Mullin, Peters to cover media beat for NY Times

New York Times business editor Ellen Pollock sent out the following on Friday:

We’re thrilled to announce that Ben Mullin and Jeremy Peters are joining the media desk, adding reinforcements to this crucial area of coverage.

Ben joins us from The Wall Street Journal, where he has covered media since 2017. He started by reporting on digital advertising and venture-backed media companies like Vice Media, Vox Media and BuzzFeed before broadening his focus to M&A and media conglomerates like Discovery and Paramount.

As the media landscape has transformed, Ben has broken news on Quibi, the ill-fated video start-up, scooped the new Justin Smith and Ben Smith media start-up and got inside Axel Springer’s plans to buy Politico. He has also broken news on The Times’s own plans to buy The Athletic and Serial (so you know where to go if you want to know the deal). Last year, he won a SABEW Award for his reporting on the rise and fall of Quibi.

Ben was previously managing editor of Poynter.org and has interned at The Sacramento Bee and USA Today. He began covering media while he was an undergraduate at California State University, Chico, in northern California, when he sold a story about the declining finances of university newspapers to the Poynter Institute.

Please welcome Ben, who starts later this month.

And please welcome back Jeremy, who to our delight has made a return to the media team.

Jeremy’s byline is known to anyone with even a passing interest in the intersection of politics and media. During his first stint on the media desk, about a dozen years ago, he wrote about a rift among the Murdochs (still relevant) and The Times’s decision to put up a paywall (still relevant, too). It wasn’t long before he was lured away by the politics team to cover his first of three presidential campaigns, and then by the Washington bureau, where he covered Congress from 2012 to 2015.

He eventually turned his gaze more directly to conservatives under Trump, reporting that culminated this year in his first book, “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.”

“On Politics, Jeremy was a generous colleague and an ideal person to turn to for insightful stories, on conservatives in particular — and good media gossip,” said Rachel Dry, Sunday Business editor, who regularly worked with him during the 2020 campaign. “Only one of those areas of expertise could go in the paper then. It’s very lucky for everyone that is changing.”

Jeremy will continue to have his eye on politics from his perch inside the business desk. But it will often be from the point of view of the media companies shaping Americans’ information diets and their view of politics. He’ll also continue to report on important stories about the First Amendment, as he did recently with his insightful coverage of the Sarah Palin trial.

His return to Business brings him back where he started at The Times, in 2002, when he was still in college and working as a stringer in the Detroit bureau.