Michelle Goldberg will join Opinion as a columnist. Read more in the below note from James Bennet, Jim Dao and Kathleen Kingsbury:

We’re delighted to tell you that Michelle Goldberg is joining the strongest lineup of columnists in the world. Many of you know Michelle from her regular contributions here, as well as from her column at Slate, so you have some sense already of her intellectual depth, courage and ambition. She is the author of three books that together point to her range: The first, “Kingdom Coming,” investigated the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States; the second, “The Means of Reproduction,” examined struggles worldwide for women’s self-determination and its connections to economic development and national identity; and the third, “The Goddess Pose,” told the rollicking tale of Indra Devi, the extraordinary woman who fled the Russian Revolution and eventually – as the twentieth century unfolded and she passed through stints in Berlin cabaret, Indian silent film, and Hollywood – helped bring yoga to the United States.

Michelle knows how to deliver big ideas through great stories, and to do the hard reporting to support both. She knows how to write fast and forcefully off the news and how to structure a complex, magazine-length argument. She is interested in pretty much everything, and she sees no contradiction between having fierce convictions and keeping an open mind. She is, in other words, our kind of colleague.

You can expect further additions to our lineup in the coming months as we continue to broaden the range of Times debate about consequential questions.

Michelle’s first day will be in about two weeks, and we’ll ask you to join us in welcoming her then.

Gal Beckerman has joined the Books desk as a preview editor covering nonfiction, graphic novels and comics, and overseeing the Book desk’s video coverage. Read more in this note from Pamela Paul:

We are thrilled to announce that Gal Beckerman has joined the Books desk as a preview editor for the Book Review covering nonfiction, graphic novels and comics, and overseeing our desk’s video coverage. Gal previously filled in for Parul Sehgal during her maternity leave and has permanently taken on that role now that Parul has become our newest book critic.

Gal is an accomplished writer, book critic and editor who has served as the opinion editor of The Forward and a book reviewer for The Times and The Wall Street Journal. He was also a New York-based correspondent for The Jerusalem Post. He has taught at the Columbia Journalism School, been an editor for the Columbia Journalism Review, been an Alexander von Humboldt fellow in Berlin and was a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon. Gal has a masters in journalism, as well as a masters and an M.Phil in communications, all from Columbia.

His first book, “When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry,” was named one of the year’s best in 2010 by The New Yorker and The Washington Post and awarded the 2010 National Jewish Book Award and the 2012 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. His next book, tentatively titled, “Anti-Social Media,” a history of interactive pre-Internet forms of media and their role in fomenting societal change, from letters to zines, will be published by Crown Publishing in 2019.

All of us who’ve been missing Gal since his departure in February are delighted to have him back.

— Pamela

We are excited to announce the new congressional team.

Jonathan Weisman, who’s been editing domestic policy and Washington health care coverage, has been named congressional editor. Jonathan joined The Times in 2012 as a congressional reporter after working everywhere else – The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Baltimore Sun and Congressional Quarterly. Before that he worked for the Alameda Newspaper Group and Education Week. He’s covered science, nuclear weapons development, education, Congress, economic policy and the White House. In his spare time, he wrote a novel, “No. 4 Imperial Lane,” a coming-of-age tale about a young American caring for a quadriplegic in Britain in the 1980s. And he’s just finished a non-fiction book (((Semitism))), to be published in March 2018.

Sheryl Stolberg, who has been the domestic affairs correspondent for the National Desk, will be returning to Capitol Hill as the lead of the team. Sheryl covered the Hill from 2002 to 2006 and calls it the best beat in Washington. Previously she covered the White Houses of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who once ordered her to ride a tiny hovercraft that landed her on Jon Stewart’s show as the “moment of Zen.” Sheryl, a graduate of University of Virginia, came to The Times in 1997 from The Los Angeles Times, where she shared in two Pulitzers won by the paper’s Metro staff for coverage of the 1992 riots and 1994 earthquake. In her work here for the National Desk, including as Mid-Atlantic Bureau Chief, she shepherded our coverage of racial unrest in Baltimore surrounding the death of Freddie Gray. Most recently she covered the violence in Charlottesville.

Sheryl will be joined by Yamiche Alcindor, who most recently has covered Ben Carson at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the impact of federal policy on poor and working class people. She’s traveled to Texas to powerfully capture the anguish of outdoor workers sweltering in the heat of climate change and to Mississippi to interview Americans who live in homes without running water. Yamiche joined The Times in 2015 and last year traveled extensively to cover the presidential campaigns of Senator Bernie Sanders and President Trump. Before that, she was a national reporter for USA Today and covered stories like the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., the death of Trayvon Martin and the protests in Ferguson, Mo. and Baltimore, Md. She earned a master’s degree in broadcast news and documentary filmmaking from New York University and a bachelor’s in international relations and African American studies from Georgetown University.

Nicholas Fandos will join the team as well. He’s been covering the Veterans Affairs Administration, the Secret Service and a range of general assignment stories, including one on Turkish guards. He started at The Times in 2015 as a summer intern in Washington and moved on to become a prolific news assistant with nearly 150 stories written or contributed to over 16 months. He’s a 2015 graduate of Harvard, a former managing editor of The Crimson and a former intern at Politico.

Last but hardly least is Thomas Kaplan, who we’re very happy to say will remain where he is, covering Congress. Tom has been on the Hill since January, when he grabbed on to the health care story and wrote it all the way through to the moment that John McCain voted no and killed Trump’s effort to repeal. Tom started at The Times in 2010 as a sports intern, moved briefly to DealBook and then to Albany, where he wrote about a long list of corruption scandals. As a 2016 campaign reporter he covered John Kasich, Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine, Mike Pence and a bit of Donald Trump. He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science from Yale.

Janet Elder, one of The Times’s most esteemed newsroom leaders, will build an operation that will allow The Times to seek philanthropic funding for ambitious journalism. Read more in this note from Dean Baquet and Joseph Kahn:

Over the past year a host of philanthropies and universities have come forward asking to help support our journalism. Invariably, they say we are one of the few institutions with the independence and ambition to take on the largest subjects here and abroad.

This is one of the most compelling developments in our business. Philanthropies across the country are providing money for big investigations, including our own Fractured Lands, the magazine’s epic examination of the post-Arab Spring Middle East, which was funded in part by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

This is a significant and exciting opportunity for The New York Times. So we have asked Janet Elder, one of our most esteemed newsroom leaders, to build an operation that will allow The Times to seek philanthropic funding for ambitious journalism.

We are setting our sights high. Even with the strength of our business and the size of our newsroom, there are opportunities to extend the reach and impact of our journalism with additional support. And we believe we can also work with philanthropies and universities to launch ventures that will help the wider world of journalism, not just The Times.

Janet’s initial task will be to begin a dialogue, both internally and externally, about different types of nonprofit funding and the kinds of newsroom activities that might be supported, as well as addressing legal questions and potential ethical considerations in moving in this direction. She as much as anyone understands our traditions and standards and has a deep knowledge of the operations of the newsroom.

Some easy possibilities come to mind. The New York Times Student Journalism Institute, for example, has nurtured a generation of minority journalists who have enriched our newsroom. Perhaps with additional support the program can help develop talent for the industry as a whole. We also believe that The Times can help with the growing crisis in local news coverage by partnering with other institutions around the country. But mainly, we think there are journalism projects we are eager to pursue that could be more ambitious and have greater impact with outside support.

What can we say about Janet? She has been one of our most visible, important and effective leaders in guiding the newsroom and nurturing careers. She has helped lead us through difficult times. And the newsroom is stronger than ever in no small part because of her efforts.

She has guided us through ethical quandaries, arranged for the rescue of journalists in danger around the world, helped inspire The Upshot, and been a big force in our political coverage for years. She will remain on the Masthead working closely with us.

Of course she is irreplaceable in running News Administration. But there are already some changes in the works that will make Janet’s move to her new job somewhat easier. Carolyn Ryan has led a recruiting effort that is transforming the newsroom. Charlotte Behrendt led us through the last buyout. And we are soon to have Keami Lewis, an HR executive in the newsroom, working closely with us on diversity and career management.

In the coming weeks Janet will be working with Hannah Poferl, in newsroom strategy, and others in creating this new venture.

– Dean and Joe

Raymond Zhong of The Wall Street Journal will be joining BizDay to cover technology in China; and Vindu Goel will be moving to Mumbai to be our India technology reporter. Read more in this note from BizDay editor Ellen Pollock and technology editor Pui-Wing Tam:

We’re delighted to announce that Raymond Zhong will be joining the Times to cover technology in China.

Raymond comes to us from The Wall Street Journal, where he most recently covered economics in India, working out of New Delhi for three years. He previously was based in London for The Journal, working in the op-ed department. Before he was a journalist, he worked at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, and interned at Goldman Sachs and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In India, Raymond visited car factories in Gujarat to report the changing fortunes of manufacturing-led economies, traveled to Uttar Pradesh to see crumbling railways and the underinvestment in infrastructure, and trekked in Nepal to find out how the country was rebuilding after a devastating earthquake.

Fluent in Mandarin, Raymond just came off a refresher course in the language at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. He will eventually be based in Beijing, but will start with The Times by visiting New York, San Francisco and working out of the Hong Kong bureau.

We are also pleased to announce that Vindu Goel, a technology reporter in San Francisco for the past four years and a BizDay backfield editor in New York before that, will move to Mumbai to be our India technology reporter.

India is in many ways the reverse of China when it comes to tech, a relatively open market where global tech giants like Facebook and Amazon are battling local companies for the wallets and attention of hundreds of millions of people. The links between the Indian and American economies are also getting more scrutiny as the Trump administration seeks to curb immigration of Indian tech workers and Indian companies like Infosys are expanding operations in the U.S.

