NY Times taps Testa to cover media

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

We’re delighted that Jess Testa has joined the media team from Styles to help the Business desk cover the country’s increasingly fractured media landscape.

The presidential campaign showed how people have changed the way they consume news and how varied the American media diet has become in just a few years. What people watch, listen to and read is often produced by companies outside the traditional media industry. Jess’s job is to cover the characters and companies that inhabit this new world.

Jess is ideally suited to take on this important beat. Media coverage has infused her coverage for more than a decade. After growing up and attending college in Arizona, she covered crime and gender as a national reporter for BuzzFeed, where, among other things, she wrote about a man shooting himself live on Fox News, and the news media’s coverage of Malia Obama as she entered adulthood.

She joined Styles five years ago to cover fashion. Her reporting veered into the world of media, including a delightful and perceptive story about the hugely popular podcaster Alex Cooper.

“Jess is both a wonderful writer and one of those interviewers who can get her subjects to tell her things they never intended,” said Vanessa Friedman, who spent, by her back-of-the-envelope calculation, hundreds of hours with Jess during Paris fashion weeks and elsewhere. “She got the beleaguered designer of Givenchy to admit he had a water filtering machine from Japan meant to keep his blood at ‘a neutral pH,’ and described Joan Rivers, red carpet pioneer, as a character who ‘could bite with the strength of a diamond-collared toy poodle, drawing blood that only sometimes splashed back on her.’”

Jess has already gotten off to a strong start, writing a fun story about Kylie Kelce’s podcast and a scoopy one on how Substack has made attracting political writers a top priority. She also contributed to some of our coverage of the recent presidential campaign, including leading a smart story about how livestreamers had edged deeper into politics. We are looking forward to everything that comes next.