It’s with no small degree of delight that we report City Paper‘s hiring of Jeffrey Anderson as the paper’s new Loose Lips reporter. Beginning Jan. 3, he will cover politics and D.C. government.

A local boy from Annandale, Anderson is a veteran, cage-rattling journalist with strong investigative chops who has distinguished himself in both daily and alt-weekly stints from Los Angeles to Baltimore to the District. For LA Weekly, he covered a series of stories about fraud within L.A.’s Department of Water and Power and a more dangerous brand of corruption in the gang-and-cartel-infested cities of southeast Los Angeles County.

His first taste of newspaper reporting came in the late 1990s at the Los Angeles Daily Journal, a legal publication, where he covered everything from the post-9/11 fallout, to a seminal medical marijuana initiative, to statewide gambling issues and the Catholic clergy sex abuse crisis.

Closer to home, he has been a frequent City Paper contributor and was a reporter for The Washington Times from 2009 to 2013. He also co-founded a website with ace photographer Andy DelGiudice called District Dig, which has featured long-form and photo-heavy reporting otherwise being overlooked in D.C.

“Every urban experience from my earliest childhood memories took place right here in Washington, D.C.,” says Anderson, a recovered attorney. “Journalism is not just a profession, or a job, or a career. It’s a pursuit, an endeavor, a reason to get out of bed in the morning and find out about what’s going on around you, what people care about, and what they don’t yet know but ought to care about.”

On a personal note, Anderson is one of my favorite people, and I have wanted to hire him since taking over as editor of City Paper in July. He is an aggressive truth seeker whose work ethic knows no bounds and whose energy is inexhaustible. Were he a doctor, his occasionally combative bedside manner would render him impoverished. But in this job his skills will only make the paper richer.