NYTimes biz desk names new weekend editor

New York Times business editor Dean Murphy sent out the following announcement:

You perhaps know Connor Ennis as The Times guy who is all-things-football. And as an editor of the college sports blog, The Quad, he occasionally fielded reader questions about celebrities like Tim Tebow.

Oh, and Robert Frost.

Reader: In my mind, this is a Robert Frost-like crossroads for the Wisconsin football program.

Connor: I suppose the Frost scholars/Badgers fans out there would say the team will take the road less traveled by and that will make all the difference.

A football editor who is conversant in literature. Only at The Times. And soon, only at BizDay. Connor Ennis will be taking a road less traveled of his own, joining BizDay as our weekend editor after seven years on the Sports desk.

Sports editor Jason Stallman describes Connor as an editor “with vision beyond the field,” and someone whom reporters are drawn to. He is creative, thinks ambitiously and is good at print and the Web. And rumor has it that he has learned a trick or two from Bob Goetz, who also came to BizDay as weekend editor after earning his stripes on Sports.

“BizDay is stealing one of the great minds of the Sports desk, someone who’s just as comfortable riffing on Edward Albee and Raymond Chandler as he is Ed Reed and Raymond Felton,” Jason says. “Connor’s intellectual interests are many, and that clearly made him a wise editor.”

As he preps for his new duties, Connor says he is looking forward to expanding his literary musings to include the titans of Wall Street and their many chroniclers (here’s one place to build his finance library, courtesy of Andrew Ross Sorkin: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/wall-street-must-reads-for-everyone/).

Connor takes up the weekend job at an important and exciting time, just as we integrate the INYT more fully into our daily report, and as we reimagine the Monday report. Connor will learn the ropes from Patrick Scott — who is leaving the weekend job to become the morning news editor in London — and will then take primary responsibility beginning later this month for making our weekend report enticing, engaging and surprising both digitally and in print.

Before coming to The Times, Connor worked for The Associated Press in Buffalo, Albany and New York, where he was a supervising editor on the national sports desk. He covered the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, and the 2006 World Cup in Germany. He was hired at The Times on the Sports copy desk, and was moved to the backfield by then-Sports editor Joe Sexton, who in announcing his promotion described Connor as having “an active, agile mind,” a “knack for ideas” and a “capacity for organization.”

And let’s not forget about fun.

Reader: I enjoy reading sports in The Times, but it seems like the bloggers at places like Deadspin and KissingSuzyKolber are having a lot more fun. Do you ever wish you could write like college jocks talk?

Connor: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Who says we’re not having fun?