NYTimes names new corporate media reporter

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

I am pleased to announce that Jonathan Mahler will join The New York Times as a media reporter. He will cover the industry’s biggest companies and the moguls who run them, along with the seismic changes transforming their businesses.

Jonathan’s byline will be familiar to our readers. He has been a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine for the past decade, writing numerous cover stories, including his most recent one on the disgraced ex-Rutgers basketball coach, Mike Rice. In the media realm, he has written insightful, entertaining profiles of the author James Patterson and the sportswriter Bill Simmons.

In addition to his work for the magazine, Jonathan has written two books, the best-selling “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning” and “The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight over Presidential Power.” In 2012, he wrote an e-book about Joe Paterno and the Penn State scandal, “Death Comes to Happy Valley.”

Since August 2012, he has been a sports columnist for Bloomberg View. But now Jonathan and his ample journalistic gifts — the guy reports like a bulldog and writes like an angel — are all ours, and we’re thrilled to have him. He starts on April 23.

Sam Sifton worked with Jonathan at Talk magazine at the turn of the century. “We’d both left newspapers — New York Press in my case, The Forward in Jon’s — to try our hand at magazines,” he said. “We spent most of our time lamenting that we weren’t working for newspapers. It’s thrilling to have him back in his natural environment, on deadline, worrying about what he’s going to eat for lunch at his desk.”