Bill Nichols joins the Fedcap Group to continue his work as editor of Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, a post he assumed in 2015 after a 35-year career in journalism as an editor and reporter, including as founding managing editor of Politico.

Nichols comes to Fedcap after 10 years with Freedman Consulting—Spotlight’s original home—where he served as a vice president and senior adviser, with Spotlight as his prime focus.

He joined Freedman after 8 years at Politico, where he was the new publication’s founding managing editor and later editor-at-large. He also helped launch Politico Europe in 2015, a publication that has been as transformational in Brussels as domestic Politico has been in Washington.

Nichols joined POLITICO in 2007 after more than 20 years at USA Today, where he covered the White House, the State Department, national politics and was a senior correspondent in the newspaper’s Washington bureau.

A native of Anchorage, Kentucky, Nichols was drawn into newspaper journalism during his undergraduate years at Indiana University. He began his career at the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger and was on the staff when the paper won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1983 for an investigative series and editorial campaign that were a key factor in the state legislature’s passage of Mississippi’s first mandatory kindergarten law.

He has covered 6 presidential campaigns, 12 national political conventions and traveled to more than 30 countries, including covering Russian President Vladimir Putin’s re-election in 2004 and staffing the first Gulf War on the ground in Israel. He also emerged undefeated from two presidential golf outings with former President Bill Clinton.

Nichols was a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes in 2009 and chaired the National Reporting jury in 2010. He is a former member of the Steering Committee of the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press. In 2019, he was a fellow in the Media Transformation Challenge at Harvard University, spending a year focused on ways to improve and enlarge coverage of income inequality and poverty alleviation. Nichols also is a member of the advisory committee of the Journalist Recovery Network, an organization committed to creating resources and personal mentoring for journalists who may be facing substance abuse or mental health challenges.