BACKGROUNDER: About The Washington Oculus

Updated, November 2009

THE WASHINGTON OCULUS is an online notebook, journal and personal blog, edited by journalist and writer Michael E. Grass, originally launched in 2003 in the District of Columbia.

Grass currently edits and manages the non-profit Center for Independent Media’s five-state network of locally focused politics and policy news: The Colorado Independent, The Iowa Independent, The Michigan Messenger, The Minnesota Independent and The New Mexico Independent. He works out of the newsroom of The Washington Independent in the nation’s capital.


Grass is the founding editor of DCist.com and Free Ride, the local blog of The Washington Post’s Express newspaper. During the 2008 campaign cycle, Grass served as Deputy Managing Editor of The New York Observer’s Politicker.com, a network of state-focused politics websites that at its height included operations in 17 states and in the nation’s capital.

He has written for The Washington Post, Roll Call and Crain’s Detroit Business and was once jokingly described as “Zeus” and, more seriously, a “tireless, content-generating machine” by The Huffington Post.

At Roll Call, Grass was a copy editor, writer, K Street Files lobbying column contributor and helped manage RollCall.com. For his highlights from Roll Call, click here.

In 2005, Grass was recruited to edit the Local section of Express and later as Web editor, was part of The Washington Post Co. team that conceptualized, planned and launched ReadExpress.com in April 2006. He also edited restaurant coverage and on Free Ride, wrote on a variety of localized topics, including transit, politics and neighborhood news. For his highlights from Express, click here.

An alumnus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Grass worked for The Michigan Daily and as a news reporter and editor covered the administration of then-President Lee C. Bollinger, including the Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger affirmative action lawsuits. Grass served as editorial page editor and edited an award-winning series of dispatches from a Daily writer sent to Pakistan and Afghanistan during the fall of 2001. He is a published contributor to “Writing Ann Arbor,” (University of Michigan Press, 2005) a literary anthology featuring the work of Arthur Miller, Joyce Carol Oates, Wendy Wasserstein and other writers who have made their way through Ann Arbor.

Although Grass grew up in East Grand Rapids, Mich., his family has lived in the District of Columbia since the 1860s. During the Civil War, his German ancestors settled in what is today Foggy Bottom. His great-great grandfather, August Grass, would open a carpentry and furniture-making workshop at New Hampshire Avenue and M Street NW and was commissioned to craft much of the intricate woodcarving in the Dupont Circle mansion of D.C.’s master brewer Christian Heurich, which is today open for tours. Pictured at left is the Heurich House’s dining room, where some of the best Grass carvings can be found. His grandfather grew up in the house that is now Kinkead’s restaurant on Eye Street NW just west of Pennsylvania Avenue and 20th Street NW, a few blocks from the White House. The Swiss branch of his family, which has ancestral ties to the oenologist who developed the Muller-Thurgau grape, settled on Capitol Hill near Lincoln Park. His great uncle and great aunt were some of the last residents of K Street NW, living in a rowhouse in what is today’s Golden Triangle Business Improvement District.