New York Times executive producer of audio Lisa Tobin and director of audio Paula Szuchman sent out the following:
Over the past two seasons, “The Run-Up” has distinguished itself as some of the sharpest, most searching political reporting in the country. Astead Herndon and the team have pushed beyond the horse race to ask deeper questions: How did we get to this moment? What is really animating this election? Why do so many voters feel so disconnected from the parties? And what are the long-term costs to the parties’ short-term plans for winning?
This summer, having started to answer those questions, the team is preparing for the next chapter of the show — a weekly show leading up to Election Day 2024. For that to happen, we knew we needed a very hard-to-find person — a visionary editor with a passion for politics, a love of great storytelling and the institutional knowledge to build a show that will draw upon the collective wisdom of this newsroom.
We are thrilled to announce that we have found that person in Rachel Dry, who will begin as the editor of “The Run-Up” later this summer.
Rachel will be charged with nothing short of helping to turn “The Run-Up” into the must-listen politics show of the presidential election. We know the audience is there and that this race deserves that level of attention. And we know we have the team to pull it off — Rachel is joining a crew that is already firing on all cylinders thanks to Astead, the leadership of Frannie Carr Toth, and the brilliant, tireless production team that is Caitlin O’Keefe, Elisa Gutierrez and Anna Foley.
Rachel’s colleagues may not know that she actually got her start in audio, on the editorial staff of NPR’s “All Things Considered.” In her years at The Times, of course, she has distinguished herself as a leading editor with a gift for sifting through the news and emerging with the perfect voice, the right idea, the question that should be asked. She did that first in Opinion, where she generated and edited some of The Times’s most important outside pieces for Sunday Review. She did that again as deputy editor for Politics in 2020, overseeing a run of memorable enterprise coverage. And most recently, she has done that as editor of Sunday Business, which she has injected with a keen understanding of the zeitgeist and must-read energy.
“Rachel is a marvel, constantly generating ideas that spark creativity in others,” says Ellen Pollock, Business editor. “We will all miss her in Biz and she will always be an honorary member of our group.”
“Rachel is a born leader and thought partner who brings this really inspiring, energizing mix of ideas, originality and fun to journalism,” says Patrick Healy, who ran the Politics desk in 2020. “I think she’s such a gifted storyteller because she’s so good at listening —- she spots what excites people most in their reporting and she starts thinking about narrative, surprise and payoff as she hears what her colleagues have in the works. She and Astead had a terrific partnership during the 2020 campaign on some of our most difficult and sophisticated stories, often under tight deadlines, and they pulled it off brilliantly time and again.”
Please join us in congratulating Rachel, and welcoming her back to audio.
