NY Times hires Rosenwald for obits desk

New York Times obituaries editor Bill McDonald sent out the following on Tuesday:

I’m excited to announce that Mike Rosenwald, a much-admired Washington Post reporter who in recent years found his true calling, writing sparkling obituaries for the paper, will be joining the Obituaries desk of The Times.

Mike is a find. He’s a gifted prose stylist who was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in feature writing in 2004 and a member of a Post team that was a Pulitzer finalist, in 2020, for its coverage of a mass shooting in Texas. He was a member of The Post’s enterprise team for a decade before joining its obituaries desk.

His essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Economist, Esquire, Popular Science and Smithsonian, among other publications, and in annual anthologies, including “Best American Science and Nature Writing” and “The Best Creative Nonfiction.” (Indeed, he has a master’s degree in creative nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh.) And he has a book in the works.

Mike came to The Post by way of The Boston Globe and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. But he was not just one of The Post’s best feature writers; he also helped conceive and launch Retropolis, a Post blog that covered the news through a historical lens, and later expanded it with “Retropod,” a daily podcast he wrote and voiced, about moments in history connected to the news.

He also teaches, currently as an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Maryland. He had earlier taught at the University of Pittsburgh and workshops at the University of Mississippi and Goucher College. And somehow, with all that on his plate, he has found time to coach youth baseball.

Mike comes to us not just carrying an impressive résumé, but also brimming with enthusiasm for deep-dive reporting and good writing — and obit writing in particular. Truth be told, Mike is something of a self-acknowledged obit nerd; he seems to have read everything ever written about them, not to mention anthologies of them.

So I can’t imagine a better fit for the Obits desk. He’ll be landing in early February, adding to a team of obit writers who are already second to none in the industry.

Please join me in welcoming him into the fold.

— Bill