NY Times names Windolf as media editor

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

I’m thrilled to announce that Jim Windolf will be our new media editor.

Jim comes to Business Day from Men’s Style, which he has led since it was founded in 2015. Prior to helping create that new section, he was editor in chief of M, the Fairchild quarterly. He has also edited at Vanity Fair and Punch.

Jim spent a chunk of time at the New York Observer. He was media columnist there for three years and eventually became the paper’s executive editor. Happily, he crossed paths there with several Business Day reporters, including John Koblin and Jim Rutenberg, so he already knows their deep, dark secrets.

Jim’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, New York and many other publications. In a recent Times story about the late playwright and actor Sam Shepard, he wrote, “with the exception of those who went on aerial raids to make their livings, no one else pulled off a bomber jacket quite so persuasively as Mr. Shepard did in his breakthrough film role as the pilot Chuck Yeager in ‘The Right Stuff.’ ”

At Vanity Fair he wrote about topics as varied as Richard Pevear, the translator of Russian literature with a near-cult following, and Jennifer Lawrence, who has a somewhat different kind of cult following. He wrote an essay on “cuteness,” an expertise that surely will be useful in his new role.

Stuart Emmrich, who brought Jim to The Times, says:

“To really appreciate Jim Windolf, you must have followed him on Twitter – whether under his own account (and its often inscrutable and yet hilarious musings) or perhaps the two parody accounts — “Cranky Kaplan” and “Wise Kaplan” — created by Jim and his former Observer colleague Peter Stevenson as a homage to their boss, the late, great Peter Kaplan.

“As with Peter Kaplan before him, Jim is a kind of Pied Piper of American journalism, leading and inspiring a generation of talented writers. Those who have worked with him before must surely be thrilled at the news of his arrival. Those who have not have a great adventure ahead of them.”

Jim will join Business Day on September 26.

Ellen