NY Times hires Quartz’s Pasick to run newsletters

Jodi Rudoren, associate managing editor for audience at the New York Times, sent out the following announcement on Thursday:

I am delighted to welcome Adam Pasick, our new editorial director of newsletters.

Adam comes to us from Quartz, where he was senior editor for newsletters and apps and, yes, helped invent the “Obsession” email. (His faves include Cheetos, MSG and elevator buttons, the last of which may be the main reason he wanted to come work at 620 Eighth Avenue.)

That could be why his name seems familiar. Or, it could be you remember his appearances in our own pages: In 2006, Adam was the subject of a New York Times profile as Reuters’s first beat reporter assigned to Second Life (after interviews, “Pasick often levitates for a moment, then flies over buildings”); in 1997, he provided the anecdotal lead for an article about students trying to use an obscure tool called a “Web site” (“All the search engines are so imprecise,” he said).

Adam has also worked as a correspondent for Reuters in London and for Quartz in Bangkok, where he built a six-person team covering Asia and wrote and edited the Quartz Daily Brief, growing its subscription list to more than 200,000, from 80,000. At New York magazine from 2000 to 2013, he was online managing editor, working with a spate of budding stars including Kevin Roose and Joe Coscarelli.

Building on the pioneering work of our first editorial director of newsletters, Elisabeth Goodridge, Adam will lead a strategic effort to refine and revamp The Times’s portfolio for maximum impact on our audience goals of engagement and habituation. Newsletters are one of our most powerful tools to introduce our journalism to new audiences and build relationships with them; people who consistently open our newsletters are more likely to convert to subscription. We are looking to invest in a few marquee products and make sure every newsletter we produce finds and grows its audience.

Adam and his deputy, Jessica Anderson, along with Alexandra March of Opinion, will be taking a more active role working with writers and editors across the organization who produce newsletters to help them clarify goals and meet them. He will partner with Melissa Loder and Lindsay Godard of product, as well as designers, data scientists and developers, to maximize inbox engagement and improve our email production tools. And he will help Andrea Kannapell and her team continue to leverage the Briefings to connect with readers more deeply and consistently.

Adam starts on Monday, May 20.