Sportswriter Sally Jenkins referenced her reporting in Mississippi on Hurricane Katrina in the announcement to her colleagues she is leaving The Washington Post to become a staff writer for The Atlantic:

Only the people who live their work in a newsroom will understand this: one of the best tastes I ever had was in a Mississippi motel parking lot at 1 a.m. sharing shots of Maker’s Mark, neat, with Washington Post photographers out of a makeshift bar in the back of a rented SUV. We’d spent the day covering the damage Hurricane Katrina had wrought with a 22-foot wall of water and 160 mph winds, and our dinner was whiskey and fried pickles, and it was good.

Earlier in the day after we saw a grand piano in a treetop, we’d interviewed the Gulfport mayor, who’d resorted to looting because his town was so cut off. He’d told his police chief to hotwire a truck. The police chief shot back, “I wasn’t cut out to be a crook; that’s why I went into law enforcement.”

“Well, can we get someone from the jail to do it?” the mayor asked.

Best quote I ever got.

Me, Jonathan Newton, and Michel Du Cille shared a two double-beds Hampton Inn room where the door wouldn’t lock because the hurricane had ruined the motel’s electronics, and we saw each other in our pajamas and brushed our teeth together.

Hundreds of us across the newsroom have had experiences like these with each other. Every two years in Sports, eight or ten of us would ship off together to the Olympics in some fine international city we rarely saw the lights of, because we were trapped in press pens in stadium tunnels, so closely packed that as my colleague Barry Svrluga says, “It’s like working inside someone’s mouth.” When deadline was finally over at 3 a.m., we’d entertain ourselves with a liquored-up singing game Liz Clarke named, “Stupid Guy Anthems.”

So, it’s with a spear in my heart that I separate from you, my adored friends and colleagues.

The Washington Post has given me most of what I have in this life, both materially and in pride of purpose. I came to work here at a very unfinished 24 years old, and this place made me. Taught me, chiseled me, formed whatever is good and integral in the work. In 30 years, l’ve not had a single unhappy moment in its newsroom; rather, l’ve been outrageously spoiled by its editors and publishers, starting with Don Graham, Ben Bradlee, Len Downie, Liz Spayd and George Solomon right through William Lewis, Matt Murray, Liz Seymour, Jason Murray, and Matt Rennie.

For a lot of that time, I was a woman working in a man’s business. A word about that. I’ve had an army of brothers here. I went into every assignment utterly confident that anyone who tried to hassle me, or mess with any of us, would be dealing with a united group of teammates ready to step forward and put that person into a wall. That’s been an incredible luxury, and I owe every one of them thanks for that, from Michael Wilbon to Jerry Brewer, Adam Kilgore, Barry Svrluga, Dave Sheinin, Rick Maese, right down to young Sam Fortier.

That said, can you imagine how gratifying it is to look up and see seated in our sports section the blazingly talented Candace Buckner at one desk, Ava Wallace at another, Chelsea Janes at another, Emily Giambalvo at another, and Bailey Johnson at another? Now that’s a job effing well done by this newsroom, and it gives me peace and completion.

All of which is to say I’m not leaving out of unhappiness. I’m leaving for an opportunity – the only other job I ever coveted in this world, at The Atlantic Monthly. I have a weakness for literary pursuits, and it got me.

I will so miss the sweat, the adventure, and the unruly carping and bitching that hides our bone-deep devotion to craft, and to this place.

I see the glimmer of a new Washinton Post – one that moves. It has to be right-sized, and young trees planted, but when the clocks all start chiming at the same time, it will be glorious. I believe that and you should too.

And I will be applauding you until my hands hurt.