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Our staff in its heyday, at a holiday axe-throwing party in 2019. From left: reporter Geoff West, marketing director Jessica Puchala, senior writer Bill Theobald, reporter Sara Swann, Publisher David Meyers, the author and audience development editor Tristiaña Hinton.
What I learned covering the democracy reform movement's evolution
Hawkings is the founding editor-in-chief of The Fulcrum and has been a Washington correspondent and editor for 32 years.
Naming the thing turned out to be much more fraught than setting its course.
The prospectus dubbed us The Democracy Dispatch, straightforward and with catchy alliteration. But we quickly ditched that, heeding warnings that the right hears "democracy" as a dog whistle of allegiance to the left — meaning we might fatally undermine our plan to chronicle with nonpartisan rigor both the dysfunctions and potential fixes for American, well, democracy.