Liz Hoffman
Liz Hoffman covers the collision of Wall Street, corporate power, and political decision-making, showing how boardroom choices reverberate through government and public policy debates. At Semafor she focuses on business and finance stories where money, markets, and institutions collide with lawmakers, regulators, and national security concerns.
Wall Street deals with political consequences
Hoffman’s core lens is how high finance translates into political leverage and public fallout. In her reporting on the Pentagon’s effort to draw more private capital into defense projects and the backlash it triggers from Democratic lawmakers, she traces the flow of money across the Pentagon, Wall Street, and emerging defense companies to surface who stands to gain and who is raising alarms. She regularly treats earnings, mergers, restructurings, and major strategic shifts as political events, focusing on implications for workers, communities, and the policymakers who oversee powerful firms. Her coverage often pairs executives and investors with lawmakers and regulators in the same frame, making clear that corporate strategy is inseparable from the political and policy environment.
Exclusive boardroom and dealmaking coverage
A significant strand of her work is built around boardroom and deal scoop reporting. Hoffman leans on deep sourcing inside banks, investment firms, and large companies to break news on contested transactions, activist campaigns, and leadership shake-ups. She tends to frame these stories through clashes of incentives: directors versus shareholders, private equity sponsors versus creditors, or companies versus the officials scrutinising them. Rather than treating corporate announcements at face value, she reconstructs the internal debates and negotiations behind them, using documents, term sheets, and conversations with principals to show how decisions were made and what trade-offs were accepted. The result is coverage that feels closer to a post-mortem of a negotiation than a simple recap of a deal.
Policy, regulation, and the business of national security
Hoffman frequently works in the space where business reporting meets national security and industrial policy. She follows how investment flows into sectors like defense technology, energy, and critical infrastructure are shaped by procurement rules, security reviews, and shifting geopolitical priorities. Pieces on the Pentagon’s outreach to investors, for example, sit alongside reporting on how financial institutions respond to sanctions, export controls, or new regulatory pressure. She often uses individual episodes — a congressional letter, a contentious contract, a regulatory action — as an entry point into larger structural questions about who sets the rules of the economy and which firms become indispensable to the state.
Newsletter analysis and explanatory voice
Across her Semafor work, Hoffman writes in a newsletter-friendly voice that combines scoops with quick, clear analysis. She explains complex financial structures, funding mechanisms, and corporate tactics in plain language, with an emphasis on what they mean for political actors and the broader public. She tends to highlight incentives, second-order effects, and unintended consequences, situating each story within a wider cycle of boom, crisis, and reform. Her pieces often move briskly from fresh reporting to informed context, making them useful both as early reads on developing stories and as primers on how particular corners of Wall Street interact with government.
Crisis narratives and the behaviour of powerful institutions
Hoffman also has an established track record chronicling how companies, banks, and policymakers behave under stress, a theme that runs through her coverage of market dislocations and government rescue efforts. She has written long-form work on how major firms and financial actors navigated the economic shock of the early Covid-19 period, and she returns to those episodes when new turmoil hits banks, markets, or corporate balance sheets. In these narratives she is particularly interested in who had power and information at critical moments, how they used it, and what those choices revealed about the unwritten rules that govern the financial system.
4 more politics journalists.
Adam Daly
Adam Daly covers politics for amNewYork with a focus on the inner workings of city and state government and the low-profile forums where power is exercised and negotiated. He reports on commissions and panels that shape how New York is governed, treating charter reform and government efficiency as central political terrain. His coverage of moves to replace an Adams-era charter commission with a new government efficiency panel foregrounds mandate, authority, and what “efficiency” means in practice for agencies and services. He tracks who gains and loses influence when one commission supplants another and which constituencies are being answered to. Daly explains dense procedural questions in clear, reader-facing terms, using specific institutional details and occasional wordplay to connect jargon-heavy reforms to public spending, service delivery, and mayoral power.
Alex Swoyer
Alex Swoyer covers national politics through the lens of the law, treating court cases and filings as core political documents rather than a separate legal niche. She reports for the Washington Times on the Supreme Court, federal courts and the justice system’s intersection with campaigns, Congress and the presidency. Her coverage follows political disputes as they move into courtrooms, focusing on cases that affect elections, executive power, immigration, religious liberty and gun rights. She explains opinions, dissents and procedural moves in plain language, grounding stories in briefs, oral arguments, orders and government records, then pairing them with reaction from officials, strategists and advocacy groups. She also reports on election rules, January 6 prosecutions, politically sensitive investigations, Republican Party dynamics and campaign‑trail narratives, using straight news, explainers and roundups to show how law, institutions and political ambition meet.
Alexander Mallin
Alexander Mallin stands out for turning dense Justice Department and federal court actions into clear, step-by-step reporting for ABC News. He covers politics through law enforcement and the courts, with a core beat on special counsel investigations, federal prosecutions, and clashes between the executive branch, Congress, and federal prosecutors. His reporting tracks interview transcripts, subpoena fights, indictments, plea deals, trial outcomes, and other court filings, especially in cases tied to President Joe Biden, the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and other high-profile political conflicts. He also covers transparency fights over investigative records and explains the statutes, rules, and institutional mechanics behind grand juries, redactions, and special counsel appointments. His stories are document-heavy, restrained, and focused on what prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges are doing on the record.
Allie Kelly
Allie Kelly is a politics reporter at Business Insider who treats US politics as a story about personalities, performance, and the internet. She covers the intersection of political figures, online culture, and how power is exercised in public. Her work follows elected officials and rising players across parties, focusing on how they brand themselves, test messages, and respond to scrutiny. She often writes about memes, viral moments, and tools like meme coins as real campaign tactics and communication strategies. Her reporting explains how digital culture shapes electoral politics, party tensions, and governance. She favors short, accessible pieces built around vivid examples, like a lawmaker launching a DOGE-style coin, to explain broader trends. She uses clear, plain language, grounding each story in who holds power, what they are doing, and why their online choices matter.