Politico expands team with two new hires

John Yearwood has been hired as deputy editor for agriculture and trade at Politico.

There, he will be working with P.J. Joshi to oversee these two policy teams. His new role begins Dec. 17.

Recently, Yearwood held the post of president for his own Yearwood Media company. Yearwood Media is a consultancy firm specializing in emerging markets. Additionally, he also spent almost 13 years at the Miami Herald working as world editor. His coordination of the Herald’s Haiti earthquake coverage contributed to the newspaper being named a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News.

He also held the post of national/international editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas and before that spent 10 years as senior staff writer with the Dallas Morning News.

Yearwood received the NABJ Achievers Award and the Media Trailblazer Award from the City of North Miami. He was also an honorary chair of the 2019 NABJ Convention.

Yearwood has a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Connecticut.

Politico’s second hire is Leah Nylen who will be joining the technology team on Jan. 7 as an anti-trust and investigations reporter, with primary responsibility for covering the Justice and FTC investigations into the major tech companies.

Additionally, she will also be expanding her beat by overseeing the policy and politics team teams to find smart, relevant anti-trust stories that could run on any Politico platform.

Previously, Nylen spent eight years reporting on U.S. antitrust for MLex where she broke news on the state investigations into Google and Facebook. Before that, she was employed at Bloomberg.

Also, she was selected as an Abe Journalist Fellow in 2014 by the Social Science Research Council and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership for a reporting project on Japanese cartels and cartel deterrence.

Nylen has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.