As our Yahoo reporter, Vindu chronicled the company’s hacking scandals, and Marissa Mayer’s $900,000-a-week paycheck. Covering Apple, he examined how the company’s iPhone software had gotten too clever for its own good and profiled a start-up made up of Apple veterans who were trying to improve on Apple’s culture by emphasizing quality while ditching its famous secrecy.

Vindu’s previous work as our social media reporter will also come in handy in India, which has more Facebook users than any country except the United States. Raymond will join us in October, and Vindu will move to Mumbai in October.

- Ellen and Pui-Wing

David Enrich, currently the financial enterprise editor at The Wall Street Journal, will be financial editor at Business Day.  Read more in this note from Ellen Pollock:

I’m thrilled to announce that David Enrich will be financial editor at Business Day.

David comes to us from The Wall Street Journal, where he is the financial enterprise editor, managing a team of investigative reporters. Prior to that he was the paper’s European banking editor, based in London, and also worked on his own reporting projects.

David joined The Journal in 2007, and his first assignment was covering the U.S. banking industry. He also worked at the Dow Jones News wires, and was a reporter in Washington for States News Service.

His series on the mastermind behind the Libor scandal won the 2016 Loeb award for feature writing. David’s other awards include a 2012 Overseas Press Club award for coverage of the European financial crisis and a George Polk award for coverage of insider trading. He was part of the team of reporters who were finalists for Pulitzer Prizes in 2009 and 2011.

David’s book, “The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History,” was published in March by an imprint of William Morrow.

So please welcome David. He’ll join us in September.

— Ellen

Alicia Wittmeyer joins the Opinion Section as gender editor of The New York Times.

When Opinion began to search for a gender editor, we were looking for someone with world-spanning interests, who could commission pieces from India as readily as from Indiana, on topics ranging from politics and culture to sports and technology. Today we’re proud to say we’ve hired Alicia Ping-Quon Wittmeyer to fill that job.

Alicia comes to The Times from Foreign Policy magazine, where she helped pioneer their European edition from London and, along the way, oversaw coverage of Brexit, and the Brussels and Paris terror attacks. Her favorite pieces at Foreign Policy include a history lesson on the brief phase when Europeans saw Islam as a hip new trend, an investigation into the failures of French deradicalization efforts, and a feature on how Iran became the fertility treatment capital of the Muslim Middle East.

Prior to her London posting, Alicia was Foreign Policy’s assistant managing editor in Washington. She has also worked as a reporter for The Virginian-Pilot and The Associated Press. She earned her BA in political science and economics from U.C. Berkeley, and masters degrees in international history from the London School of Economics and Peking University. Alicia will remain based in London after spending her first month in New York. She starts Oct. 2.

Natalie Kitroeff, a familiar face, joins Business Day to cover economics and heavy industry. Read more in this note from Business Day editor Ellen Pollock:

I’m thrilled to announce that Natalie Kitroeff will join Business Day.

Natalie joins us from The Los Angeles Times, where she covered the California economy and basked in the beauty and strangeness of her new home. She was a finalist for this year’s Loeb Award for beat reporting. (One of her editors pulled me aside at the ceremony to say he’d traveled to New York just to make sure I didn’t hire her.)

Prior to moving to L.A in 2016, Natalie spent two years covering student debt and higher education for Bloomberg. She also wrote stories for Businessweek, including a feature with the headline, “Are Lawyers Getting Dumber?” (The answer was yes.)

This will be Natalie’s second tour at The New York Times. After graduating from Princeton she was a research assistant to Charles Blow and Nick Kristof.

So please welcome back Natalie. She’ll arrive in mid-September and will cover economics and heavy industry.

— Ellen

The Times has lifted its paywall for stories about Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath. Readers now have unlimited access to storm-related coverage (other sections of The Times will operate as usual).

Please note that articles about Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath will still be counted by the meter (those who have read their free monthly allotment can still continue to read all hurricane coverage). Read more about how The Times’s meter works here.

Resources available from The New York Times:

• On our website:

  • Live briefing

  • Maps tracking the path of the storm

• On your phone: The New York Times mobile news apps are free to download and readers can sign up for breaking news notifications.

• On Twitter: @nytimes and for on-the-ground updates from reporters tracking the storm follow:

  • @mannyNYT in Corpus Christi, Texas

  • @alanblinder, @jswatz and @ckrausss in Houston, Texas

  • @viaSimonRomero in Albuquerque, New Mexico

Update: August 29, 2017
This post has been updated to more accurately explain The Times’s open access for coverage of Hurricane Harvey.

The Online News Association announced that The New York Times is a finalist for eight Online Journalism Awards, more than any of our competitors.

Steve Duenes, assistant masthead editor, notes, “This is really encouraging. The recognition by ONA gives us further confidence that the push The Times is making to innovate in our digital storytelling is working. There’s a wide range of material recognized here, from mobile-first interactive projects to virtual reality and live video, and we’re really pleased that we were able to strike a chord across the digital spectrum.”

The storytelling recognized by ONA varies from virtual reality to breaking news to graphics:

1. General Excellence in Online Journalism – NYTimes.com: The Times has been creating vivid digital experiences that are helping redefine journalism. We are often telling stories in new forms that meld video, charts, data visualizations, maps, audio, photos, social media and text. These deeply immersive interactives made otherwise impenetrable data accessible, and took users on visual journeys that were never before possible.

2. Breaking News – Orlando: The New York Times arrived quickly at the scene of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in June 2016. A Miami-based correspondent had been vacationing at Disney World just down the interstate. As the awful details poured in, she was quickly joined by a team of colleagues with a wide array of skills who turned our coverage of this tragedy into a riveting display of the power of digital journalism.

3. Breaking News – Terror Attack in Nice, France: The New York Times coverage of the terrorist attack in Nice, France, is an illustration of how The Times is utilizing multiple story forms to convey different aspects of breaking news stories. Within an hour and a half of the attack, which occurred at about 4:30 p.m. Eastern, The Times published the first version of the news story that would be updated more than 100 times over the next 24 hours.

4. Excellence and Innovation in Visual Digital Storytelling - Fragments of a Life: A Curbside Mystery: This story — an innovative piece of live journalism that broke new ground in its approach — began when New York Times journalist Deborah Acosta followed a trail of wind-blown photo slides to an abandoned trash bag filled with images. Acosta then embarked on a quest with The New York Times audience to figure out where the slides came from. What emerged was a story of life, love, and loss, carried out using participatory journalism in a new medium on Facebook.

5. Excellence in Immersive Storytelling – Fight for Falluja: When The New York Times first started experimenting with virtual reality in 2015, we recognized it as a powerful tool for journalism, a way for viewers to experience events first hand, to use their curiosity and instincts to investigate and understand the world in new and meaningful ways. Taking our viewers to the frontlines of the Iraq war and the fight against ISIS seemed like an urgent use for this nascent medium.

6. Feature – The Fine Line: How do we engage a mobile audience to explain the balance of strength and technique athletes use to win gold at the Olympics? Inspired by Snapchat and mobile viewing habits, but with the elegance of a highly crafted narrative, The Fine Line series creates a new kind of viewing experience that shows the physics and technique behind the performances of the world’s best athletes.

7. Online Commentary – Race/Related: Race permeates so much in our society, and we try to match the immersive experience with multidisciplinary storytelling. We cross boundaries — departmental, platform and storyform — in how we execute our journalism and engage with users. Case after case, our work provoked discussions and insights that might not otherwise have been had — pulling people together across the lines of race, ethnicity, generations, class and politics.

 8. Sports – Rio Olympics: The New York Times engaged its Olympics audience in a variety of innovative ways, placing a particular emphasis on its viewers’ mobile viewing habits. But the small-screen approach did not mean small ambitions. For its Olympic coverage, The Times met its audience on the device of its choice with inventive, well-designed and informative features, news and analysis.

Explore more of the 2017 Online Journalism Award finalists.

                         

Tiffany Hsu and Ben Casselman are joining Business Day as reporters.

Tiffany will focus on breaking news, and will be taking on other stories and projects as well. She joins The Times from Columbia, where she finished the MBA program two weeks ago, and also completed a Knight-Bagehot fellowship.

Ellen Pollock, editor of Biz Day, writes in a note to staff about Tiffany’s appointment: “As far as I can tell, Tiffany has written about everything, from drones to retail to restaurants to trucks to M&A to personal finance–the list goes on and on. Before moving to New York in 2015, she worked at The Los Angeles Times, covering the California economy, retail and the food and beverage business. (Not all at once.)”

Ben joins The Times from FiveThirtyEight, where he is a senior editor and chief economics writer. He’s written about income inequality, education, criminal justice and the last presidential election. He helped lead the site’s “Gun Deaths in America” project, which was the recipient of several awards, including one from the Society of News Design.

Before joining FiveThirtyEight, Ben worked at The Wall Street Journal, both in Dallas and New York. His coverage of the Deepwater Horizon disaster was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting and won a Loeb award.

Pollock writes, “Ben started his career at the Salem News, in Massachusetts. Among other things, he covered a controversial project to erect a statue of Samantha Stephens, the character played by Elizabeth Montgomery in the ‘Bewitched’ TV show. Here’s a lead from one of his stories in 2005: “Maybe they won’t fly in on broomsticks, but by plane, train, and automobile, fans of  ’Bewitched’ will soon be sweeping into the Witch City.” I know he’ll be thrilled I’ve mentioned that here.”

Ben will continue to do data and analytical stories about economics, as well as other business topics. And he’ll collaborate with other reporters on data-driven storytelling.

 

 

John Haskins becomes the Director of The New York Times Student Journalism Institute.

Since 2003, The New York Times has trained hundreds of young journalists who were members of the National Association of Black Journalists or National Association of Hispanic Journalists at our Student Journalism Institute. It has been one of our most successful diversity efforts. We now have ambitions to expand the Institute exponentially, by including other news organizations as sponsors, developing a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering Mathematics) component and hosting more training sessions in other parts of the country and the world. Our hope is that the Institute will aid all newsrooms in their efforts to diversify.

