NY Times taps O’Brien to cover labor

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

We’re delighted to announce that Rebecca Davis O’Brien, fresh from 22 scoop-filled months on Politics, has joined the economics team on the Business desk to cover the national labor scene.

Rebecca’s time on the campaign was spent largely, and memorably for readers, covering the role of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – as a Democratic presidential aspirant turned independent candidate turned Trump ally, with a recurring subtheme of his curious encounters with wildlife.

Rebecca came to The Times in 2021 to cover courts and criminal justice for Metro. Earlier in her career, she worked at The Record in Bergen County, where she was a Pulitzer finalist for her reporting on heroin addiction and the drug trade, and she spent seven years at The Wall Street Journal, where she was part of a Pulitzer-winning team covering payoffs to women who said they had affairs with Donald Trump. She also worked on award-winning coverage of the sexual abuse scandal in U.S.A. Gymnastics.

“Rebecca is brilliant, hilarious, generous and warm, and a very hard worker,” said David Halbfinger, the Politics editor. “She dominated coverage of R.F.K. Jr., but Ron DeSantis’s bizarre handshake with his wife in Iowa also opened our eyes to Rebecca’s writerly gifts. So much deliciousness followed under her byline, including pieces about Mike Johnson’s facial expressions, Kristi Noem’s teeth, Kennedy’s ravens, Kamala Harris’s ‘I am speaking now’ and her halting interview style.”

Happily for Business, Rebecca’s predecessor on the labor beat, Noam Scheiber, will remain part of the economics team, shifting his focus to the forces reshaping the white-collar workplace, like A.I. and demographics. In his decade covering labor, Noam brilliantly spotted and illuminated trends like the rise of gig work, the emergence of the college-educated working class, and the fresh energy in the organized labor movement.

We welcome Rebecca and we salute Noam.