NY Times taps Otterman to cover higher ed

New York Times metro editor Nestor Ramos sent out the following on Thursday:

For the last several months, the Metro desk has been reviving a key beat in New York: higher education. Now, we’re thrilled to announce that Sharon Otterman will be officially taking over the beat after unofficially producing several important and well-read stories.

As protests and debate over the Israel-Hamas war roil college campuses, Sharon has reported on the response at Columbia and a canceled day of classes at Cornell and also produced a thoughtful and nuanced reconstruction of a protest that went viral at the Cooper Union.

Nearly three years ago, Sharon dove into the health beat just after the pandemic broke out and helped anchor one of the biggest storylines on the desk in recent memory. She produced dozens of stories from the front lines of the crisis, including one of Metro’s most vital reads in.2022.

Jorge Arangure, her editor at the time, said, “Simply put: We couldn’t have done it without her. She took on a subject matter that she had not previously covered as a beat and then delivered powerful story after story, whether it was about the rollout of the vaccine and then subsequent mandates, or her accountability stories about how the state was wasting money, or her stories about how the city struggled to store all the bodies of the deceased.”

He also pointed out that it was Sharon who helped make “Vax Daddy” a household name.

As the pandemic waned, Sharon has explored other key issues on the health beat, on topics as diverse as monkeypox, menopause and opioids. Sharon will continue to report occasionally on health issues and, in particular, will keep an eye on opioid and overdose news, after producing some of Metro’s biggest stories on the city’s fentanyl crisis last year.

Sharon has been a staff reporter at The Times since 2008 — covering health, religion and K-12 schools in the city — and brings the perfect set of skills and experience to a beat that includes a rich mix of issues. She has produced nuanced enterprise stories about complicated characters and investigations that have brought down N.Y.P.D. detectives and Catholic cardinals. She won a Polk Award in 2013 for her role in exposing a pattern of wrongful convictions in Brooklyn.

Before joining The Times, Sharon lived in Egypt on a Fulbright fellowship. She has also been an associate director at the Council on Foreign Relations, where she wrote about foreign policy. She began her career as a reporter for New York Newsday, The Riverdale Press, The Jersey Journal and U.P.I. Sharon holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Yale and a master’s in international relations from Columbia University. She speaks Spanish, some French, some Egyptian Arabic and a bit of Hebrew.

We’re excited to see how she trains her formidable reporting and writing abilities on the world of higher ed.