A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
This is a difficult announcement to make.
It is with mixed emotions that the New Jersey Globe says goodbye to our two incredible reporters as they embark on new chapters of their careers.
Joey Fox will depart on Friday after nearly five years with the New Jersey Globe. He was based in Trenton for nearly two years and in Washington for almost three.
Yesterday, we said farewell to Zach Blackburn, who joined the New Jersey Globe almost two years ago as our statehouse reporter.
I’m incredibly proud of both of them and what they have accomplished. They deserve the opportunity to announce their own next chapters when the time is right.
Change is always challenging, and we are working on assembling a new team to cover New Jersey politics and government.
Last week, we welcomed Joe Seewald as the newest member of our reporting team. And soon, Jonathan D. Salant will help us cover Capitol Hill for the New Jersey Globe. We are interviewing candidates for another New Jersey-based position; please spread the word.
Joey Fox’s resume arrived around 11 PM on a Saturday night in August 2021; I was watching television and opened his email. He had just graduated from Williams College, and he checked two boxes: he wrote for his college newspaper, and he’d worked on political campaigns. What sold me was his list of hobbies: he wrote Wikipedia biographies of New York City councilmembers, just for fun.
During his interview, I was reminded of Steve Kornacki, who joined my old website, PoliticsNJ, just days after graduating from college in 2002. The same qualities were there: intelligence, curiosity, and an unmistakable passion for political reporting. It was immediately clear to me that Joey was destined for success.
Since then, Joey has written 3,847 stories – some featuring the most incredible maps to help our readers visualize election outcomes in parts of six election cycles. He has done it all while guided by a deep sense of integrity and an unwavering commitment to fairness. He understood that a reporter’s highest calling is not to take sides, but to pursue the truth wherever it leads. He has been fearless without being reckless, relentless without being partisan, and dogged in his determination always to get the story right. And he’s accomplished all of that while seemingly never combing his hair and sometimes while wearing orange pants.
Joey has been an integral part of building the New Jersey Globe, and for that, I am incredibly grateful. He is simply the very best journalism has to offer.
Zach is a very special person whose resume immediately caught my attention: he’d been the editor-in-chief of his college newspaper at The George Washington University, worked as a copy editor at the National Journal, and interned for a South Carolina state senator. He joined our team a couple of weeks after his college graduation in 2024.
Over two years, Zach wrote 1,237 stories spanning parts of three election cycles. Just a few weeks ago, he moderated the Republican U.S. Senate debate, another milestone in a career defined by diligence, fairness, and a deep respect for the truth. He approached every story with journalistic integrity, a sense of decency, and a determination to get the facts right. He has an incredible sense of humor.
Along the way, I learned to accept his unwavering devotion to the Detroit Tigers and his fascination with auto mechanics of varying degrees of integrity.
When we spoke yesterday, our conversation turned to what New Jersey will always mean to him. No matter where his career takes him, he knows he is unlikely to hear a story more astonishing than the tale of the woman who, in the 1970s, drove up the steps of the State House and hurled at a state trooper the severed head of her mother, whom she had just murdered.
That’s New Jersey. And for Zach, it always will be.
I will miss Joey and Zach – not just because of their talent, but also because there aren’t many people who listen to political stories about Livingston in the 1980s and politely pretend to be interested the way both of them have. To say that losing them doesn’t suck would be an understatement. But this is the natural order of things, and I’m glad we all had the chance to work together.
When I hire new reporters, I typically ask them for a two-year commitment and say that if they stay beyond three years, then I have failed as a mentor. (Joey held two jobs with us, so he’s within the correct range.) After 26 years, on-and-off, running political news sites, my model has been to hire young reporters right out of school and watch their love of politics allow their careers to flourish.
(I can’t help but wear the success of some of our former reporters as a badge of honor: NBC’s Steve Kornacki, who spent the first four years of his career at PoliticsNJ before ascending beyond the upper reaches of political journalism; the Boston Globe’s James Pindell, who ran PoliticsNH and is now the nation’s leading expert on New Hampshire presidential primaries; POLITICO’s Matt Friedman, whose snark was already beginning to blossom, albeit without cats and dogs; and the New Jersey Monitor’s Nikita Biryukov, who spent nearly three years with the New Jersey Globe.)
New Jersey should be excited to get to know Joe Seewald, who was trained at the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. Joe joined the New Jersey Globe and promptly wrote 50 stories on primary night — just his second day on the job.
I first met Joe at our February 2025 gubernatorial debate at Rider. He told me he had been reading the New Jersey Globe since middle school, which explained a lot. He arrived with a genuine passion for New Jersey politics. You can’t teach that.
During a debate rehearsal, Joe volunteered to play Steve Fulop while I took the role of Ras Baraka. Staying completely in character, he got in my face and gave our production crew a realistic sense of what to expect on debate night.
On my desk is a baseball autographed by Jonathan D. Salant HOF 2023, so it’s an unimaginable honor to get to work with him. He’s been a respected Washington reporter for nearly 40 years, a former president of the National Press Club, and a member of the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Hall of Fame.
Jon was the Washington correspondent for NJ Advance Media from 2014 until the Star-Ledger closed its Washington bureau in 2023. He previously worked at Bloomberg, Associated Press, Congressional Quarterly, Newhouse News Service, Syracuse-Herald Journal, Albany Times Union, Miami Herald, The (Bergen) Record, and Newsday.
With Jon and Joe – and whomever our search finds next – we look forward to continuing our commitment to covering New Jersey politics from the inside out.
I’ll close this with something from a great English philosopher named Winnie the Pooh: “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