John Haskins has agreed to lead this effort as Director of The New York Times Student Journalism Institute. The breadth and depth of John’s experience in his 27 years at The Times make him the perfect emissary for our journalism.

John was an early advocate for digital journalism, recognizing the need for us to produce original content online. He served as editor of CyberTimes, which chronicled the rise of the web. John has served as an editor on National, Graphics, Business Day, Real Estate and the News Desk. He was the editor of Escapes and managing editor of both The New York Times Magazine and T magazine.

In recent years, John has spent considerable time in our major international bureaus. He was day news assignment editor for The International Herald Tribune in Paris. When he lived in London, he managed that bureau, as well as the bureaus in Paris and Hong Kong. He then moved to Hong Kong to help manage the transition of putting out the print International Edition from Asia.

In recent months, he’s worked alongside Tom Jolly on the Print Hub.

John grew up in Iowa and is a graduate of the University of Missouri. He’s open, fair minded, creative and endlessly patient. John has a great eye for talent and an instinct for networking — drawing together people and organizations who can help each other.

John will begin his new job in early September.

Mike Tackett becomes a national political correspondent.

Mike Tackett, deputy Washington editor, long thought about coming to The New York Times, but not necessarily as an editor. He did think about covering politics. His first presidential campaign was in 1988, when he was a national correspondent for The Chicago Tribune (and when he first met two Times reporters, Maureen Dowd and Rick Berke). Over the next 24 years Mike covered six more presidential elections as The Tribune’s chief political writer, The Tribune’s Washington Bureau Chief and then Bloomberg’s Washington Bureau Chief.

Mike, a product of Anderson, Ind., and Indiana University, arrived at The Times as deputy political editor in December 2013. While helping to run coverage of the 2014 midterm elections, he also edited the brilliant series of stories by Eric Lipton on state attorneys general that won the Pulitzer Prize. Most recently Mike has been editing our congressional coverage, Ron Nixon’s reporting on homeland security, Linda Qiu’s fact checks and Carl Hulse’s On Washington columns. He’s a generous, at times hilarious and strong presence on a desk (long before we were a strong desk) and has always been a great source of story ideas for reporters in the bureau.

In mid-September, Mike will return to an original ambition and become a national political correspondent for The Times. He’ll be working with a stellar team that already includes Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns.

After a year in the making, The Times has replatformed its legacy iPhone and iPad news apps into a single adaptive app that optimizes the user experience on iOS, streamlines the publishing process on the backend and provides the foundation for evolving the mobile Times experience moving forward.

Written in Swift, Apple’s programming language released in 2014, the new app is lightweight and easily adaptable, which will make Times content easier to publish and consistent across platforms, from the small screen of an iPhone up to a full-size display of an iPad Pro.

Major changes of the replatform include:

• A single, adaptive application that runs on one codebase allowing for feature parity between both apps. The Times’s iPad app can now support 360-video and contextually placed media, which gives Times journalists more control over how assets like images, maps and infographics are placed.

• A more modern visual layout featuring reimagined section fronts inspired by The Times’s collection layouts used on the web reflects the nuanced judgement of Times editors

• Hybrid articles showcase The Times’s powerful imagery, including its award-winning graphics and photography through full-bleed images. Hybrid articles also allow The Times to evolve its article layout without having to release an update to its app, ensuring consistency across all iOS platforms

• Flex Frames, The Times’s propriety horizontal, large format and responsive ad unit which appears in-stream alongside editorial content, is now available on the Top Stories section on both iPad and iPhone (previously, Flex Frames were not available on iPad), which may feature video, 360 video, 360 images, slideshows, static images or custom advertiser-specific formats.

 

Jennifer Steinhauer is taking on a new role as Editor of Live Journalism/D.C.

Jennifer is going to play a key role launching a series of TimesTalks events tied to politics, current events and the Trump administration. The events will feature The Times’ top journalists in conversation with politicians and leaders from across the political spectrum and will take place in front of live audiences. The first event is expected in Washington in September.

Jennifer first started working as what was then called a copy girl at The Times in 1989, when she was a 20-year-old junior at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. Since then she has covered numerous high-profile beats, and has served as City Hall bureau chief and Los Angeles bureau chief. Most recently she has covered Capitol Hill.

She has written what she calls a mildly embarrassing novel about the television business, “Beverly Hills Adjacent,” and two cookbooks, the latest on meatloaf with her friend Frank Bruni. She says her proudest role at the paper is as the self-appointed president of the Washington Bureau Food Club, a post she declines to relinquish.

She will continue writing on culture and politics in Washington. In her new role, Jennifer will work closely with Dorothea Herrey, the head of our NYTLive conferences and events business (which includes TimesTalks), and the entire NYTLive team.

The New York Times today debuted an interactive astronomy and space calendar for 2017 available via Google or iOS offering readers a personal digital guide and schedule to some of the most exciting upcoming space and astronomy events.

The Space Calendar will not only remind readers of newsworthy events on Earth and beyond, but will help them interpret those moments by connecting them to our news report, sharing useful context from our reporting (both past and present), updates about live coverage, and other ways to engage with Times journalism.

Along with the total solar eclipse on August 21, the calendar will highlight several special events per month, including the approaching 40th anniversaries of the Voyager 1 and 2 launches, and the Cassini spacecraft ending its mission by crashing into Saturn on September 15, just to name a few.

The calendar will also remind users of meteor showers, equinoxes, and other cosmic happenings.

Readers can learn more and sign up to access the Calendar here.

Sewell Chan is returning to New York in a deputy position that will bring to International skills that have made the Express Desk operation so successful. Read more in this note from Michael Slackman and Patrick LaForge:

As the International Desk evolves to meet the demands of a digital first newsroom, we need a leader who has demonstrated a commitment to the values and standards of The Times and who can drive our daily digital report. This editor will bring to International all of the skills that have made the Express Desk operation so successful, not just in New York, but around the world: speed, versatility and the digital smarts that help every article reach its maximum audience.

We are pleased to announce that journalist is Sewell Chan, our first International News Editor, a deputy position that will join the missions of Express and International, reflecting the reality of running a 24/7 global news operation.

From London, where he oversees our breaking news operation, Sewell already works closely with Express on a wide range of stories that develop overnight. In his new leadership role in New York, Sewell will not only be charged with developing exciting partnerships with the team but will help International better integrate our three newsrooms – New York, London and Hong Kong – as we build the strong desk model.

Virtually everyone who encounters Sewell comes away with the same assessment: he is a phenomenon. Boundless energy. Meticulous knowledge of global events. Deep passion for Times journalism. He has been a pioneer since his earliest days at The Times, when he worked closely with Patrick LaForge to create the City Room blog on Metro. He later worked as a reporter in Washington and a deputy in Op-Ed before joining International in 2015. He quickly became a pillar of our London Newsroom, making sure that when news broke anywhere in the world, we were on it.

In New York, Sewell will ensure that every aspect of our report is published in a timely fashion, with the right promotion, headlines and social strategies to have the greatest possible impact. He will keep a keen watch on the flow of stories making necessary post-publication adjustments to maximize reach and engagement. He will also be our liaison to the news desk to ensure optimum home page, mobile and social timing and placement.

In short, this position will serve as a digital captain for the global report working closely with our first-rate Day Assignment Editor, Kim Fararo, to maintain a comprehensive eye on what news is being covered and how it can reach its fullest possible audience.

Please join us in congratulating Sewell.

Michael Slackman and Patrick LaForge

Reggie Ugwu will be joining the Culture Department as a pop culture reporter. 

The Culture Department is thrilled to welcome Reggie Ugwu as a pop culture reporter; he will cover a wide range of subjects, including film, television and music.

Reggie is a thoughtful and humane writer with an uncommon eye for stories about where culture is going. He comes to us from BuzzFeed News, where he focused on pop music, and the cultural, economic and technological forces that shape it.

He is known both for memorable profiles of artists in need of a second look like Carly Rae Jepsen, and inventive features about burgeoning trends and modern peculiarities. His reconsideration of early YouTube’s most notorious punching bag, Rebecca Black; his deconstruction of what Selena Gomez and Halsey do with their vowels; and his definitive portrait of the anonymous laborers responsible for 20 percent of all plays on music streaming services captivated serious and casual readers alike. He brings new insights to subjects you thought you knew, and uncovers currents influencing pop culture you never knew existed.

Reggie consistently reimagined the contours of the beat, stretching them to encompass racial purists in the alt-right in search of their own musical genre, and country singers whose political stoicism has been tested by Donald Trump. A profile of the creative director of Adidas revealed how the legacy brand rehabilitated itself in the athleisure era. And a personal essay about the house his family built in Enugu, Nigeria, will be anthologized in “The Best American Travel Writing 2017.”

Reggie is a proud Houstonian and Longhorn with a degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. Before he joined BuzzFeed in 2014, he was a staff writer for Billboard magazine, and began his career as a Time Inc. editorial intern and researcher for “Frontline.”

Reggie begins at The New York Times after Labor Day.

Ana Swanson joins The Times as a trade reporter in the Washington Bureau.

Ana Swanson comes to The New York Times from The Washington Post, where she covers trade, the Federal Reserve and the economy.

A native of Story City, Iowa, Ana graduated from Northwestern in 2004 with a degree in cultural anthropology. She spent eight years in China learning Mandarin and writing about business and economics, was editor-in-chief of China Economic Review magazine from 2011 to 2013, then moved to Washington to earn a master’s degree at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She has freelanced for numerous publications, including Foreign Policy, Forbes, CNN and The Atlantic, and is a regular contributor to American Public Media’s “Marketplace.”

She helps run the International China Journalists Association, says she’s always on the hunt for good Chinese food in Washington and is an amateur soccer player and avid traveler. She starts on September 11.

Tariq Panja will be a Global Sports Reporter for The New York Times; he starts August 29th and will be based in London, his hometown.

