NY Times biz reporter Kitroeff to become Mexico correspondent

New York Times international editor Michael Slackman sent out the following announcement:

Nine years ago, Anita Isaacs, a political science professor at Haverford College, invited her daughter and a reporter to join her on a trip to Guatemala to speak with survivors of the country’s genocide.

Her daughter, Natalie Kitroeff, was a senior in college, and the reporter, Nick Casey, worked at The Wall Street Journal.

Now both are reporters for The New York Times, and Natalie is about to head off on the assignment she dreamed of while watching Nick: She will be our next Mexico-based correspondent, where she will join a great team led by our bureau chief, Azam Ahmed.

Anyone who has ever crossed paths with Natalie will not be surprised that she has achieved her goal. Hers is a story of hard work, determination and a bit of serendipity.

In 2012, Natalie started work at The Times as a researcher for Nick Kristof and Charles Blow in Opinion. But what she really wanted was to be a reporter, and when The Times declined to accommodate her ambitions, she simply picked up and went to Bloomberg.

There, Natalie covered higher education and student debt, and her fine work caught the attention of a Bloomberg editor named Ellen Pollock. Yes, that Ellen Pollock.

After two years at Bloomberg, Natalie was hired at The Los Angeles Times by Larry Ingrassia (himself a former Times editor — did someone say “serendipity”?). She was a Loeb finalist for coverage of automation and blue-collar jobs and won two awards from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing for her work as part of a team of reporters covering immigration and farm labor.

The next year, Ellen, now Business editor here at The Times, recruited Natalie.

Since then, Natalie has traveled across the country covering the trade war, the corporate tax cut and the government shutdown. She worked on a series of investigations on pregnancy discrimination in the workplace. And this year, she was part of a team of reporters that produced groundbreaking work on the Boeing 737 Max debacle.

Natalie also became a familiar presence as a sub for Michael Barbaro, hosting “The Daily” when needed.

Please congratulate her.