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’s daily West Wing Playbook newsletter. “That’s my trademark,” says the former political science major, who also spent five years at NBC.
“It’s the fastest way around,” Egan says. “I’m constantly going from Capitol Hill to office meetings or a source lunch.” 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. “I’ll go get a sandwich and run into at least five people within an hour,” she says.
One thing she regrets about her college days is that she never wrote for The Vanderbilt Hustler. At Politico, Egan’s colleagues jokingly called Playbook “the campus newspaper” because it often focused on “insider-y” subjects like midlevel White House staff conflicts. “I guess I got to write for my school paper in some way,” the Baltimore native says.
Egan is now writing a newsletter for The Bulwark’s 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 “hits” (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, “No, but I should have.” 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. “The war coverage was intense but also meaningful,” she says. “You come back, and it’s hard to get through some of the memory of what those mass graves smelled like.”
Egan has always found herself in the swim of things. She competed in the 200- and 500-meter freestyle events on Vanderbilt’s swim team until a shoulder injury sidelined her.
“Being on the team definitely taught me to wake up early and how to manage my time,” she recalls. “When you’re 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.”
After returning from Ukraine, she turned to surfing for her aquatic fix. “I’m such a water creature,” she says. “I 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.”
—George Spencer
