An announcement

And a reflection on my career in journalism

Monday was my last day at Time. In a couple of weeks, I’ll start a new job as senior political correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. Here’s the announcement the Journal’s editor in chief, Emma Tucker, sent to the staff:

Molly Ball is joining The Wall Street Journal as senior political correspondent. Molly will bring her distinctive voice and finely observed reporting to analysis pieces and political features from Washington and around the country.

Molly is joining the Journal from Time where she was the national political correspondent. In six years at Time, she wrote more than 30 cover stories; authored Pelosi, a bestselling biography; and received several national honors for her reporting, including the Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress and the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency.

Molly previously covered politics for The Atlantic, Politico and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. 

Molly will report to Politics Editor Ben Pershing and is based in Washington.

I’m excited for this new challenge, but sad to be leaving Time, my home for the past six years. What an eventful six years it was: the Trump administration, the Mueller investigation, the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath, two impeachments, two midterms, a pandemic, an insurrection and so much more. I wrote my first Time cover story during my very first week on the job, when Mueller’s first indictments dropped. A few weeks later, Time Inc. was sold to new owners. Around the same time, I had the unique experience of finding out my presidential interview was canceled via a Trump tweet. (The tweet was false, of course.) There was truly never a dull moment.

Looking back on my career, I never set out to be a political reporter. When I was in the fifth grade in Englewood, Colorado, I started a newspaper with a few friends and sold it door-to-door. In college, I did internships at the Toledo (Ohio) Blade, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Washington Post, and worked in the New York Times’ Hartford, Conn., bureau during my senior year. When the Post didn’t offer me a job after my post-graduation internship, I moved overseas and spent two years reporting for the now-defunct Cambodia Daily. It was there that I met and fell in love with David Kihara, the American journalist who’s now my husband and the father of my three children. But our foreign adventure was cut short when I was diagnosed with cancer. After my treatment, I ended up at the Las Vegas Sun as a general-assignment reporter, writing features, investigations, and whatever else I dug up.

In 2006, the bigger paper in town, the Review-Journal, was tired of me scooping them and wanted to hire me. I wasn’t qualified for the only job opening they had, which was for a political reporter. But I must have talked a good game, because they gave me the job anyway. Within a few months, we broke the biggest story of that election cycle, the news that the Republican gubernatorial nominee had been interviewed by police after a drunken altercation with a cocktail waitress at a McCormick and Schmick’s off the Strip. The story was a co-byline with my then-boyfriend, David, who was covering crime for the R-J; it’s generally a good story when the politics and crime beats intersect. A lot of powerful people tried very hard to bury that news—the sheriff, who had endorsed the candidate, kept his name out of the police logs—but the paper’s management protected our ability to report independently from outside pressure. (Around the same time, I attended the Vegas tryouts for “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” and made it onto the show. I ended up winning $100,000, which is how I paid off my student loans and funded our wedding in 2007.)

Las Vegas was a great place to report on politics. I covered everything from the state legislature in Carson City to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to the state’s first early presidential caucuses in 2008. That year, Vegas was the epicenter of the housing bubble that led to the global financial system melting down, and Nevada was a swing state in the presidential election between Barack Obama and John McCain. David and I didn’t plan to stay in Vegas long-term, but with newspapers everywhere shrinking, closing, and going bankrupt, we weren’t having any luck finding jobs elsewhere. In 2009, we were both considering leaving journalism when I was lucky enough to receive the Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship. We moved to Ann Arbor a few weeks after the birth of our first child, and I took a break from reporting to spend a year studying economic policy. In 2010, we moved to D.C. on a wing and a prayer—two unemployed journalists, an infant, and a little bit of savings. After a few months of not-very-successful freelancing, I was hired to cover Sen. Reid’s reelection race and the 2010 midterms by Politico. After a year at Politico, I got a job at The Atlantic, a magazine I’ve loved since childhood, where I had the opportunity to establish my voice and profile as a national reporter and where I covered the once-in-a-lifetime 2016 presidential campaign. And after six years at The Atlantic, I started working for Time.

I’m so proud of the work I’ve done over the past six years. I wrote many profiles of political figures: Jeff Sessions, Stacey Abrams, Peter Navarro, Michael Avenatti, Kamala Harris, Michael Bloomberg, Larry Hogan, Chuck Schumer, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Glenn Youngkin, Jim Clyburn, Spencer Cox, Wes Moore, Ron DeSantis, John Fetterman. My profile of Nancy Pelosi put the first woman House Speaker on the cover of Time for the first time and eventually led me to write my bestselling first book. I scored Joe Biden’s only long-form print interview of the 2020 cycle. I made fun of the elites in Davos, built houses with Jimmy Carter, hung out in Austria with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and toured a rocket launchpad in Texas with Elon Musk. I explored the racial controversies fracturing the Virginia Military Institute and a Boston charter school. I won a bunch of awards. And I wrote my favorite story of all time, a cover profile of Jan. 6 hero Mike Fanone that’s also a meditation on policing, heroism, and memory. All these stories were edited by Time’s brilliant Alex Altman, the part-time therapist and trusted collaborator who’s taught me so much. And I have one last piece for Time coming out next week, so stay tuned.

I’ve always believed it’s a strength rather than a weakness that I stumbled into covering politics. Like most normal people, I’m not a “political junkie.” I got into journalism because I’m curious about the world and I like to tell stories, and I think political writing needs more of both curiosity and storytelling. I also believe it’s a strength that I started as a local reporter, learning politics from the ground up. Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer of the local papers and paid internships that helped me get started in this business. The decline of local news is a major, ongoing threat to our democracy. I’m glad to see organizations like the American Journalism Project, to which I’m a donor, working to fix this problem. But it’s going to take a lot more.

At the Journal, I’ll be doing what I’ve always done: trying to understand this fascinating, difficult country and tell stories about politics that are important, compelling and fun. I’ll range across the political landscape, from Congress to the White House to the campaign trail. I haven’t decided whether to keep up this mailing list. I hope you’ll subscribe to the Journal, to Time, and to your local newspaper. Most of all, I hope you’ll keep reading.