NYT media reporter joining politics desk

Dick Stevenson, the politics editor at the New York Times, sent out the following staff announcement on Wednesday:

The presidential candidates, their allies and various interest groups are likely to raise billions of dollars by the time Election Day rolls around a year from now, and they will spend most of it on advertising. So we’ve decided to make a commensurately big investment: We are bringing Jeremy Peters onto the political team to cover the ways in which campaigns and outside groups use advertising and other media and communications strategies to sell candidates, ideologies and issues.

This is a rich field, one that Jim Rutenberg, among others, tilled for us to great effect in previous cycles. Advertising is how most voters experience campaigns. It is the visible element of sophisticated strategies that in some cases resemble selling soap and in others veer into the political dark arts. Its practitioners are among the most colorful people in the business.

Jeremy comes to us from Media, where he has done terrific work with Bruce Headlam and his team, most recently on Rupert Murdoch. He started stringing for The Times as a senior at the University of Michigan when the National desk needed an extra set of legs on the ground in Detroit right after the 9/11 attacks. He subsequently spent two years living on St. Thomas reporting for The Virgin Islands Daily News. Then The Times brought him back in 2004 as a contract freelancer in the Detroit bureau. He was hired on staff in 2006, and since then has covered economics and financial news for Continuous News and Biz Day, two state houses for Metro (Trenton and Albany) and since last summer, the media.

Jeremy is finishing up some final assignments for the Media desk and will move over to politics after that.