Our formidable sports-business reporting team just went international in a spectacular way. Say hello to Tariq Panja, a supreme authority on global sports — most notably FIFA and the IOC, a couple of outfits that find themselves in the news from time to time.

Tariq, who comes to us from Bloomberg, has dropped more scoops on our head than we care to think about. (Andy Das, who knows his way around this scene better than most, has been saying for years that we need to bring Tariq to The Times or else he’ll continue eating our lunch.)

He worked in Paris for Eurosport, and in London and Pakistan for The A.P. before joining Bloomberg, which assigned him to Rio for several years for the World Cup and the Olympics. He’s a regular in the lobbies of hotels that have hosted FIFA executives … “including the Baur au Lac in Zurich,” Tariq said, “where Chuck Blazer, sitting next to a Christmas tree on the eve of the infamous 2018/2022 World Cup vote, suggested FIFA would be in crisis should Qatar and Russia emerge victorious. He had the air of Santa Claus that evening, and his words proved prophetic.”

The people who run sports at the highest levels know how dogged Tariq can be. Some are downright afraid of his tenacious reporting. I asked him about his favorite anecdote from the sprawling FIFA scandal. He mentioned Jeffrey Webb, the former president of Concacaf. “Months after he was arrested I found out that Webb had hired a private detective to tail me and a colleague, to the point of trying to enter our hotel rooms, at the 2015 Concacaf congress in the Bahamas. Webb would be arrested a month later.”

Margaret Coker is joining as Baghdad bureau chief from The Wall Street Journal, and Jina Moore is leaving BuzzFeed News to be bureau chief in Nairobi. Read more in this note from Michael Slackman and Greg Winter. 

Baghdad

There is a reason The New York Times has remained committed to covering Iraq while many other news organizations have closed their bureaus: The American invasion in 2003 eroded public trust in government, destabilized the Middle East, internationalized the jihadi footprint, weakened American influence abroad and took the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis – along with 4,424 Americans.

That commitment is one of the reasons Margaret Coker wanted to join The Times as our Baghdad bureau chief. Margaret, who goes by Meg, comes to us from the The Wall Street Journal, where she recently served as Turkey bureau chief and contributed to a 2016 series that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The plan is for her and her journalist husband, Craig Nelson, to set up base in the United Arab Emirates, starting in September.

Meg covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for Cox newspapers, and in 2008 joined the Journal team in the Middle East. She has roamed widely and demonstrated a commanding knowledge of the region with in-depth reporting on counter-terrorism, cyber-warfare and corruption. She once revealed secret communications between Al Qaeda and the aggressive upstart that became ISIS, and, after the attack on the American compound in Benghazi, was the first to report how CIA contractors were running covert operations without Libyan approval.

Meg’s alma mater, Lewis & Clark, gave her a distinguished alumna award in 2013. In the video honoring her achievement, a former roommate, Elizabeth, discussed Meg’s “incredible work ethic and discipline,’’ and went on to detail just how she pulled it off.  “She would literally sit quietly at her desk, drink a whole pot of  coffee and stay up to 2 o’clock in the morning learning how to speak Russian and whatever she was learning,” the roommate recalled. “She did that just about every night for the entire year.”

She should fit right in.

Nairobi

 (Walter Mendez/BuzzFeed)

The Nairobi bureau has long been a cornerstone of the international report, gateway to a region that includes some of the world’s fastest growing economies and its worst humanitarian disasters. East Africa  has vibrant democracies and repressive, authoritarian states. It is a magnet for business and tourism and  a major battleground in the struggle against terrorism. All of the globe’s major issues converge in the region, and it has, historically, been a platform for some of our most important journalism.

The best way to introduce our new East Africa bureau chief is her own explanation of what drives her.

“I’m trying to combine journalism’s two missions: Holding the powerful to account, and telling stories about the people around us.” Jina Moore wrote on her personal website. “Actually, I try to hold the powerful to account by telling stories about the people around us. I think that if you’re only doing one mission at a time, you’re missing out.”

Jina, who grew up in West Virginia, joins The Times from BuzzFeed News, where she told  compelling stories from Africa before becoming the site’s global women’s rights reporter and senior foreign correspondent. Before that, she spent the better part of a decade as an Africa correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and as a magazine writer and broadcast producer. She was also a senior nonfiction editor at Guernica Magazine.

Jina reported on the Ebola outbreak from Liberia, on the failures of United Nations investigations into rape allegations in South Sudan, and on the twists and turns of justice in Rwanda. She’s worked in the rebel-held territories in the Central African Republic, the piracy dens of Somalia and the highest peak of Kilimanjaro, where she followed women farmers on their crusade for equal land rights. Lately, she’s focused on the refugee crisis in Europe.

Her work has been recognized with a Fulbright Fellowship and the Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Gold Medal from the United Nations Correspondents Association. She’s collaborated often with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the International Reporting Project, and she’s been an advisor to the International Women’s Media Foundation on its Africa projects and on best practices for reporting on violence and trauma.

She says her favorite place in the world is on the back of a motorcycle, on any muddy path in rural Africa, surrounded by trees — especially if there’s a view of Lake Kivu.

- Michael and Greg

The New York Times today announced that its popular NYT VR app is now available in the Oculus Store for Samsung Gear VR, powered by Oculus; it will offer users a streamlined immersive experience with high-quality video and audio. Most users will also be able to watch the films in 4K resolution.

In addition to the full library of NYT VR films, the app will also showcase select films from The Daily 360, immersive videos from Times journalists around the world created with Samsung Gear 360 cameras.

The NYT VR app for Gear VR was built in collaboration with Secret Location, a virtual reality and technology studio for emerging platforms, VR sound partner Mach1™ and MPC.

“We’re very excited to bring our NYT VR app to Gear VR,” said Jordan Vita, associate product manager, The New York Times. “The platform offers a significant opportunity to expose new audiences to our virtual reality journalism and empowers us for future innovation in the medium.”

Since its debut in November 2015, the NYT VR app has been downloaded more than 1.2 million times and is also available on Google Play for Android and Daydream and in the iOS App store for iPhone. The Times plans to launch several feature films in 2017 — all that will be available for Gear VR.

 

Choire Sicha will be the new editor of Styles. Read more in this note from Dean Baquet and Joe Kahn:

We are pleased to announce that Choire Sicha, one of the finest features editors of his generation, will be the new editor of Styles.

Several months ago, a team of Times editors began the search for a successor to Stuart Emmrich, who built the modern Styles report. We interviewed dozens of editors inside and outside of the building, and reviewed memos from a broad list of candidates, all of whom said they would do anything to get one of the most important features jobs in American journalism.

Choire was chosen based on his vision for adding urgency, different forms of storytelling, and an additional bit of edge to the Styles report. We know the selection of Choire leaked out last week, which we regret. But if you review the social media traffic you could see the praise for Choire. He is an editor known for nurturing the voices of writers. As Mark Armstrong wrote on Longreads last week, “Choire makes people feel good about themselves and their work, and this of course is what makes an editor truly great.”

Choire was most recently the head of partnerships at Vox Media. Before that he was editor of Gawker, and later a co-founder of The Awl. He also worked at The New York Observer. And over a decade ago he was a young writer on the Arts and Leisure section.

The Styles report is key to the life of The Times. It allows for more risk taking in writing, and is a platform for exploring issues and personalities in a way that should push our boundaries. It is also one of the most important journals of fashion and style. And it should be fun.

Choire will start after Labor Day.

– Dean and Joe

The New York Times today debuted “The New Washington,” a new limited-run politics podcast that takes you inside Trump’s Washington.

Each episode of “The New Washington,” which airs once a week and will run through the fall, features interviews with politicians and Washington insiders, along with insight, analysis and perspective from some of The Times’s most intrepid reporters. Chief Washington correspondent Carl Hulse, along with other reporters in the Washington bureau, will help listeners make sense of the figures remaking Washington.

In the introductory episode, Michael Barbaro talks with Carl Hulse about the most interesting and important characters in Washington today and what he’s learned from his decades covering these figures — and sharing a home, and in one case a barber, with them.

Carl also describes what he sees as the benefit of the podcast interview as a way to get lawmakers to open up. “If you give them a chance to talk and they know that a lot of their words are going to be used, they can be forthcoming,” he says. “It’s different if I’m going to scribble down a few notes and take some quotes and put it in the paper, and I get to select those quotes, and I get to select what comes before that quote and what comes after that quote.” But the podcast form tips the balance. “They are willing to expound, but you have to give them a little room.”

New episodes will be released weekly. Listeners can subscribe via Apple Podcasts or the podcast app of their choice.

Carl Hulse is The Times’s chief Washington correspondent. Previously, he had been The Times’s Washington editor. Hulse has worked for The Times for nearly three decades. His first Times-related job was Washington correspondent for the regional papers, starting in 1986. He joined The Times as night editor in 2001 and began covering Congress in 2002.

 

Please see below a note to staff from executive editor Dean Baquet on Michiko Kakutani’s retirement: 

“To the Staff,

As many of you now know, Michiko Kakutani has decided to retire after 38 years at The Times — much of it as chief book critic for an institution that cares about books the way it cares about wars and politics.

She has read — or read between the lines of — hundreds of books with rigor and tenderness, and extraordinarily high standards.

Reviewing a book is harder than it looks. It is not enough to read a writer’s latest novel or a single epic biography of a world leader and offer an opinion. To prepare for just one review, Michi and her colleagues read previous work looking for recurring characters and themes, and to figure out whether a book stands up to its predecessors. They carry entire libraries in their heads.

No one has played a larger role in guiding readers through the country’s literary life over the past four decades than Michi. And no one, I would venture, knows more about the literature and writing that flowed out of Sept. 11. That knowledge has enabled her to go toe-to-toe with a president — a well-read president, yes, but no one could be as well-read as Michi.

