In Cairo, he worked on the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, an Egyptian think tank founded by Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a critic of Hosni Mubarak’s regime. Colleagues and friends from that era remember the middle, which was certainly one of the Islamic world’s leading voices on human rights, as being crammed with idealistic Egyptians and foreigners, all working together to advance ideals of democracy. There, he met his future wife, Sandy Choi, an completed skilled musician and Middle East consultant.
Now a pair, they moved to Washington within the mid-2000s, arriving just because the capital’s media landscape was remade by the rise of the web and social media, and where Hounshell’s profession in journalism then paralleled — and helped shape — the rise and evolution of digital media at multiple publications.
Hounshell’s interest in international affairs and the Middle East led him online: He founded a foreign policy blog, called “American Footprints,” and wrote for the American Prospect’s blog in an era where Prospect hosted most of the nation’s hottest emerging voices, like Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias, and the positioning’s unique voice was helping to pioneer a recent variety of journalism in Washington, D.C.
With little journalism training and background, Hounshell wove and wrote his way into the sector primarily by devouring news and hoovering up more information than anyone around him, eventually landing a task at Foreign Policy. Within the wake of the magazine’s 2008 purchase by The Washington Post Company, incoming editor Susan Glasser remembers being immediately struck by Hounshell’s wide-ranging interests and unparalleled metabolism.
“He was faster and smarter and more immersed within the news cycle than anyone I’ve known,” Glasser recalled. “Although Blake wasn’t born with an iPhone in his hand, he was the primary and most digital native person I knew.”
Working together, Glasser and Hounshell reinvented Foreign Policy, remaking the longtime print publication, which had been run by the Carnegie Endowment for 30 years, right into a day by day online magazine just as magazines were imagining a web-first future. David Kenner, whom Hounshell first hired as an intern and later right into a staff role, recalls Hounshell’s voracious reading ability.
“He had his encyclopedic knowledge of the world that was unparalleled amongst our staff. At FP, his job was to oversee the entire world, really, and the joke was at all times that we’d have lunch with, like, a Swedish diplomat, and he’d be like, ‘I used to be reading this obscure Swedish document and had this very specific query’ — things that nobody could fathom how someone who had such a broad remit could know,” Kenner recalls.
Despite his wide-ranging interests and his role overseeing global coverage, it was clear to colleagues that a component of him remained fascinated with the opposite path — the reporters who specialized, learned the local languages and dug deep into single subjects and regions — and while his Arabic skills never rose above what he self-deprecatingly called “mangled,” he at all times followed closely the careers of those he’d met early in Egypt, like Ben Hubbard, now the Istanbul bureau chief for the Latest York Times.
Hounshell succeeded in feeding his voluminous mental appetite partially by being brutally efficient in his emails — he and Kenner reached some extent where Hounshell would reply to the author’s long pitches just with a “Y” or an “N.” As Kenner recalls, “He was incredible — this multi-tasker who could answer all these questions and keep all these plates spinning.”
The reinvention of Foreign Policy was seen as a brilliant spot in an industry still struggling to return to terms with the impact of the web, and won Glasser, Hounshell and the upstart magazine a digital National Magazine Award for its blogs. On the train ride back from Latest York to Washington, their Alexander Calder “Ellie” award awkwardly perched with them, Glasser recalled that Hounshell confided that his wife had been offered an expert opportunity in Qatar that might force him to depart the magazine. “In journalism people come and go, and I just couldn’t do it,” Glasser says, recalling that she told him he should keep his job in Qatar: “By some means we’ll make it work.”
The timing proved fortuitous, because the Arab Spring broke out soon after his return to the Middle East, putting him at the middle of certainly one of the largest stories on the earth and in a region that had uniquely captured his heart. “He mainly live-tweeted the entire thing,” Glasser recalled.
“It meant a lot to him to throw himself back right into a story — and specifically an Egyptian story. His Twitter feed was just nonstop, it was 20 hours a day — following essentially the most minute details of the politics,” Kenner recalled. “It was certainly one of the primary times I’d ever seen it used like that.”
Hounshell’s Twitter following grew to lots of of 1000’s, in an era when such followings were all-but-unheard of, but he was hardly only a keyboard journalist: He reported on-the-ground from Tahrir Square and experienced the rebellion up-close; his reporting for Foreign Policy was a finalist for the Livingston Awards, the celebrated recognition for the perfect journalism by journalists under 35.
After Hounshell returned to Washington he and Glasser were recruited to POLITICO in 2013 to launch the brand’s first foray into longform journalism, a project that became POLITICO Magazine.
The magazine, which Glasser, as editor, and Hounshell, as deputy editor, launched in 2013 quickly established itself as a must-read, recognized as certainly one of the industry’s hottest recent magazines, scoring two National Magazine Award finalist nods in its first 12 months, and each the Michael Kelly Award and the George Polk Award for its coverage of the rise of ISIS.
Of their collaborative transformation of multiple agenda-setting publications, Glasser and Hounshell’s unique editorial partnership over a decade surely ranks as certainly one of the capital’s deepest, one which helped endlessly remake the metabolism of Washington journalism and reshaped the industry’s understanding of digital magazines. As Glasser says, “He was not only a colleague, but my indispensable partner.”
Hounshell’s role within the POLITICO newsroom expanded steadily — he became the newsroom’s digital editorial director in November 2014, a task that saw him install a siren and red fire-engine-style light within the newsroom to mark when the web site published scoops. He wowed colleagues together with his ability to quickly grasp unique angles, conjure creative headlines, and understand what would connect with an online audience. He also led the positioning’s first top-to-bottom redesign.
