Peter Wallsten is hoping to bring the Post's White House coverage back to its glory days. Photograph by Chris Leaman.

It’s been years since the Post dominated the White House beat.

In the competition for news and profiles, Wallsten most fears Peter Baker and Mark Leibovich. Both left the Post and now work for the New York Times. Wallsten will be filling a slot that opened when Michael Shear jumped to the Times last August.

Wallsten has the potential to break news in an increasingly crowded beat. Writing for the Wall Street Journal last January, he broke Rahm Emanuel’s quote referring to some liberal activists as “f---ing retarded.” He was among the first to write that Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams From My Father had more dreams than fact in places.

“I want to write stories that surprise people,” he tells me during the one-week hiatus between switching papers.

Wallsten, 38, has been an itinerant newsman. Born and raised in Chapel Hill, he knew he wanted to be a reporter early on: “Seemed like a way to always be involved with what’s going on. It would be fun. It would be useful to the world."

After graduating from the University of North Carolina, he wrote for the St. Petersburg Times, the Charlotte Observer, and the Miami Herald. In 2004, he came to Washington to cover the White House for the Los Angeles Times. In 2009, he went to the Wall Street Journal to write about national politics.

Tina Brown sealed the deal with Robin Givhan about a month ago at the Hay-Adams hotel.

“I felt tremendously energized,” Givhan tells Washingtonian. “We had a great time tossing around ideas.”

And so the Washington Post’s trademark fashion critic will leave the paper after a decade and start writing for Brown’s publications, Newsweek and The Daily Beast. She starts January 10.

“I felt we were completely on the same page,” she says.

And the pages of the Washington Post will lose another brand name, adding to a recent exodus that includes media reporter Howard Kurtz, sports columnist Michael Wilbon, and art critic Blake Gopnik. Post editors didn’t respond to questions about whether the paper would hire another fashion critic.

Friends and family are used to showing up in Galifianakis's cartoons.

Katharine Weymouth is perhaps Washington’s most eligible woman. Attractive, intelligent, and powerful, she’s the granddaughter of the late Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and now is publisher of the Post herself.

But don’t cross Weymouth: You might wind up lampooned in a Nick Galifianakis cartoon.

In Galifianakis’s new book, If You Loved Me, You’d Think This Was Cute, Weymouth’s ex-husband, Richard Scully, doesn’t come off so well. In one cartoon, a Weymouth look-alike is seated beside a giant leech, drool coming from his mouth. “Prenup?” he asks. “It’s because I’m a leech, isn’t it?”

“He never runs them by me,” Weymouth says of the cartoons.

Weymouth and Galifianakis are close. You might see her on his arm out and about. They were together at the October wedding of Pary Anbaz-Williamson and Quinn Bradlee, son of former Post executive editor Ben Bradlee and writer Sally Quinn.

But Galifianakis did run the book by his cousin, Zach Galifianakis, star of The Hangover and It’s Kind of a Funny Story, who jokes in the book’s foreword: “Nick has been my roommate, friend, and lover.”

Galifianakis’s book is filled with cartoons that illustrated columns by his former wife, Washington Post advice guru Carolyn Hax. They’re funny and irreverent, cynical and real.

“Cutting 4,000 down to 1,200 almost killed me,” he says. “From 1,200 to 800, I almost killed everyone else.”

Galifianakis, 48, was born in North Carolina and grew up in Falls Church, graduating from J.E.B. Stuart High. At the University of North Carolina, he was headed for a medical career.

“I had always doodled,” he says. “In college, I started having my own opinions: I had something to say and a graphic vocabulary to say it.”

His first published cartoon—in the Marietta Daily Journal in 1988—took a stance against smoking in public. The paper paid him $15.

The local Journal Newspapers, a now-defunct suburban chain, hired him as a cartoonist in 1990. He met Hax, then an editor at Army Times. They married in 1994. Three years later, Hax was editing at the Post when editors encouraged her to try an advice column, with Galifianakis drawing some images.

“I took her idea and ran with it,” he says.

Howard Kurtz will become chief of the reconfigured Newsweek/Daily Beast Washington bureau on January 1.

“It will be a big change for me,” Kurtz says.

Kurtz, who left the Washington Post last month after 29 years to join Daily Beast, will take over a storied bureau run by Ben Bradlee in the 1960s. He follows legendary bureau chiefs such as Mel Elfin and Evan Thomas. Jeff Bartholet has run the bureau the past few years; he will remain through January.

Since July, the New York Times has been making journalistic hay out of leaked documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars provided by WikiLeaks, an organization dedicated to publishing classified information. Without the same advance access to the documents, the Washington Post has ended up chasing the Times to follow up on the other paper’s exclusives. The fact that WikiLeaks didn’t choose to work with the Post says a lot about the paper’s national and international reputation. And the situation has to be galling for the Post because the Times might not have been able to publish its WikiLeaks scoops at all if the Post hadn’t set the precedent for them almost 40 years ago.

A decade ago, the Washington Post raked in profits and measured itself against the New York Times. Now “Brand X,” as Posties call the Times, has lured away a bevy of Post stars—from Peter Baker and Mark Leibovich to Sewell Chan and most recently Michael Shear—and it routinely puts out a more interesting and higher-quality product, in print and online. But the Post has more to fear. Here’s a look at the marauding news organizations and their top talent. Names in bold came from the Post.

As a journalist, I'm always sad to hear that a publication is closing. But the announcement today that the Washington Independent will cease operations on December 1 is a particular loss for Washington journalism.

Area publications have taken their turns as incubators of hot young talent. The American Prospect sent Matt Yglesias off to the Atlantic and then the Center for American Progress and Ezra Klein off to the Washington Post. In recent years, writers like Dayo Olopade and Jamie Kirchick developed their voices at the New Republic.

But even by those standards, the Independent was on a unusual Streak. In 2010 alone, Dave Weigel went from the Independent to the Washington Post (and then to Slate), Spencer Ackerman went from the Independent to Wired's Danger Room blog, and Annie Lowrey went from the Independent to Slate.

The Independent encouraged all of them to do deep, innovative reporting, and it shifted coverage areas depending on its reporters' beats. That may not have made for a stable publication, but it did make the Independent a great staging ground for young reporters, and a publisher of a lot of great journalism. Even if the Independent wasn't an entirely conventional news site, it made tremendous contributions to Washington journalism. It's too bad donors didn't turn out to be interested in that project. I can only hope that other publications recognize the tremendous value of the Independent's remaining staff, and bring that same innovative, developmental spirit into their newsrooms, and do it quickly.

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