NYTimes hires Steel from FT

New York Times media editor Peter Lattman sent out the following announcement on Friday:

We are pleased to announce that Emily Steel will join The New York Times as a media reporter covering the television industry.

The cheers you’re now hearing around the newsroom are from our colleagues who once worked with Emily at The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. They had urged us to hire Emily, and having competed against her, it didn’t take much convincing.

Emily spent six years at the Journal and the last two at the FT as its media and marketing correspondent. At the Journal, she contributed several stories to the paper’s Pulitzer-finalist “End of Privacy” series about the pervasive tracking of Americans online, including her high-impact piece about privacy breaches at Facebook. Her media reporting at the FT has been topnotch, including her recent coverage of the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger.

She will be a triple threat on this beat, with deep experience covering the traditional broadcast and cable networks; the disruptive forces in television (Netflix, Amazon, Aereo, etc.); and all facets of the advertising business.

Emily was born in Salt Lake City, spent her grade school years in Lincoln, Neb., and then moved to East Lyme, Conn., for junior high and high school. She graduated from the University of North Carolina, where she was a top editor at the Daily Tar Heel.

She starts June 16. Please help us welcome her.