There are a lot of nice things about working at TIME, but one of the nicest is how being on the same staff as superior journalists flatters your self-conception. There are still times when I’m flattened by the fact that here I am, basically a guy who yells at his TV in public for a living, and yet I’m a colleague of [name of actual honest-to-God amazing reporter here].
Chief among those people is Karen Tumulty.
When I joined TIME a decade ago, the idea of my being a coworker of the woman I’d seen on all those TV political panels all those years seemed like some kind of joke. But although my working relationship with Karen was mostly virtual (she’s in D.C., I’m in NYC), she was always accessible and down to Earth. On the occasions when I was drafted to work on some D.C.-related breaking-news story, she was always accessible and willing to help out despite my utter lack of qualification to come within 500 yards of her beat.
And when TIME launched the Swampland blog, she was equally game and team-spirited—the opposite of the stereotypical print veteran who thinks the Web is beneath him or her. She jumped into blogging wholeheartedly, breaking news and breaking down the process by which the news gets delivered, and keeping up a steady interaction with her readers. When we teamed up to liveblog election nights—it was like fantasy camp for a political amateur, getting to suit up with an actual big-leaguer—she took to the format as if she’d been online all her life.
Karen’s leaving us for the Washington Post, and says goodbye to her TIME and time.com readers at Swampland. If you’ve appreciated her work a fraction as much as I have, stop by and send her your regards. I can’t wait to see what she writes next.