Island Profile: Lisa Rein, small town reporter in a big bad town
Lisa Rein’s career as a reporter includes 27 years at The Washington Post covering state, local and federal government in Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. and a 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Part of a team of Washington Post journalists honored for coverage of the Trump administration’s 2025 federal-workforce cuts and DOGE-related government changes, the Pulitzer Committee honored them for “piercing the veil of secrecy around the Trump administration’s chaotic overhaul of federal agencies and chronicling in rich detail the human impacts of the cuts and the consequences for the country.”
Ms. Rein was also a finalist for the 2026 Harvard University’s Goldsmith Prize for her work with a colleague to shed light on the veterans’ disability system.
Lisa got her start in muckraking digging up clams in West Neck Creek. “My first memory is when I was maybe six, and my mother took me to Crescent Beach to learn how to swim from Jack Wroble. And I remember clamming with my dad off Daniel Lord Road. I had to walk through the grass in the salt marsh and sit on my butt in the shallow water. It was very muddy, fun to a point, and a little gross.”
She grew up in Philadelphia and Boston, where the family moved when her father became a professor at MIT. Her family started coming to Shelter Island in 1960, and a few years later bought a house at the corner of Bowditch and Midway Roads. After Ms. Rein’s parents divorced, her mother bought a house the family still owns on St. Mary’s Road.
Like many teenagers today, Lisa worked summers through high school, at George’s IGA, La Terrace and The Dory. Names of restaurants and stores have changed, but the quest for summer money never goes out of style. The best change in her years coming to Shelter Island has been The Perlman Program.
“They were playing at the Farmers Market on Saturday, four of their violin students. I love the way that they take the Island very seriously. They’ve integrated themselves into the Island in the best possible way.”
Once she got a BA in history at Wesleyan University in 1984, she worked as a reporter for the Bergen Record in Northern New Jersey, covering Asian immigration, then moved to the New York Daily News, covering Rudolph W. Giuliani’s mayoralty. In 1999, he joined the Washington Post.
When the Post brought Lisa on board to cover the federal workforce, it was considered a backwater with most reporters preferring to cover politics. “I wanted to make it a beat that attracted a general readership, investigative about the management of government,” she said. “It’s about people who work for the government, but also about federal agencies — what they do, where they go wrong, where people screw up, where misconduct happens, where waste, fraud, and abuse happen.”
She wrote a story about the last clerk typist in the federal government, a woman who took calls on a landline and wrote down messages on a pad for her boss, to show how the government was finally modernizing way behind a lot of private sector companies.
Lisa married in 2007 at The Rams Head Inn, a union that lasted only four years. Once she was ready to try again, she went on match.com and met David Cohan, a West Coast native who was starting a new job in Washington, D.C. In 2017 they married.
“It’s a lot better the second time,” she said. Her new spouse suggested they keep a cabin in a remote part of Montana, to satisfy his yen for the great outdoors. “There are bears and snakes, and it’s beautiful,” Lisa said. They balance their time off the grid in Montana with an annual pilgrimage to Shelter Island, and the couple recently moved from D.C. to Oregon to be closer to Mr. Cohan’s children.
Lisa said she accepted a buyout and left The Post about a month before 45% of the newsroom was laid off in February of this year, including two dozen of her friends. Since then, a steady stream of the journalists who remained lost faith in the newspaper and found other jobs.
She has thoughts about what went so wrong at The Post to cause the collapse of the newsroom of one of the most widely read newspapers in the country. “The Post entered this turbulent period during the years of the Biden administration. The publisher at the time made some unforced errors and didn’t do what The New York Times did — make acquisitions, focus less on subscriptions and more on advertising. When Biden came in, the readership dropped off everywhere. But The Post had not positioned itself to accommodate that.”
As the newspaper started losing tens of millions every year, owner Jeff Bezos lost a massive cloud computing contract worth millions of dollars. An extremely controversial publisher named Will Lewis was hired. He and the newsroom were at war for his entire two-year tenure.
Lately, Lisa has been freelancing for Oregon Public Broadcasting, an NPR affiliate, where she enjoys doing local news again. She wrote recently about women wine producers in the Northwest and filed another story about a cat in the town of White Salmon, Wash. who served as kind of the mayor of the town. “With local newspapers in free fall, covering local news is more vital today than it’s ever been,” she said.
One thing that brings her back to Shelter Island every summer is the large, intergenerational group of friends from years and years that meet at Hay Beach most afternoons, and the annual barbecue that she began about eight years ago. “We text each other all year: ‘O.K., six months to Hay Beach.’”
LIGHTNING ROUND — LISA REIN
What do you always have with you? My crocheting.
Favorite place on Shelter Island? Hay Beach.
Favorite place not on Shelter Island? Paris.
When was the last time you were elated? When my cat got out at night, was lost and finally came to me. I saw her in the moonlight — there was Lily. She’d had an adventure.
What exasperates you? I really love to cook; yeah, I get very frustrated when I make a bad meal.
What is the best day of the year on Shelter Island? The best day is our annual barbecue.
Favorite movie or book? Pride and Prejudice.
Favorite food? Homemade ice cream.
Most respected elected official? Jamie Raskin.
