After about four months of retirement, former Washington Post reporter Laura Vozzella decided it was time to put the sourdough starter aside and get back to work, but in a role opposite than the one she called her own for more than a dozen years.
“I enjoyed covering the General Assembly,” Vozzella said in an interview at the start of the 2026 General Assembly session. “I was ready to try something new.”
And so, after a conversation with her new employer, Vozzella crossed the Rubicon and began working as a legislative aide in a temporary, General Assembly-length position for Franklin County Republican Sen. Bill Stanley.
“I think this will be fun — to see from the other side, see what they’re really up to,” she said, of the switch from covering lawmakers to working for one.
“I put the F-U in fun, man,” Stanley said with a laugh.
Turning the page after nearly 40 years as a reporter
Vozzella had worked as a reporter since 1988 when she started her career at the Hartford Courant after graduating from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. From there she went on to work for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Associated Press in Boston, and The Baltimore Sun before landing at The Washington Post more than a dozen years ago.
The Washington Post had begun shrinking the metro section and other operations in recent years and she made the decision last summer to take a buyout offer from her employer, after avoiding it for a couple of rounds.
“This one came along and I was ready to take a break and do something different,” she said.
Her buyout took effect on Aug. 1, and she spent the latter half of the summer and into the fall working out, making sourdough bread and doing yardwork, she said.
“I’ve enjoyed it. When I told Senator Stanley that I was retiring — and I told everybody but he was the one guy who said, ‘well, if you’re bored, come work for me,’ I kind of laughed it off at first and then I thought, maybe it would be fun,” she said.
Vozzella said she doesn’t consider her new role to be a partisan one and added that she does not want anyone to interpret her decades of work as a reporter as partisan because of her new job. She said she would never “leap into” what she would consider a partisan job and pointed out that she would not work for a politician’s campaign, or put up yard signs in front of her home or slap political bumper stickers on the back of her car.
“I’m not writing flyers saying [Democratic Del.] ‘Rodney Willett wants your dog to turn gay,’ or whatever,” she added, regarding her new role. “Somebody might look askance, I guess that’s possible but I feel good about the work I did here [as a reporter].”
Stanley has built a reputation for introducing mainly nonpartisan legislation — the majority of his bills aim to support local emergency management, to support children with special needs, and “dog and cat bills,” as the animal champion himself called them. He and the former Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam used to publicly exchange Valentine’s Day wishes to each other on the Senate floor. Regardless of that reputation, he’s heard some reservations from his Republican colleagues regarding his new hire.
“You get the one maybe, kind of stink-eye, like, ‘Laura Vozzella of the Post? What are you, some liberal?’” Stanley said, and called those reactions from either side of the aisle shortsighted.
Vozzella’s new role is a “session gig” at the moment, meaning it starts and ends with the 2026 legislative session, but Stanley said he’s open to discussing a more permanent role, if Vozzella is interested. In her new role, Vozzella will work on messaging for Stanley — to help him write better and to be “more insightful,” he said.
His office, he added, doesn’t have a top-down structure, it’s more like a team, and his legislative aids and other staff members advise on bills and other issues.
Vozzella said she is not sure what her post-legislative session work life will hold — whether she’ll continue on with Stanley or embark on a new adventure. But she plans to take it day by day.
For Stanley, hiring Vozzella was a ‘no-brainer’
Vozzella first met her new boss over a decade ago.
Part of the appeal of her new job is the comfort level, she said, because she had worked with Stanley on stories over the course of her years of reporting on the General Assembly.
“But the same is true for [former Democratic Sen.] Dick Saslaw or [Democratic Sen.] Scott Surovell or anyone else. It’s not as though we were secret pals this whole time,” she said of Stanley.
“I hired her for her talent and her abilities and the fact that I know her and can trust her. She’s upfront, she’s honest, that’s all I require, and I want her to have fun. I want her to learn a lot,” Stanley said. “It was a no-brainer for me.”
He added that Vozzella had earned a reputation for being fair and accurate among Republican and Democratic lawmakers for her reporting on the General Assembly. And she worked to build that trust throughout her career, not just in Republican Stanley’s office but among powerful Democratic lawmakers as well.
She pointed out at least two stories that came to be because Democratic state Senate president pro-tempore Louise Lucas trusted her enough to unload about one of her colleagues in colorful language. Lucas had felt that her Democratic colleagues had sidelined Black lawmakers and their concerns, and so she had decided to form a temporary alliance with Republicans to send a message.
Vozzella wrote that story and the one that ultimately broke the tension that surrounded a heated debate on the Senate floor.
“She has a lot of talent, a lot of talent in a lot of different ways. Plus she knows the people here. She knows the rules, she’s made the relationships, it’s a perfect fit. And she’s a lot of fun, and I trust her,” Stanley said of Vozzella.
“If I piss Louise Lucas off — which I’m prone to do — I’m going to send Vozzella out there,” Stanley added.
“I’ve got The Vozz, we’re cool,” he said, using a nickname he gave to Vozzella when they first met.