Brian McNicoll
Brian McNicoll is Senior Communications Director at the Competitive Enterprise. During his career, he has been on all sides of the Washington communications experience. He worked as a newspaper reporter and editor. He has run a newsroom, an editorial page and a sports department. He has worked in the media relations field at The Heritage Foundation and now at CEI.
From 2006 to 2009, he worked on Capitol Hill as director of communications for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and as personal press aide to the committee’s chairman and, later, ranking member, Tom Davis (R-Va.). Following his stint on the Hill, he worked for A.C. Fitzgerald and Associates, an Arlington, Virginia-based consulting firm that helps the development departments of non-profit organizations operate more effectively, before joining CEI in September 2012.
McNicoll grew up in Shreveport, La., and joined the staff of The Shreveport Times, the morning daily, in 1977 at age 15. He rose from part-timer to prep editor in charge of sports coverage for 66 high schools in North Louisiana, created a Sunday page to highlight prep coverage and was credited with dramatic improvement in this critical area for a sports-crazy Southern community. He also covered college and pro sports. McNicoll worked at the Times until 1988, when he moved to the Washington, D.C., area and went to work for the National Business Forms Association, as newsletter and magazine editor.
In 1992, he became a sports editor at The Connection newspapers, a chain of weekly newspapers that serve the Northern Virginia suburbs. Within months, he was named managing editor, editorial page editor, and county news editor. The staff won 24 awards under McNicoll, including a national award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
In 1997, he went to work for The Montgomery Journal, in Rockville, Maryland, where he served as city editor and led a staff that accumulated 11 awards in less than a year. He then became sports editor at the paper and helped the sports staff win seven more awards.
In 2001, he moved to The Heritage Foundation, where he served as senior writer in the organization’s Editorial Services Department. He stayed there until 2006, when he went to Capitol Hill. He served until Davis retired from Congress.
McNicoll holds a bachelor of sciences in journalism and communications from Louisiana State University-Shreveport. He is a husband and father of two, an avid golfer and a well-known girls’ basketball coach in Northern Virginia.

