If you follow District politics, chances are you’ve come across Bill Rice and Dorothy Brizill.

They are regular and persistent attendees at local government hearings and press conferences, often sitting alongside and among the press corps, and have been for decades. Mayor Muriel Bowser, like most D.C. mayors before her, knows them by name. And Council Chair Phil Mendelson acknowledges them at his regular legislative briefings.

Neither consider themselves a reporter. Brizill describes herself as a “watchdog” while Rice says he’s an “advocate.” Both have run for elected office—each taking a turn at running (unsuccessfully) for seats on the D.C. Council. Both are self-admitted pack rats—each amassing stacks of boxes of yellowed clippings, files, and other mementos from a lifetime of gadflying.

Despite their unofficial titles, Rice and Brizill have dedicated the better part of 30 to 40 years to the proceedings, leaving an indelible impact on local D.C. media and political circles.

Various mayors over the years have tolerated them or despised them. The same could be said of their relationships with some local journalists.

“I don’t mind Bill or Dorothy showing up and asking questions … they are well intended and have deep knowledge of the issues,” says Mark Segraves, the unofficial dean of the D.C. press corps as one of the longest active reporters covering city politics. “But they are not reporters. Bill is an activist … and Dorothy is an activist.”

Segraves once had a showdown with Brizill when he walked into the press room at the Wilson Building and found her sitting at his desk. “I was pretty steamed,” he recalls.

In interviews with City Paper, both Rice and Brizill describe how they review the mayor’s daily schedule and attend events to which only reporters receive official invitations.

In most other big American cities, reporters are required to present press credentials to attend such events, but D.C. requires no such identification.

The District government decided against issuing media credentials nine years ago after the Metropolitan Police Department ended media credentialing. MPD Chief Pamela Smith declined to talk about the issue, but her staff says MPD abandoned the practice in 2015 because reporters have no more or less access to crime scenes than the general public.

But considering Rice and Brizill as reporters misses the distinctive angle that each of them bring to the table. They’ve both been observing District politics like hawks for more than a generation, and several political observers note that they have considerably more experience than the average, often youthful D.C. reporter. They both bring a historical perspective to bear when they pose tough questions.

For that reason, many observers value the role that Rice and Brizill play in the city’s quirky media landscape—throwing them into the same category as the late Mark Plotkin, who blurred the line between reporting and advocacy.

The Washington Post (and City Paper) has quoted Brizill in dozens of District news stories, and she estimates that she’s provided “uncredited” news tips to countless other reporters over the years via her government watchdog organization and website DC Watch, which is no longer active.

Vincent McCraw, who worked for the Detroit News for 20 years after serving as a city editor at the Washington Times, recalls getting documents from Brizill back in the 1990’s about suspected wrongdoing by District officials countless times.

“She was dogged … she was just relentless,” recalls McCraw. “She would come by the press room and talk about whatever she was working on.”

Josh Gibson, the Council’s communications director, notes that many reporters benefit via osmosis from having Rice and Brizill at press conferences because of their memories and firsthand knowledge of long-ago events.

“Dorothy and Bill have decades of institutional memory that make them truly unique resources to us here in the Wilson Building,” Gibson says.

Rice has emerged as a great source of information thanks to the photo documentation he has assembled in recent years on X (formerly Twitter). Since he attends nearly every event held by the mayor, and posts his photos on his X account, he’s managed to create an unparalleled visual timeline of all the things Bowser does in a day: fundraisers, speeches, birthday parties, ribbon cuttings, and just everything else.

It’s not uncommon for reporters to ask Brizill for her take on political missteps by D.C. officials, or for news producers or editors to scan Rice’s social media for insight into who is standing alongside the mayor at ribbon cuttings or after-hours celebrations.

So who are these two unusual figures in the District’s media ecosystem?

Rice, 82, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1941. His father worked for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee after the war helping resettle Jewish refugees. So Rice grew up in Paris, Geneva, and Frankfurt until 1955 (his younger brother was born in Paris).

After graduating from Bowdoin College in Maine, Rice went to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a doctorate in chemistry. His first big job was working for the Federal Energy Office (now the Department of Energy) during the Nixon administration, but he also spent a year working for former New York City Mayor John Lindsay.

Rice spent most of his professional career in the field of energy and environmental consulting, but he says that upon settling in D.C. he very quickly became attached to the local political and historical quirks and wanted to engage on the ground rather than in the more distant world of federal policy.

As far back as the 1970s, Rice threw himself into District politics. He became familiar with the various characters rising to power as the city itself was emerging into the Home Rule era, which started in 1973.

It would be another 25 years before Rice made his first of two runs for the Council. He was a candidate in 1998 and 2006, winning a tepid endorsement from Washington Post in 1998 (the paper told readers that they should vote for Rice, Phil Mendelson, Linda Moody, or Greg Rhett in the crowded primary race. Mendelson won an at-large seat that year).

It was during those years that Rice worked his first and only stint as a reporter. He contributed articles to Regardies, the Georgetown Dish, the Intowner, and the Current, and penned an op-ed column for the Washington Post back in 1996. He says he loved writing about what mattered to D.C. residents, especially in his Tenleytown neighborhood (he also spent some time living in Dupont Circle).

Later, Rice did a short stint working for the District government when he served as spokesperson for the District Department of Transportation under Dan Tangherlini. He would then work with the city’s Office of Property Management (now the Department of General Services), too. In both roles, Rice became comfortable attending press conferences and rubbing elbows with reporters.