Later, he spent three years as editor-in-chief of POLITICO Magazine before becoming managing editor for Washington and politics, helping to shape over time every part from the positioning’s frenetically paced breaking news team to its star congressional team to its signature morning Playbook newsletter.
“As anyone who knew him will inform you, Blake relished the story greater than anything,” POLITICO Editor-in-Chief Matt Kaminski wrote to the newsroom Tuesday afternoon, breaking news of his death. “And yet certainly one of his most lasting legacies here shall be in what he built as an editorial leader. … Blake cultivated the present Congress team. He thought we wanted higher offerings on national security (NatSec Day by day got here to life). He pushed for deeper coverage of the presidency (West Wing Playbook). Every thing he touched, it seemed, turned to gold.”
At the same time as his stature within the newsroom rose, he feared that management would take him away from the world of ideas that he loved. He loved the craft and give-and-take of editing and preferred being within the editorial trenches with reporters, desirous about ledes, headlines and angles; when Donald Trump’s recent administration issued its surprise so-called “Muslim Ban” on the primary Friday of his presidency, Hounshell raced to Dulles Airport to cover the chaos, leading to a first-person piece, “Scenes from a Constitutional Crisis,” that harkened back to his reporting on the Arab Spring.
As his colleague Charlie Mahtesian recalled, “His brilliance got here to him at speed — the connections occurred to him immediately. He at all times understood what the story was instantly. He was an idea factory. He didn’t have a pointy ideological edge, which left him open to each possible possibility.”
Elizabeth Ralph, the present editor of POLITICO Magazine whom Hounshell mentored for years, recalls, “Blake completely appreciated the unconventional. He was at all times encouraging me to go down weird rabbit holes and telling me to follow my curiosity. He hated conventionality — anything vanilla. And he wanted Impact, with a capital I.”
Glasser says, “He loved scoops; he loved news. He was great at headlines; he had a present for framing and attending to the sting of the story after which getting beyond it.”
Ben Schreckinger, a longtime POLITICO Magazine author, recalled Hounshell’s ability to grasp the unique twist that might make a story capture readers — like when he proposed Schreckinger write in regards to the workout regime of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by actually doing it himself. “He had his lowkey presence, but he could just give you essentially the most sensible ideas,” Schreckinger recalls. “The speed and class that he could have a look at a political story and inform you what mattered, he had his incredible ability to do this day in and time out.”
“What he understood about this job is that a part of what makes it great is to put in writing in regards to the curiosities and the eccentricities — those are great stories. Blake helped pivot POLITICO to doing more of that,” recalls former POLITICO reporter Daniel Strauss.
“Blake was a pioneer in a business where there are a number of sheep. He was early to know the facility of a private voice and sensibility online, and created a community that any news organization would envy,” wrote Mike Allen, the creator of Playbook, whom Hounshell worked with for years. “He was gifted as each an editor and a author, with crossover talents which can be so very, very rare.”
He was renowned and beloved inside POLITICO particularly for his recruitment and mentorship of so many younger reporters, playing a key role within the hiring of a generation of talent to the newsroom, shaping their stories as an editor and championing their stories contained in the 4 pm editorial leadership rundowns, where his sardonic wit truly got here alive. As Strauss says, “He at all times felt he was inviting people to the party.”
On Twitter within the wake of the news of Hounshell’s death Tuesday, Tim Alberta, a former POLITICO Magazine staff author, shared how Hounshell had helped him early in his recent job navigate a panic disorder that manifested in ferocious, debilitating anxiety so bad Alberta wasn’t sure he’d give you the option to proceed writing. “His response was something I’ll always remember. ‘Want to check notes?’ he asked me. So we did. My recent boss, a dude I barely knew, became my mental-health confidante. We’d start every work-related conversation by trading stories about our respective struggles. I began to enhance. And my recent boss was an enormous reason why,” Alberta wrote. “Wouldn’t you understand, we began churning out hits together at Politico Mag — a few of the perfect work of my profession. He never took any credit, but he deserved all of it. Because without him, without his patience and humanity and empathetic ear, I might need never reported again.”
A stroke just before the 2020 election led Hounshell himself to reconsider the way to balance his passion for following the ins and outs of the day by day news cycle, particularly as the daddy of young kids he adored and posted about commonly on Instagram. He took up exercising — an interest that quickly turned just as intense as his day by day reading and eventually included a rock-climbing phase. “We’d go to the gym together, and eventually stopped because he got so far more fit and ahead of me,” recalls Strauss, now a staff author on the Latest Republic.
In 2021, he left POLITICO for the Latest York Times, where he returned to his early writing roots — helming the newspaper’s nightly “On Politics” newsletter. John Fetterman, the newly elected Pennsylvania senator who himself suffered a stroke mid-campaign last campaign, recalled on Twitter Tuesday how Hounshell brought his own life challenge into that day by day column: “Blake Hounshell was a fellow stroke survivor, and certainly one of the primary interviews I did once I returned to the campaign trail and struggled to seek out my words. He showed compassion and humanity in a way few others had. That is heartbreaking.”
Conversations and long dog walks with Hounshell were as more likely to range from Henry Adams to the rapper Tyler, the Creator, from weightlifting podcasts to Generation Z’s political affiliations, which was the topic of certainly one of his final “On Politics” columns for the Times last Friday. He often surprised colleagues together with his astute cooking skills — once unexpectedly winning a guacamole contest at Foreign Policy after rigorously carrying out a study of every individual component and assembling a seemingly perfect dish. As Mahtesian says, “Every thing looked as if it would capture his attention.”
“You’d just wonder, ‘What incredible thing does he have today?’” Strauss recalls.
He’s survived by his wife and two children, his two siblings and his parents, amongst others.