Sanger-Katz joining NYT’s Upshot

David Leonhardt, the editor of the New York Times’ new site The Upshot, sent out the following staff hire announcement:

Margot Sanger-Katz is one of the country’s sharpest health care writers. At National Journal, she’s been ahead of the curve in reporting on both Obamacare’s problems and its successes. Says the political writer Ron Brownstein: “She’s smart, tough, totally unswayed by conventional wisdom, and an instinctive debunker: not a reporter who travels with the pack.”

Starting this summer, Margot will do her reporting, writing and debunking for The Upshot, and I’m ecstatic about the idea of working with her. She’ll cover health care for us, and she’s chomping at the bit to collaborate with The Times’s tremendous staff of health care journalists, whom she has long admired.

She is coming to us after a year at Columbia as a Knight-Bagehot Fellow (because, she says, the health care story was becoming more of a business story and she wanted the expertise to cover it). Margot previously worked at Legal Affairs and covered the 2008 McCain campaign for The Concord Monitor. She’ll be based in Washington. You’ll find her on Twitter too: @sangerkatz.