Politico hires Herszenhorn as chief EU reporter

Matt Kaminski, executive editor of Politico Europe, sent out the following announcement on Monday:

Team,

As much history as we’ve digested in our first year plus as a publication, we have to get ready for a lot more of it.

The Brexit vote upturned assumptions about Europe’s future; in the months and years ahead we’ll have to chart, in small ways and large, how the EU builds a new relationship with its second-largest economy and reimagines itself. There are critical votes coming in the next year in Austria, Italy, the U.S., France, the Netherlands and Germany that may bring in new political management and will test the appeal of the new populists. Migration, terrorism and economic weakness are sure to continue to challenge the Continent’s institutions and leaders.

Our newsroom—with over 60 journalists across Europe—has risen to the occasion at every turn before, establishing POLITICO as a must-read on European politics and policy. With demand growing for our brand of journalism, and the demands on all of you growing as well, we’ll reconfigure and add editorial resources to make us even better placed to cover the Brexit and other dramas in the months ahead.

In that light, this morning we’re excited to announce a big addition to the POLITICO team in Europe: David M. Herszenhorn joins us as Chief Brussels Correspondent.

In this newly created role, David will anchor our coverage of the EU, its institutions and personalities, at this unsettled juncture in European history. He’ll work closely with the other senior correspondents in Brussels—Morgen Europa writer Florian Eder and Brussels Playbook writer Ryan Heath—the strong political team under Craig Winneker, our six Pro policy verticals and the nearly dozen reporters based in the London, Paris and Berlin bureaus. David’s mandate is to break news, write analytical stories, profiles and features, and connect the dots between the EU capitals and across the Atlantic, on the biggest political and policy stories of the day.

David began his 22-year career at the New York Times as a clerk out of college, worked the cops and City Hall beats, moved on to state politics in New Jersey and Connecticut and covered education in New York. In the late Bush years, he transferred to Washington as Congressional correspondent, covering the financial crisis and starting a blog and news vertical on healthcare during the Obamacare debate (and competed directly with Carrie). David spent four years in the Times’ Moscow bureau, and a lot of that time on the ground in Ukraine during the 2013-14 upheavals there. He returned to the U.S. last year as Washington correspondent, writing on domestic and foreign policy.

He is a journalist’s journalist who enjoys delving into the policy minutiae and knows how to navigate opaque political institutions. He’s an accomplished foreign correspondent who can write with feeling and sweep about history-changing events and forces. And a reporter who is savvy with social media and open to different ways of story telling.

David speaks Spanish and Russian—though he’ll admit not as well as his Spanish wife or kids who attended Russian public schools. He starts with us in early September.

Please welcome him to POLITICO and wish him the best of luck on his new assignment.