I will miss her coming to my office bearing galleys. It should not be a surprise that her final review was a gift for a debut writer — check it out. It is classic Michi — wise, startling, beautifully written and generous. She has been one of our signature writers. It is hard to imagine the story of the modern New York Times without a hefty chapter bearing her name.

-Dean”

After 38 years at The Times, Michiko Kakutani has decided to step down as chief book critic. Read more in this note from Pamela Paul and Radhika Jones:

“The changing of the guard among critics at The New York Times is always a momentous occasion, but in the world of letters, it is hard to imagine a more seismic change than this one: After 38 years at The Times, Michiko Kakutani has decided to step down as chief book critic. It is with profound gratitude for her tremendous service to readers of The Times and readers of books everywhere that we take a moment to recognize her remarkable contributions over the past four decades.

Michiko Kakutani began her career at The New York Times in 1979 as a reporter covering cultural news, writing on subjects ranging from Ingmar Bergman to Katharine Hepburn to the Broadway debate over the building of the Portman Hotel. In January 1983, she became a book critic for The Times, and that year she reviewed works by V.S. Naipaul, Richard Yates, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, William Trevor and Renata Adler, as well as biographies of Churchill, Disraeli and Vita Sackville-West. She went on to cover the major fiction and nonfiction of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, books by established writers and new voices alike: Thomas Pynchon, William S. Burroughs, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Toni Morrison, Robert Caro, J.M. Coetzee, Susan Sontag, David Foster Wallace, Alice Munro, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, David McCullough, Joan Didion, J.K. Rowling. She weighed in on White House memoirs, often under tight deadlines — from “The Haldeman Diaries” to Bill Clinton’s “My Life” — and shared her passion for the Rolling Stones in a review of Keith Richard’s autobiography. In essays she addressed the intersection of culture and the news, writing about James Frey and the blurring of fact and fiction, the cultural impact of 9/11, the literature of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the influence of technology and social media on the ways we read and think. In 1998, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize “for her passionate, intelligent writing on books and contemporary literature.” Among the reviews cited by the Pulitzer committee were pieces on John Updike, J.D. Salinger, Henry Louis Gates and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In the past year alone, she wrote three pieces that drove the cultural conversation for weeks: a review of Volker Ullrich’s biography of Hitler, an interview with President Obama in his final days in office about his life as a reader and a re-evaluation of George Orwell’s “1984.” Her tenure at The Times has been among the most storied and influential in our history, and we are deeply grateful for the course she has charted, book by book, week by week, through the vast frontier of contemporary literature.

Daily coverage of books and literary culture remains core to the mission of The New York Times, and we are delighted to announce that Parul Sehgal will join our unmatched team of book critics.

Parul, a senior editor and columnist at The New York Times Book Review, came to The Times in 2012. Her writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Bookforum, The New Yorker and Slate, among other publications. In 2010 she was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle, and her TED talk on literature and envy has been viewed more than two million times. Her nonfiction interests range from science and technology to philosophy and religion, and her column, “Roving Eye,” is focused on international literature. Her recent work includes a profile of Mary Gaitskill for The New York Times Magazine, reviews of Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen” and Arundhati Roy’s “Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” and columns and essays on Leonora Carrington, Daphne du Maurier and Muriel Spark.

Parul grew up in Virginia, New Delhi, Manila, Montreal and Budapest. She studied at McGill University and received an MFA from Columbia University, where she has taught writing workshops and a master class on criticism. In an interview with Poets and Writers earlier this year, she described her early life as a reader: “My mother had a marvelous, idiosyncratic library — lots of André Gide, Jean Genet, and Oscar Wilde, lots of philosophy, and lots of Jackie Collins. But she was terribly strict, and the library was off-limits to us. Naturally my sister and I became the most frantic little book thieves; I must have spent the first decade of my life with a novel — and usually something massively inappropriate like Judy Blume’s ‘Wifey’ or Gore Vidal’s ‘Myra Breckinridge’ — stuffed in the waistband of my pants.” Of criticism, she says simply, “I just got addicted to the form, its constraints and possibilities.”

We are thrilled to welcome Parul as a new voice on fiction and nonfiction in our daily report, joining our superb team of critics — Dwight Garner and Jennifer Senior, with regular contributions from Janet Maslin — as the Books desk at The Times ​expands its coverage, reaching out to new audiences while continuing to provide the high standard of authoritative literary criticism our readers have depended on for decades.

Pamela Paul
Editor, New York Times Book Review

Radhika Jones
Editorial Director, Books”

The National Academy of Television Arts & Science announced that The New York Times has been nominated for eight News and Documentary Emmy® Awards, including multiple honors for Times Documentaries, Op-Docs and NYT VR.

The Times received twice as many nominations as the next closest traditional competitor, with only broadcast outlets receiving more.

The News & Documentary Emmy Awards will be presented on Thursday, October 5th, 2017, at a ceremony at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall in the Time Warner Complex at Columbus Circle in New York City.

Read more in this note sent to staff by Nancy Gauss, The Times’s executive director for video:

We’re proud to report that The New York Times has been nominated for eight News & Documentary Emmy awards, including three Op-Docs, two virtual reality films and a video collaboration with POV. The Times received more nominations than any other digital publisher and many traditional broadcasters — a terrific recognition of the formidable breadth of our visual reporting across all subjects.

Our nominations include videos like “The Forger,” as well as interactives like “A Bullet Could Hit Me and My Kids Anytime” and “Carbon’s Casualties,” and an Op-Docs video game, “The Voter Suppression Trail.” In its second year of existence, our virtual reality team received nominations for two films. The nomination for the Op-Doc “4.1 Miles” follows its nomination for an Academy Award. And we were nominated for “Who, Me? Biased?” as part of a partnership with POV.

Frontline also received a nomination for “The Fantasy Sports Gamble,” a joint investigation with The Times’s staff — including Walt Bogdanich, Jim Glanz, Jacqueline Williams, Augustin Armendariz, Ian Fisher, Paul Fishleder and Sarah Cohen — into fantasy sports and online gambling. Unofficially, that makes nine nominations for The Times.

The number of nominations is a reminder that our visual journalism — all of it — plays an important role as we fulfill our mission on behalf of subscribers. We are investing in original reporting and analysis, experimenting with innovative formats and using industry-leading techniques like open source reporting. And while our digital competitors launch experiments with 360 video, we’ve now published more than 250 videos out of The Daily 360 since November of last year, setting a standard for what a daily, immersive news operation can deliver.

As the quality of our video journalism grows, our audience is spending more and more time with our videos when they have the chance to watch them. A majority of our viewers now watch past the halfway point in our videos, a promising benchmark for on-site engagement.

We’re also reaching a broad audience on social platforms dominated by video: On Facebook, our monthly views are 10 times what they were just 18 months ago; on YouTube, our audience is now watching 25 million minutes of Times video every month, and we’re fast approaching our millionth YouTube channel subscriber.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the rich collaboration across the newsroom. Congratulations to everyone involved.

This year’s nominations include:

Outstanding Short Documentary:

4.1 Miles

Outstanding New Approaches: Current News

‘A Bullet Could Hit Me and My Kids Anytime’

Carbon’s Casualties

The Fight for Falluja

Outstanding New Approaches: Arts, Lifestyle and Culture 

The Forger

The Voter Suppression Trail

The Click Effect (with Annapurna Pictures)

Who, Me? Biased? (with POV)

Outstanding Business and Economic Documentary

The Fantasy Sports Gamble (Frontline)

For the full list of nominations, click here.

- Nancy Gauss

David Halbfinger, a 20-year veteran of The Times, will be The Times’s next Jerusalem Bureau Chief. Read more in this note from Michael Slackman and Greg Winter:

There is a lot of change in the newsroom right now, and that can be unsettling. But as Dean and Joe have said, this is also an opportunity to find new talent to take on some of the biggest, most important jobs at The Times.

Or in this case, a familiar talent: Our next Jerusalem Bureau Chief is David Halbfinger, a 20-year veteran of The Times.

David, our Deputy National Editor, has had quite a run at the Times: he was a copyboy; a reporter in Metro, National and Culture; and an editor in metro and politics before national. He has written hard-hitting investigations of corrupt public officials and businessmen, murderous prison guards, law-breaking Hollywood moguls, roamed his native Long Island, the Bronx, and eight states in the South, left a big mark in New Jersey, covered John Kerry’s presidential run and helped lead the politics team in New York.

Politics, violence, religion, culture, passion, relentless digging and compelling prose: all good preparation for one of the scrutinized (and most prestigious) jobs in journalism.

Our assistant masthead editor and chief talent scout, Carolyn Ryan, who had David by her side during the campaign last year, said he “is a gifted editor, a treasured colleague and a journalist with a remarkable sense of story and a sophisticated political mind.”

David and his family will be moving in August, and he will begin work after Labor Day. And after 28 years at The Times, Ian Fisher, our current bureau chief, and a dear friend, colleague and newsroom leader to many, decided he was ready for a change. He is planning to spend the next year with his family in Italy. We will miss Ian and wish him the very best.

One other word on David — when he was named Deputy National Editor, Marc said that David was “great with copy, full of ideas,’’ and, perhaps most importantly, “a nice guy.”

Please congratulate him.

— Michael and Greg

The New York Times debuted “‘Your ‘Game of Thrones Guide,’” a weekly pop-up newsletter to the seventh season of the popular HBO show “Game of Thrones.”

Written and curated by TV editor Gilbert Cruz and “GoT” experts Jeremy Egner and Jennifer Vineyard, the newsletter will be sent to readers every Tuesday morning and will include exclusive episode explainers, interviews and compilations of the best articles from across the web about the latest “GoT” episodes.

Presented by Watching — The Times’s website focused on helping users find the best movies and shows to watch and read about — the latest edition of the newsletter can be found here.

Readers can sign up for The Times’s “Game of Thrones Guide” newsletter here. Check out all the other newsletters The Times has to offer at nytimes.com/newsletters.

