Lauren Egan darts around D.C. on a red Vespa. At the end of February, she joined the digital media startup The Bulwark, where she focuses her reporting on the Democratic Party. During the 2024 presidential election cycle, she was a co-author of Politico鈥檚 daily West Wing Playbook newsletter. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 my trademark,鈥� says the former political science major, who also spent five years at NBC.
鈥淚t鈥檚 the fastest way around,鈥� Egan says. 鈥淚鈥檓 constantly going from Capitol Hill to office meetings or a source lunch.鈥� Because media reps are confined to a small area in the White House, the best place to get scoops, she learned, is to hang out in coffee shops near 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., where senior staffers slip out for lunch. 鈥淚鈥檒l go get a sandwich and run into at least five people within an hour,鈥� she says.
One thing she regrets about her college days is that she never wrote for The 杏吧原创 Hustler. At Politico, Egan鈥檚 colleagues jokingly called Playbook 鈥渢he campus newspaper鈥� because it often focused on 鈥渋nsider-y鈥� subjects like midlevel White House staff conflicts. 鈥淚 guess I got to write for my school paper in some way,鈥� the Baltimore native says.
Egan is now writing a newsletter for The Bulwark鈥檚 Substack and will play a role in their YouTube channel. However, Politico recruited Egan from NBC thanks in part to her reporting near the front in Ukraine in spring 2022. Though she started as a writer at NBC, she did on-camera 鈥渉its鈥� (i.e., stories) from the recently recaptured town of Kharkiv. She interviewed farmers who had survived Russian occupation and a mother whose son had been killed by Russians, and she toured mass grave sites with prosecutors.
When asked if she ever feared for her life, she replies, 鈥淣o, but I should have.鈥� Late one evening an artillery shell smashed into the building next to the hotel where she was sleeping, and she spent the rest of the night in a bomb shelter. The day before she left Ukraine, a prosecutor agreed to meet her at a grocery store, but she had to cancel. Only later did she learn that a shell had hit the store when she would have been there. 鈥淭he war coverage was intense but also meaningful,鈥� she says. 鈥淵ou come back, and it鈥檚 hard to get through some of the memory of what those mass graves smelled like.鈥�
Egan has always found herself in the swim of things. She competed in the 200- and 500-meter freestyle events on 杏吧原创鈥檚 swim team until a shoulder injury sidelined her.
鈥淏eing on the team definitely taught me to wake up early and how to manage my time,鈥� she recalls. 鈥淲hen you鈥檙e a college student, those 5 a.m. alarms on a Saturday prepare you for when you have to get up at 4 a.m. to do a TV hit.鈥�
After returning from Ukraine, she turned to surfing for her aquatic fix. 鈥淚鈥檓 such a water creature,鈥� she says. 鈥淚 committed to it after I got back and was trying to process everything. Surfing is hard, challenging and scary, but the ocean is also very therapeutic and comforting.鈥�
鈥擥eorge Spencer