Just after the November election, I told you how we were expanding our original reporting capacity in Washington by hiring two new reporter-bloggers, one to focus on Capitol Hill and another on the White House and executive branch.

I'm extremely pleased to announce that we've now hired the first of the two. Elana Schor will start at TPM the beginning of next month. She's covered Capitol Hill for The Guardian for the last year and before that she covered the senate for The Hill newspaper for three years.

(We hope to hire the second DC reporter-blogger in the next few weeks, in time for them to hit the ground running with the new administration.)

To date, our original reporting has been mainly, though not exclusively, old-fashioned phone reporting from our offices here in NY or from our Muckraker reporters' home offices in DC. But as we expand our operation to chronicle the unfolding story of the new Democratic Ascendancy (of unknown duration) in Washington, DC we felt like a more on-the-ground, in-person dimension to our blog reporting was required. And with that in mind, our plan is to have our Capitol Hill reporter-blogger reporting from Capitol Hill every day. So this will be, among other things, an experiment in mobile blogging.

We're excited, both about the story that's before us and the chance to keep innovating in the field of digital news reporting and aggregation. So a big welcome to Elana and a thanks to you, our regular readers, who've made our continued expansion possible.