 

Oprah Winfrey Joins Hosts Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond for First New Episode

The New York Times is thrilled to announce that it is bringing “Dear Sugar Radio,” the advice podcast from WBUR, hosted by best-selling authors Cheryl Strayed (“Wild” and “Tiny Beautiful Things”) and Steve Almond (“Against Football”), to a new audience of Times listeners with a refreshed name — “Dear Sugars” — and identity. This collaboration between The Times and WBUR follows the tremendous success of their producing partnership on “Modern Love: The Podcast.”

Known for offering “radical empathy,” “Dear Sugars” brings advice to the heartsick with answers to listeners’ most pressing and painful relationship dilemmas. The new season debuts Saturday, July 15, with new episodes coming out every Saturday of the season. On the first episode, listeners will hear from Oprah Winfrey, who responds to a letter-writer struggling with saying “no” to demanding family members.

“Dear Sugar” began as an advice column on the online literary community The Rumpus, written first by Almond under the pseudonym and imagined identity of “Sugar.” When he received a fan letter from Strayed, an acquaintance who didn’t realize that he was the one behind the column, he had a revelation: the voice he was channeling as Sugar was actually hers. He asked Strayed to take over the column, and she agreed. In December 2014, WBUR united the “Sugars,” Strayed and Almond, for the first time to develop “Dear Sugar Radio” as a podcast where it quickly established a large, loyal audience.

Before joining The Times as executive producer for audio, Lisa Tobin was managing producer of program development at WBUR, where she helped develop and launch “Dear Sugar Radio” in 2014. “Cheryl and Steve are not typical advice columnists. They are beloved literary figures with incredible intelligence and life experience,” said Tobin. “As The Times continues to expand its role in people’s lives — to be vital not just as a source of news and information but in all aspects of life — they are the perfect addition to The Times family.”

New episodes of “Dear Sugars” will be released every Saturday, available on Apple Podcasts or the podcast app of your choice.

The Times will also introduce a new column inspired by “Dear Sugars” that will run in Thursday Styles. The weekly column, “The Sweet Spot,” will feature advice from both Strayed and Almond in response to letters from readers and listeners. The first column runs in print on Thursday, July 27.

In January 2016, The Times first collaborated with WBUR to launch “Modern Love: The Podcast,” which debuted at the top of the Apple Podcasts chart. Along with “Modern Love,” “Dear Sugars” joins a growing slate of New York Times podcasts, including “The Daily,” “Still Processing,” “Popcast,” and “The Book Review.”

The Books desk is delighted to announce several new additions to its staff. Please read more in this note from Pamela Paul and Radhika Jones:

Photo by Olivia Adechi

Lovia Gyarkye will be joining this month as a fact checker for book reviews and features. Lovia is a former reporter-researcher at The New Republic magazine, where she fact-checked and regularly wrote for the website. She reviewed everything from the new James Baldwin film to books about the rise of mega foundations. Lovia graduated from Princeton University, where she received her B.A. in English with concentrations in African and African-American studies. At Princeton, she wrote for the Nassau Weekly, worked as a Writing Center Fellow for two years and was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. Her research interests (and topic of her thesis) explore the presence of the black female cosmopolitan in 20th century and contemporary American literature. Born in Ghana and raised in the Bronx, she is interested in writing about the literary and cultural landscape of the countries she calls her past and present homes.

Lauren Christensen will be joining this month as a senior staff editor editing fiction and nonfiction and overseeing visual books coverage. Formerly the associate features editor at Harper’s Bazaar and an assistant editor at Vanity Fair, Lauren has written for The New York Times Book Review and The Los Angeles Times. Her work has encompassed everything from celebrity cover profiles to interviews with David Sedaris and Tracey Emin; the late Christopher Hitchens’s tribute to Joan Didion to an oral history of Cuba’s Tropicana nightclub. She received her master’s in Victorian literature at Oxford and her bachelor’s in English from Princeton University, where she earned the prize in American literature for her senior thesis on Henry James’s psychological realism in “Portrait of a Lady.”

Susan Ellingwood will be joining in August as a senior staff editor from Opinion. Susan will be working on news and features, nonfiction book reviews, global books coverage and a range of entrepreneurial efforts on the desk. Susan joined The Times in 2004 as a staff editor on the Op-Ed page, where she helped launch Campaign Stops and The Conversation with Gail Collins, and more recently created On Campus. She was one of the founding editors of Room for Debate, and based on the success of that series, she recently took over a new Opinion Day Desk to commission daily arguments about big ideas and developments that are under debate on the web — or should be.

Before The Times, she was an international news and features editor at The Wall Street Journal, an assistant managing editor at The New Republic, a news assistant at The New Yorker and an officer in the United States Army.

But the job that may have best prepared her for the Book Review was one she had back in high school, when she was a deputy loon ranger in Salmon Meadow Cove on New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee (she had hoped to land the head ranger post, but that went to, um, her father). The job involved sitting in a boat all day, reading books while keeping watch over loon nesting sites. Arguably it was training for any newsroom position.

She holds a B.A. in international and Russian studies from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., and did her graduate work in Russian literature at Oxford University. She is the editor of “What We Saw,” a CBS News book on 9/11; the co-editor of “America at War,” a CBS News book about Iraq; and an associate producer of “Last Letters Home,” a Times/HBO documentary about letters written by fallen soldiers in Iraq.

We couldn’t be more thrilled to have all three of these terrific journalists on our desk as we move forward with our vision for centralizing and expanding books coverage at The Times. Please join us in welcoming them to the Books team.

— Pamela and Radhika

Matthew Anderson of the BBC is joining The Times as European Culture Editor, based in London. Read more in the below note sent to staff by Danielle Mattoon and Jim Yardley:

We are delighted to announce that Matthew Anderson will joining us as the European Culture Editor, based in London.

Matt joins us from the BBC, where he has worked as a reporter and producer for digital stories, radio and television. He edited the BBC.com homepage from 2010 to 2013, then became the inaugural editor of BBC Culture, an arts and entertainment site aimed at digital users outside the U.K.

Under Matt’s guidance, BBC Culture has grown to reach an international audience of 4.3 million monthly users, with a devoted and engaged social media following. Last month, the site won a Webby Award for Best Cultural Website.

Matt grew up in Adelaide, Australia, but has lived in Europe for many years. He is a fluent German speaker and has recently been dividing his time between London and Berlin.

Please join us in welcoming him.

— Danielle Mattoon and Jim Yardley

 

 

In the latest virtual-reality film in The New York Times Magazine’s Voyages series, learn how Ethiopia’s Afar people are adapting to tectonic shifts in their way of life. “The Land of Salt and Fire” transports viewers to the hottest place on Earth, where camel caravans move salt across the vast plains, and active geothermal zones turn into a landscape of psychedelic colors.

Watch here or download the NYT VR app for a fully immersive experience.

The film was produced by Andrea Frazzetta, Kassie Bracken and Jenna Pirog.

On Wednesday, July 5, The Times held an exclusive panel discussion in London to examine the intersection of innovation and programmatic advertising, and specifically how publishers and brands can work together to create innovative ideas and transact them programmatically through technology.

The conversation was led by The Times’s director of programmatic advertising Sara Badler and Beamly’s chief operating officer Anthony Rhind. The two panelists explored the importance of transparency on tech platforms and partnerships for clients, and how to best align with premium content like that found in The Times. Badler also emphasized the crucial partnership between advertisers and publishers.

The event was attended by nearly 100 representatives from agencies and brands from across a variety of industries including retail, e-commerce, travel, and luxury.

 

The New York Times has published its first ever video Op-Ed, “Bombs Will Not Defeat ISIS (but Maybe the Internet Will).” In the film, Abdalaziz Alhamza, a Syrian activist and journalist, risks his life to expose the horror of life under ISIS. Mr. Alhamza calls on foreign governments and leaders in Silicon Valley to do more in the information war against ISIS, saying, “If we don’t win this battle for hearts and minds, I fear someone else’s homeland will be the next to fall.”

The film is produced by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Matthew Heineman and executive produced by The Times’s Adam B. Ellick, who is leading The Times’s new team creating Opinion Video.

In this New York Times special feature “What Happens Just Before Show Time at the Met Opera, in 12 Rooms You’ll Never See,” The Times’s culture desk takes a look behind-the-scenes at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, where the prestigious Met Opera has resided for the last 50 years.

The piece includes a continuously shot video walkthrough by steadicam of the Met Opera House documenting the hours leading up to a performance of “Whipped Cream,” a new ballet by Alexei Ratmansky. Below the video, the piece positions a handy index listing various points of interest along the way, including footage of ballerinas like Misty Copeland and the Met Orchestra rehearsing, to a peak into the process behind the show’s extravagant set, costumes and wigs.

The New York Times’s graphics department and The Upshot have won the Gerald Loeb Award in Images, Graphics, Interactives as presented on Tuesday by the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. The Times has won the Loeb Award in this category for the five years it has been presented.

The entry included some of our most collaborative projects from 2016 and featured work from several journalists’ expertise – in words, charts, video and photographs – in a form that put readers first.

In its 60th year, the prestigious Loeb Award honors business and financial journalism in the United States. Times journalists were also finalists in two other categories. In the International category, Ana Graciela Méndez, Jacqueline Williams, Walt Bogdanich, Jeremy White, and Larry Buchanan were finalists for “The New Panama Canal: A Risky Bet.” And in the Personal Finance category, Tara Siegel Bernard and Ron Lieber were finalists for their “Public Sacrifice” series.

