NY Times hires Bloomberg’s Nereim to be Gulf bureau chief

The international news desk leadership at the New York Times sent out the following:

Vivian Nereim, our new Gulf bureau chief, is a long-serving foreign correspondent in Saudi Arabia and has been writing about the Gulf countries since 2011, when she moved to Abu Dhabi with a handful of suitcases.

Vivian grew up in Chicago and graduated from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in art history. Her first job was at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where she worked as a general assignment reporter, covering the county courts, child welfare and Pittsburgh’s minority communities. From there, she moved to The National, an English-language newspaper in the United Arab Emirates, and then Oman, where she studied Arabic and worked as a freelance journalist before moving to the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in 2015.

She joins The New York Times from Bloomberg News, where she wrote about Saudi Arabia’s politics, economy and society. She’s covered every major story during the rise of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, from the midnight power struggles, jailed billionaires and futuristic mega-projects to the advent of women driving and the crackdown on domestic dissent. Now, she will be the first Times correspondent to lead a bureau in the kingdom.

She speaks Arabic, which she loves, and in Riyadh, she is frequently recognized for being the subject of a viral meme in which a senior Saudi official started stuttering after she asked a simple question. In a previous life, she trained as a Balanchine-technique ballet dancer and still cannot hear “The Nutcracker” without breaking out in a cold sweat.

Welcome, Vivian!