Thottam joins NY Times op-ed page to write about business and economics

Jyoti Thottam has been hired by the New York Times op-ed page to write about business and economics.

In a note to the staff, editorial page editor James Bennet writes:

Jyoti spent most of her diverse career at Time, first as a business and technology reporter covering Enron’s collapse and Google’s rise, and later as the magazine’s South Asia bureau chief chronicling the Sri Lankan civil war, the conflict in Kashmir and the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. Along the way she did an exclusive interview with a rising provincial politician named Narendra Modi. After returning to New York, she served as a senior editor handling stories on global politics and business (and editing a promising reporter named Katie Kingsbury.)

After leaving Time, Jyoti worked as news editor at Al Jazeera America, where colleagues say she became the go-to manager of big news features. For the past two years, she has been working on a book for Viking, ‘Children of Nazareth,’ that will tell the story of post-partition India through the experiences of six nuns from Kentucky who trained a generation of nurses.

On Op-Ed, Jyoti will use her global expertise and contacts to expand our corps of contributing business and economics writers — a group that already includes Bryce Covert, Steve Rattner and Ruchir Sharma — and start a vertical featuring the sharpest, most insightful opinion writing on both the news of the day and the biggest ideas roiling the business world.

Born in India, she was raised in Sugar Land, Texas, studied economics and religion at Yale, received a master’s in international and public affairs from Columbia, and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters. In her spare time, she loves hiking and bird watching. Importantly, she has what she describes as a ‘hard-earned’ certificate from the Wine & Spirits Education Trust that she promises to explain over drinks.

Join us in welcoming her.