These five projects were nominated as one entry for the winning submission:

The Array of Conflicts of Interest Facing the Trump Presidency

By Larry Buchanan and Karen Yourish

The New Panama Canal: A Risky Bet

By Walt Bogdanich, Jacqueline Williams, Ana Graciela Méndez; Produced by Larry Buchanan, Aaron Byrd, Hannah Fairfield, Matt Ruby, Jeremy White and John Woo

Money, Race and Success: How Your School District Compares

By Motoko Rich, Amanda Cox and Matthew Bloch

40 Percent of the Buildings in Manhattan Could Not Be Built Today

By Quoctrung Bui, Matt A.V. Chaban and Jeremy White

Hungry Venezuelans Flee in Boats to Escape Economic Collapse

By Nicholas Casey; Photographs by Meridith Kohut

Taffy Brodesser-Akner will join The Times as a features writer for Culture and a staff writer for The Times Magazine. Danielle Mattoon and Jake Silverstein introduce her.

We are delighted to announce that Taffy Brodesser-Akner will be joining us as a features writer for Culture and a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.

Taffy is a prolific writer with tremendous range who can capture and unfurl all types of pop personalities. Who else could tell you everything you need to know about Don Lemon through the pronunciation of a common dessert? Or get Nicki Minaj to unpack the meaning of “Anaconda” while sleeping? Or explain how Andy Cohen’s particular understanding of human nature — earned through producing hundreds of hours of “Real Housewives” — allowed him to predict the results of last year’s election?

Taffy has been writing for The New York Times Magazine since 2012, and has been a contributing writer since 2014. Her most recent article, in the April 2 issue, was about Footsteps, an organization that helps people leave ultra-Orthodox Judaism. At The Times, she won the New York Press Club award for her profiles of Gaby Hoffmann and Damon Lindelof; at GQ, she won the same award for her profile of Don Lemon, which also garnered a Newhouse Mirror award. Elsewhere, she won awards from the New York Press Club and the Newswomen’s Club of New York for her profile of Bill May, the lone United States male synchronized swimmer on his quest for Olympic gold.

Please join us in welcoming her. She will start in the fall.

— Danielle and Jake

Jake

The New York Times today announced digital subscriptions for NYT Cooking, its popular recipe site and app that helps home cooks discover and save the world’s best recipes and serves as a guide in the kitchen. The subscription is available today at NYTCooking.com/subscribe.

For $5 every four weeks, Cooking subscribers will have unlimited access to more than 18,000 tested and curated recipes from Times journalists past and present, including Melissa Clark, Julia Moskin, Tejal Rao, Sam Sifton, Mark Bittman, Craig Claiborne, Molly O’Neill, Ruth Reichl and many others. The subscription also includes all of the Recipe Box tools, which allow users to save recipes from anywhere on the web (in addition to Cooking recipes), as well as rate recipes and leave notes to help fellow cooks.

Read more in today’s press release.

 

The Times has unveiled a complete redesign The New York Times Store, its online marketplace, in order to serve Times enthusiasts who seek Times-branded and inspired merchandise, books, photographs and other items that symbolize the power of The Times brand and its commitment to original, independent journalism.

The site features items for all types of New York Times fans and includes personalized products curated for and recommended to each individual shopper, in addition to bestselling items like classic photography; framed reprints of more than 57,500 historical Times front pages; and sports books and memorabilia consisting of archived New York Times coverage.

The store redesign is part of a renewed focus on The Times brand, and leverages the power of The Times’s world-class journalism to further engage its devoted readership at every touchpoint of their lives. The new design runs on Shopify Plus, the ecommerce platform, and provides a high-speed, consumer-focused experience focused on the uniqueness of The Times, and what The Times means to its hundreds of millions of readers all over the world.

The store now features a refreshed visual identity and logo that reflect the styling of NYTimes.com, as well as a responsive design built for optimal shopping across all platforms.

Some of the bestselling items from the NYTStore include:

Commemorative History Books: A wide array of books–from sports to science to history, all packed with historical pages from The New York Times archives.

Framed Front Page Puzzle: A unique, 500-piece jigsaw puzzle comprised of the front page of a date of your choice.

‘36 Hours’ Travel Guides: Based on The Times’s popular “36 Hours” travel column, each book provides a one-stop resource for travelers who have just  36 hours to get to know a city.

Front Page Reprints: Framed and unframed reprints are available of more than 57,500 historical front pages published since 1851.

New York Times Apparel: A wide assortment of branded apparel including shirts, towels, tote bags, water bottles, umbrellas and others, designed for fans who want to show their love of The Times in their daily lives.

To mark the relaunch of the store, first-time shoppers will receive a 10% discount on any orders of $50.00 or more.

The New York Times today debuted a new “Smarter Living” newsletter, offering readers a weekly roundup of the best advice on living a better, smarter, more fulfilling life, highlighting stories from The Times and across the internet.

Brought to readers by Smarter Living editor Tim Herrera, the newsletter will be sent out every Monday and feature a mix of archival and fresh content aimed to help  readers make daily decisions, solve problems, and enrich their lives.

“The New York Times is not only dedicated to helping our readers understand the world, but also to helping them live better lives,” said Herrera. “Smarter Living lets us deepen our relationship with readers and offer practical, actionable advice they can apply to their everyday lives. We’re incredibly excited to build upon that relationship by bringing the best of Smarter Living to their inboxes every week.”

Readers can sign up for the Smarter Living newsletter here and explore all the other newsletters The Times has to offer.

The Times has won the National Edward R. Murrow award for overall excellence by a digital news organization, which recognizes outstanding journalism by radio, television and online news organizations.

The overall excellence award, which requires an organization to “exemplify the highest standards in serving its audience through quality electronic journalism,” recognized the Times’s work in breaking news and enterprise video, interactives, VR films and the launch of The Daily 360.

The winners will be recognized at the RTDNA Edward R. Murrow Awards Gala at Gotham Hall in New York City in October.

The New York Times announced today that Kathleen Kingsbury has been named deputy editorial page editor of The New York Times.  Currently, Ms. Kingsbury is managing editor for digital at The Boston Globe. She will join The Times in August.

Read more about the announcement in today’s press release.

Terrance Hayes has been named The New York Times Magazine’s new poetry editor. Read more in this below note sent to staff from magazine editor Jake Silverstein.

I’m could not be more excited to announce that the next poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine will be Terrance Hayes. Terrance will be our third poetry editor, following the wonderful Matthew Zapruder, whose last poem will appear in the June 25 issue, and the wonderful Natasha Trethewey, who was our inaugural poetry editor. In this role, Terrance will be selecting the poems that appear every week in the magazine, and briefly introducing them.

Terrance is a major voice in American poetry, and we’re lucky to have him in this role. He may be familiar to many of you, since we profiled him several years ago, around the time of the publication of his most recent collection of poems, How To Be Drawn, which was a finalist for a National Book Award. That’s just one of the many commendations he’s received for his work. His previous collection, Lighthead, won the National Book Award in 2010, and he’s also been awarded with a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim, and a Whiting Award, just to name a few.

Terrance is currently teaching poetry at NYU, so you might see him around the office from time to time.

Please join me in welcoming Terrance aboard, and in thanking Matthew for his excellent work during the past year.

Onward,
Jake

The New York Times won five awards for editorial excellence and three honorable mentions from the Society of Publishers in Asia on Thursday night, more than any other news organization. The recognized work spanned China, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, the Philippines and Australia, and for the second year in a row, our Chinese-language site was honored for original work published only in Chinese.

The annual SOPA Awards, the most prestigious recognition of fine journalism in Asia, are administered by the Journalism & Media Studies Centre at The University of Hong Kong. The Times competes in a division that includes The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg and other international news media.

Here are the winners:

Excellence in Business Reporting

China Rules, a three–part series

David Barboza and Brooks Barnes

Excellence in Lifestyle Coverage

Culture Wars and Cultural Differences: Chinese Students in America’s Classrooms 文化战争与文化差异：美国课堂上的华人同学

Jessica May Lin, Cao Li, Dong Yifu, Irene Han and Afra Wang; edited by Jonathan Ansfield

Excellence in Opinion Writing

Australia’s Offshore Cruelty

Roger Cohen

Excellence in Photography

‘They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals’

Text and photos by Daniel Berehulak; produced by Craig Allen, Rodrigo de Benito Sanz, David Furst, Jeffrey Marcus, Sergio Pecanha and Jodi Rudoren

Excellence in Reporting Breaking News

Terror in a Dhaka Bakery

Julfikar Ali Manik, Geeta Anand, Ellen Barry and Russell Goldman

And the honorable mentions:

Excellence in Journalistic Innovation

‘They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals’

Excellence in Reporting on Women’s Issues

India’s Missing Women

Ellen Barry

Excellence in Video Reporting

Myanmar’s Unemployed Elephants

Jonah M. Kessel

Four other Times entries were finalists. The complete list of SOPA Award winners is here.

On Friday, June 9, The New York Times celebrated the launch of its new Chinese Magazine, “時”, with an event in Hong Kong held on board the Genting Dream luxury cruise ship.

Over 250 guests attended the invitation-only event, which featured a forum on luxury lifestyle led by Ching-Ching Ni, editor in chief of the Chinese Magazine and The New York Times Chinese website, and special guests, including Red Hong Yi, the world-renowned artist.

The forum was followed by a lively sunset cocktail party at the ship’s rooftop bar hosted by Helena Phua, executive vice president, Asia Pacific and publisher of the Chinese Magazine, to mark the official launch.

Since launching in December, the tips line has been an excellent source of leads and stories. Hundreds of tips have been distributed throughout the newsroom with dozens of stories, sources and documents as a result. Today we are excited to launch the newest version of the tip line, TipJar.

Read more in this note from Gabriel Dance, Runa Sandvik, Jeremy Bowers and Zach Wichter.

Since launching in December, the tips line has been an excellent source of leads and stories. Hundreds of tips have been distributed throughout the newsroom with dozens of stories, sources and documents as a result. Additionally, The Times has served as a model for the industry. After our rollout we saw other news sites launch their own versions using similar methods. And our pioneering use of Signal and WhatsApp has helped bring safe and secure lines of communication to a new set of potential sources.

Today we are excited to launch the newest version of the tip line, TipJar.