“I saw it as my job to know the media and know what they were talking about,” Rice says, explaining why he was frequently spotted at press conferences even when his responsibilities were sometimes unrelated to the event.

In recent years, Rice has embraced the cause he says he was destined for: a crusade to have the city’s various archival records all consolidated in one spot for safeguarding and preservation. Rice has made the issue his passion, and he says he asks direct questions of politicians only if they pertain to the archives (though he has asked about other topics, too).

Rice says his basement is packed to the rafters with bits of political and District government memorabilia. “I have a marriage that is threatened by my level of accumulated archival material in my basement,” he says, though he declined to let me come take a look.

Rice says the city’s plan to open a DC Archives in the former Building #41 space on the University of the District of Columbia campus is the culmination of his life’s work. His wife, Myrna Sislen, who owned Middle C Music and is now working on a public art initiative at Cobb Park, is as pleased as he is with the city’s commitment to preserving history.

“There’s nobody else holding onto this collection,” Rice says, smiling.

For her part, Brizill has spent more than 30 years at the helm of DC Watch—a name she and her husband coined for the government watchdog effort they launched in response to the utter dysfunction of the entire District government in the early days following Home Rule. 

Brizill, 74, was born in Queens, New York. She went to Queens College and Columbia University before moving to the District to take a job at the Brookings Institution and later in the U.S. Department of State working under Cyrus Vance, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter. She also did a spell working on international trade for New York Gov. Mario Cuomo.

Brizill’s husband, Gary Imhoff, 75, was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, and spent his war time on a farm in Missouri. Imhoff identifies himself as vice president and webmaster of DC Watch, but also he’s an accomplished scholar who has published Learning in Two Languages: From Conflict and Controversy to Cooperative Reorganization of Schools and The Immigration Time Bomb: The Fragmenting of America.

Brizill says Imhoff attended Harvard University and earned his master’s in Black literature at Howard University, which is what brought him to D.C. back in the 1960s. He would later work at the World Bank.

According to Brizill, the two met in the ’60s. She was living in Adams Morgan and needed to find a new place to live. Imhoff was living in Columbia Heights and needed a roommate. They were out with a mutual friend, and over wine Imhoff asked her if she wanted to move into his house as a roommate.

“I said, ‘Gary, there is no way in the world that my dad would be OK with me moving in with you.’ So Gary says, ‘Alright, well, would you at least consider going out on a date with me if you can’t move in?’” Brizill recently told City Paper at the JW Marriott hotel, one of several spots she camps out when she’s covering news at the Wilson Building.

Her start as a government watchdog began in the 1970s when she was disgusted by the open drug dealing, gun violence, and prostitution happening next to their home on Girard Street NW. Brizill would meet with MPD officers and city officials to nudge them into action against “dealers and pimps,” who in many cases operated out of abandoned properties with seeming impunity, she says. She was ahead of her time in terms of the neighborhood watch groups and Listservs that would become standard a generation later.

“Users and sellers would gather,” Brizill says. “We could see the whole thing because some of these houses didn’t even have windows or doors.” Eventually, she began to get some response from the District government, and she and Imhoff later christened their efforts to push for accountability as DC Watch, the website that went live in 1997—more than two years before the D.C. government website launched. In those early years, Brizill says, DC Watch included phone numbers for police substations, building inspectors, and elementary schools—information that wasn’t available elsewhere on the web.

Over the years, Brizill’s frustration with the District government’s dysfunction expanded beyond law enforcement. She has taken on inspectors, educators, and analysts, but her deep disdain for the DC Board of Elections is her primary target of late. 

Brizill ran for the Ward 1 seat on the D.C. Council in 1994, but finished second behind Frank Smith in the Democratic primary.

For many years, Brizill spent Election Day driving around to 40 or more precincts and talking with workers about what was going on. On election night she would post up at the BOE’s offices, watching as the ballots came in and were counted.

Her partners in this notable level of dedication and observation were typically Jonetta Rose Barras (who wrote City Paper’s Loose Lips column from 2000 to 2001), and on occasion, local journalist and author Harry Jaffe. “I wanted to see for myself what was going on,” Brizill says. “Sometimes Jonetta would drive us.”

Brizill frequently published her findings and observations on the DC Watch website, which was at its peak during the Control Board years under Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry.

John Hill, executive director of the DC Financial Control Board when the District government was in receivership, recalls Brizill attending every hearing, meeting, and press conference during that time.

“Although she would be allowed at press conferences, she wouldn’t be given information on an embargoed basis as regular reporters would be given,” Hill says. “She felt like she was a reporter, however we saw her more as a blogger. We tried to treat her with respect.”

Brizill and Imhoff experienced every homeowner’s worst nightmare in May 2012 when their three-story brick home on Girard Street NW burned down. Nearly everything inside was destroyed, including the computer servers that allowed the couple to maintain DC Watch. The website has remained frozen in time to 2012.

Worse yet, according to Brizill, all their paper files documenting 40 years of District government operations and malfeasance were also consumed by the fire. Brizill has suspicions about the origin of the blaze, but she declines to talk about it.

Brizill and Imhoff rented a place in the District for many years after the fire while they dealt with insurance and repairs. They now have a new apartment just across the line in Maryland. Since Brizill doesn’t drive, she’s farther away from the Wilson Building than ever, but no less committed to covering it.

“I’ve got several big projects I’m working on,” she says. “It’s always something.”

Out of Ink covers media issues relevant to the DMV. Send tips, suggestions, or feedback to vmorris@washingtoncitypaper.com and connect with him on X @vincentmorris.