Long Live All Met!

My brother Billy and I grew up in DC. A few times a year, the Washington Post would publish a completely subjective but strangely authoritative list of which high schoolers were good at sports. It gave the city a shared reference point for who and what mattered – which sounds trivial until you don’t have it.

That model worked because it made confident, subjective judgment explicit rather than pretending it didn’t exist. Without it, everything feels noisier, less trustworthy, and increasingly shaped by algorithms. More importantly, it’s unclear how Washingtonians are supposed to have opinions with real conviction.

So we decided to recreate the spirit of it, which felt a lot easier than fixing local media altogether.

We plan to rank things that shape life in this city — startups, coffee shops, high schools, ideas, players, institutions, and the occasional topic we are wildly unqualified to evaluate.

This turns out to be a durable editorial strategy because lists cannot technically be wrong. They are less about correctness and more about signal, taste, and conversation, which conveniently makes disagreement part of the product.

But All-Metting — the act of ranking — is just the entry point.

DC does not only need confident subjective judgments. It also needs new local sports and business news. It needs fast, factual information — the kind people actually use. Context and quick clarity. And it needs more people in the arena willing to independently form opinions, defend them, and publish them.

Emerging journalists, builders, investors, athletes, and subject-matter experts need a place to write honestly, develop a voice, build a body of work, and occasionally be incorrect in a highly visible way.

All Met is designed around that premise.

The publication is contributor-owned. The economics are intentionally simple: if the publication makes money, contributors make money. The more it makes, the more contributors earn. It is a fair, emotionally well-adjusted, and economically rational model – probably why it won’t work.

And if it fails – which it most likely will – we will optimistically describe the experience as a valuable and character-building success.

This approach is admittedly risky and unconventional… but appropriate for a city that regularly tolerates much worse ideas.