TipJar is a custom-built application for distributing tips, and was designed with the security of sources in mind. TipJar stores tips, stripped of their source information, and documents that have been sanitized to remove digital traces and malware.

When tips come in, be it through Signal, WhatsApp, email (encrypted or otherwise), physical mail or SecureDrop, they are vetted by a person. That person discards spam and anything else that is clearly not a tip, and then logs the tip in our application with a few keywords assigned. These tips are subsequently distributed to desks and individuals based on their subject matter.

One of TipJar’s key security features is to ensure our sources’ contact information is separated from the tips themselves. Instructions on how to request source contact information is included with each tip and – as part of our commitment to security and source protection – initial contact with sources must use the same channel the source originally used. For example, if a source initially contacts us on Signal, the reporter or editor must reach out to them on Signal until the source gives explicit permission to move to another channel. As such, to use TipJar reporters and editors must have Signal and WhatsApp installed on their mobile devices. Both apps are free and instructions on download and use can be found on the tips page.

We’d also like to remind everybody that tips are not vetted, and we have had several disinformation campaigns aimed at the line. TipJar provides the opportunity to flag bad tips and add notes, which allows editors and reporters to leave information should they follow up. If you have questions about how to interact with sensitive sources or documents, please contact [email protected].

We appreciate all feedback we’ve gotten, and are grateful to those who have worked with us to make it better.

Gabriel Dance, Runa Sandvik, Jeremy Bowers and Zach Wichter

 

The Times today announced a major step toward integrating its readers into its report with the introduction of Moderator, a new system that will arm Times comment moderators with machine learning technology, allowing them to moderate more comments. For now, Moderator’s implementation will open up comments on all of The Times’s top stories during business hours and commenting will remain open for 24 hours. The implementation of Moderator will allow for comments on approximately 25% of stories at launch, with the goal of 80% of all Times stories allowing for comments by the end of the year.

The Times’s comments section, widely considered one of the best on the Internet for its insightful, civil and robust discussion, is managed by a team of 14 moderators who manually review approximately 12,000 comments each day. Because of this labor intensive process, until now, commenting was available only on roughly 10% of Times articles.

Moderator was born through a partnership with Jigsaw, a technology incubator within Alphabet—Google’s parent company—that created Perspective, an API that uses machine learning technology to score the perceived impact a comment might have on a conversation. Moderator includes an optimized user interface and predictive models that will help moderators group similar comments to make faster decisions, allowing more comments to be posted, while maintaining a respectful and substantive conversation. Details on how Moderator works can be found over on Times Insider.

Today The New York Times Magazine published the first magazine cover story with Chelsea Manning since her release from United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Her disclosure of classified documents in 2010 ushered in the age of leaks. Now, freed from prison, she spoke with Matthew Shaer about why she did it — and the isolation that followed.

On why she decided to leak approximately 250,000 American diplomatic cables and roughly 480,000 Army reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Ms. Manning said:

‘‘[T]here are plenty of things that should be kept secret’’: ‘‘Let’s protect sensitive sources. Let’s protect troop movements. Let’s protect nuclear information. Let’s not hide missteps. Let’s not hide misguided policies. Let’s not hide history. Let’s not hide who we are and what we are doing.’’

When asked about the impact she has had on the world:

‘From my perspective, the world’s shaped me more than anything else. It’s a feedback loop.’

Shaer writes that, “it remains difficult to overstate the impact of the Afghan and Iraq war logs, or the later publication of the diplomatic cables. “The material touched on virtually every relationship the United States had around the world,” Crowley, the former State Department official, says of the cables…The Afghan and Iraq documents brought home, in exactly the way that Manning had hoped, the messiness of the two conflicts.”

The full story is available online now and will appear in print in the June 18 issue of The New York Times Magazine.

Cover credit: Photograph by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. Styling by Alex White.

Contact: Danielle Rhoades Ha, [email protected]

 

On Monday, The New York Times Magazine will publish the exclusive first magazine cover story with Chelsea Manning since her presidential commutation and release from United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas just weeks ago. After serving seven years of a 35 year sentence for what was then the largest leak of classified records in American history, Ms. Manning sat down with contributing writer Matthew Shaer to tell her story for the first time. Though she has been the subject of numerous articles, Ms. Manning was forbidden from speaking directly to reporters during her incarceration.

The magazine’s cover image was shot by legendary photographers Inez and Vinoodh  in their New York studio. This is the first photo shoot of Ms. Manning since her release. The full story and photo portfolio will be published online at 5am ET, and will be the cover feature of the June 18 issue of The New York Times Magazine the following Sunday.

Contact: Danielle Rhoades Ha, [email protected]

Kevin Roose is joining Biz Day to cover the intersection of business, tech and power. Read more in this note from Ellen Pollock:

“Please welcome Kevin Roose, who will join Biz Day as a columnist.

I should probably say rejoin. Some of you will remember Kevin from his earlier stint at Biz Day as a finance reporter. In the last five years he’s had plenty of new adventures. He wrote about young bankers on Wall Street and the start up scene in Silicon Valley at New York magazine. Then he joined Fusion as a senior editor and TV producer, and went on to become a vice president there, overseeing editorial projects and strategy.

Somehow Kevin has found time to write a couple of books . The most recent, “Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits,” was a New York TImes bestseller. Over time he’s written for a bunch of magazines, and yes, you’ve seen him on the telly.

Kevin’s reported column will deal with the intersection of business, tech and power. He’ll look at the upheavals in global business that happen when worlds collide. As tech merges with manufacturing and entertainment and telecommunications and everything else, there’s no better time to launch such a column.

Kevin will join us in New York on Monday.

Ellen“

Today The New York Times announced that Nick Rockwell, Laura Evans and Stephen Dunbar-Johnson have joined the Executive Committee.

Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, Nick Rockwell

Nick Rockwell joined The New York Times Company in November 2015 as senior vice president and chief technology officer. He was promoted to executive vice president in June 2017. Rockwell is responsible for all technology operations, including infrastructure, e-commerce, enterprise computing and development of the company’s digital systems. Rockwell joined the Times Company from Condé Nast, where he oversaw all aspects of the company’s technology development and operations. He holds a B.A. in literary theory from Yale, and lives in Brooklyn.

 Senior Vice President, Data & Insights, Laura Evans

Laura Evans joined The New York Times Company in 2016 as senior vice president, Data & Insights. In this role, Evans oversees data science, analytics and data operations across the organization. Prior to The Times, Evans served as vice president of audience development and data science at the Scripps Networks Interactive, a position she held since 2013. Evans has also held leadership positions at major media organizations including The Washington Post and Dow Jones. She has a Ph.D. in political science with a concentration in quantitative methods from George Washington University.

President, International, Stephen Dunbar-Johnson  

Stephen Dunbar-Johnson is the president, international of The New York Times Company. Stephen is responsible for the oversight and strategic development of the Times Company’s international businesses. Dunbar-Johnson was appointed president, international for the New York Times Company in October 2013 to lead the global expansion of The Company.

Prior to The Times, Dunbar-Johnson was Publisher of the International Herald Tribune (IHT), a position he assumed in January 2008. Before joining the IHT in 1998, he held various business development roles in the UK, France and the US over  twelve years at the Financial Times. He was educated at Worth School and Kent University in the U.K. and  has completed an executive management program at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the Sulzberger program at the Columbia School of Journalism.

Eileen Sullivan will be joining the Washington Bureau as an early-morning breaking news reporter. Read more in this note to staff from Elisabeth Bumiller, Bill Hamilton, and Thom Shanker:

We’re very happy to announce that Eileen Sullivan will be joining the Washington Bureau as an early-morning breaking news reporter.

Eileen comes to us from the AP’s Washington Bureau, where she has spent the past decade as a reporter and at times a player-coach covering intelligence, terrorism, criminal justice, surveillance policy and homeland security. In 2012 she won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting with Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman and Chris Hawley for their work on the New York Police Department’s secret program to spy on American Muslims.

Before that she worked for Congressional Quarterly, where she covered the birth of the Department of Homeland Security and helped reveal its failings after Hurricane Katrina.

A native of Alexandria, Va., she graduated from Villanova University and got her start at the Cherry Hill (N.J.) Courier-Post, initially covering hard-hitting topics such as a Labrador retriever who ate golf balls.

Eileen lives on Capitol Hill with her husband, James, and their 16-month-old daughter, Celia. She says she loved to cook until she had to cook for a family. Lately she’s been trying to cook more, using her toddler as a sous chef, with mixed results.

Lara Jakes and Amy Fiscus, along with Matt and Adam, sing her praises.

She starts July 5. Please welcome her.

Elisabeth, Bill and Thom

Nellie Bowles is joining BizDay to cover tech and digital culture from The Times’s San Francisco office. Read more in this note from Ellen Pollock and Pui-Wing Tam:

Please welcome Nellie Bowles, who is joining Bizday to cover tech and digital culture from the San Francisco office.

Nellie comes to us from Vice News Tonight on HBO, where she has been an on-air correspondent for the past year, working on segments about venture capitalists and tech companies, and traveling the world on a broad range of assignments.

She previously worked at The Guardian and Recode, and covered, among other things, Ellen Pao’s discrimination suit against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Nellie began her journalism career as an intern at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she started in the Style section covering people and nightlife, before joining the Business section to write about start-ups and city life

Nellie has a keen eye for the Silicon Valley that titans would prefer you never see. Elon Musk called her a TMZ reporter after she quoted him talking about the show Silicon Valley. In a Guardian story, she once described how Eric Schmidt wore a top hat and vest made of mirrors at an elite desert event that attendees called “Burning Man for the one percent.”

Nellie has also looked at Silicon Valley’s influence on American culture, writing about teens dropping out of high school to follow their digital dreams.

A graduate of Columbia University, Nellie is also that rare thing in the San Francisco Bay Area these days: a native.

She’ll be joining us in July.

Ellen and Pui-Wing