New York Times business editor Ellen Pollock sent out the following on Tuesday:
Hi all — We have had a bunch of folks take on new roles in the last couple of months so I’d like to recap it all below. A special congratulations to Eli Tan, until recently our fellow in San Francisco, who has officially joined the Tech group. And please welcome Farah Stockman, who has just joined us from Opinion to cover manufacturing.
Ben Casselman
Earlier this year, Ben was elevated to chief economics correspondent. He’ll continue to cover the U.S. economy and economic policy. As we all know, Ben is our all-star collaborator and economics whisperer. Since joining The Times in 2017, he’s helped lead our coverage of unprecedented economic events including the pandemic.
Ben is also an adjunct faculty member at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, where he teaches economics reporting.
Ben previously was chief economics writer for FiveThirtyEight, where he contributed to award-winning projects on criminal sentencing, gun deaths and the 2016 presidential election. As a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, he won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2011 for his coverage of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and was part of a team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for that coverage.
He lives with his wife and bakes bread in Brooklyn.
Mike Isaac
After a stellar run covering Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, Mike is taking on a broader beat as Silicon Valley correspondent. He will jump into rapid investigations of tech companies, write about social media and media, roam around Silicon Valley to meet investors and entrepreneurs, scrutinize tech leaders and their politics, and dive into tech trends. Mike will also mentor new reporters and keep the Tech group on the pulse of news.
Mike joined The TImes in 2014 and has produced a steady stream of tech exclusives and enterprise. His behind-the-scenes stories on Uber and the downfall of then-chief executive Travis Kalanick in 2017 became must reads. That work led to a 2019 book, “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber,” and a 2022 Showtime series of the same name that starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Kyle Chandler and Uma Thurman. Mike made a cameo — playing a journalist in the series. He has since covered or been part of teams that covered Meta’s plunge into the metaverse, the A.I. race, Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, OpenAI’s leadership fracas and much, much more.
He previously worked at Wired, AllThingsD and Recode.
Mike’s stories on punk bands and tattoos occasionally show up in other corners of The New York TImes. He is known for his strange Starbucks habits and turning his X posts into their own performance art. Mike has become so synonymous with tech reporting that he is frequently recognized and stopped by strangers on San Francisco streets.
He lives in Oakland with his wife and Bruna, his 11-year-old Bernese Mountain Dog.
Eli Tan
Eli, who distinguished himself as a Times fellow this past year, has joined the staff and will cover Meta. During his fellowship, Eli dove into a variety of tech topics, including a data center debate in the town of Peculiar, Missouri; A.I.-fueled dating; and how A.I. has changed the way pastors work. He also jumped on news, including the wildfires in Los Angeles. He has covered Uber, Lyft and DoorDash.
“Eli has a knack for telling stories that make us understand technology’s impact on regular people,” said Jim Kerstetter, a deputy tech editor who has been Eli’s main editor. “It will be exciting to see him turn that creativity toward Meta.”
Eli, a Seattle native, majored in English and economics at St. Olaf College, where he played on the baseball team. He later did a master’s in journalism at Columbia University. He started his journalism career after college at CoinDesk, covering the rise of the crypto industry. Before joining The Times’s fellowship, Eli was a business reporter at The Washington Post and led coverage of the Sam Bankman-Fried trial.
Eli, who is a long suffering Mariners fan, still plays on an adult league baseball team in the Bay Area. He enjoys camping, seeing movies and attending local trivia nights. He looks forward to taking over the beat from Mike, whom he does not think is a celebrity.
Kevin Draper
Kevin will cover the business of agriculture, a new beat for us. As you know, Kevin previously wrote in-depth stories about sports, covering streaming, litigation, league investigations, the PGA Tour and LIV Golf and gambling. He joined our department almost two years ago and The Times in 2017.
Aside from his sports coverage, Kevin recently has jumped into National’s coverage multiple times, including the aftermath of the shooting outside a Jewish museum in Washington and the crash at Reagan airport in January. Shortly after he joined Business he covered the raid on The Marion County Recorder, a small newspaper in Kansas, that captured the country’s attention. He has already started covering how American farmers are bracing for tariffs and a trade war.
Prior to joining The Times, Kevin worked at Deadspin, where he covered ESPN and sports media.
Kevin grew up in Oakland and went to Carleton College, where he played ultimate frisbee. He now lives in Kansas City.
Lauren Hirsch
Lauren has joined biz from Dealbook. She will cover Wall Street, deals and financial regulation. In the last few weeks Lauren dug into the details behind U.S. Steel’s extraordinary deal with Nippon Steel; explored Yale’s attempt to sell part of its giant private equity portfolio and broke news about an unusual condition the F.T.C. may impose on an ad mega-merger.
At DealBook, Lauren broke news about the PGA Tour’s flirtation with the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, the proposed Skydance acquisition of Paramount, Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter as well as TikTok. With colleagues she was the first to report that Paramount was considering a settlement with President Trump. She will continue to contribute to Dealbook.
“Lauren joined DealBook in the middle of the pandemic and immediately proved she gets it,” said Andrew Ross Sorkin of DealBook. “She understood the stakes, the stories and the players — and got herself deeply sourced in a world that’s not easy to break into. Over the past five years, she’s written hundreds of sharp stories that broke news, and broke through. She has been on the front line of the biggest business story of the moment, often writing multiple stories in one day, starting in DealBook and ending on the front page of the paper.”
Prior to joining DealBook in 2020, Lauren reported at CNBC, where she first covered consumer and retail companies and then business and politics. She previously worked at Reuters.
Lauren has an M.B.A. from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and a B.A. from Cornell University.
She lives in Manhattan and enjoys playing tennis — she’s a solid B+ — and going to Broadway shows and the ballet.
Farah Stockman
I’m thrilled to announce that Farah Stockman has joined the Business department to cover manufacturing — at a time when trade wars loom and manufacturing is top of mind for so many Americans. Farah comes to us from Opinion, where she has been a member of the editorial board since 2020. There she wrote about foreign and national affairs.
Prior to her time in Opinion, Farah wrote about politics, race and other topics for National. Over time, Farah has reported from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Israel, Japan and elsewhere.
“Farah is fearless in every sense, not just in her journalism but also in life,” says Katie Kingsbury, our Opinion editor. “The newsroom is lucky to have her dogged determination in reporting and her compassionate approach to storytelling. I look forward to continuing to read her work.”
Farah came to The TImes in 2016 from The Boston Globe, where she spent 16 years, first covering foreign policy from Washington and then as a columnist and member of the editorial board. In 2016 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for columns on race, education and class divides in Boston and the legacy of busing.
She is the author of “American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears,” published in 2021. The book started as a story in the The Times about workers at a company that made steel bearings. The company decided to close its factory in Indianapolis, leaving employees to figure out what to do next as they trained others to take their jobs in Mexico.
Farah is a graduate of Harvard. She was born in East Lansing, Michigan, and now lives with her family in the Boston area.
Please join me in congratulating everyone.
Ellen
