New York Times moves senior political editor to weekends

The New York Times is moving senior political editor Caryn Wilson to its weekend audience team, the news outlet announced on Thursday.

Wilson will be setting targets for weekend readership and test new approaches to coverage and programming, according to the announcement. She’ll report to Anna Dubenko, deputy audience editor, and oversee Suzie Sainwood, the weekend social editor.

The move is part of a routine drawdown of the staff that occurs in non-election years, a Times spokeswoman said, adding that “the politics desk gets smaller and folks who have been on the beat are reassigned.”

Wilson’s tenure on the Times’s politics desk started in 2019 as an audience engagement editor looking at voter voices and alternative story forms. Prior to that, she was deputy editor of the Times’s Snapchat Discover team. She initially joined the Times as a foreign-national copy desk intern in 2011.

The move is part of a number of staff changes made by the Times in the post-campaign period. Most significantly, it revamped the lineup of reporters covering the Biden White House, moving Maggie Haberman off the beat and over to the investigative/enterprise team in its Washington, D.C., bureau.

It also recently bolstered its live news coverage team, adding several journalists in “an effort to reinvent breaking news,” it said in an announcement.

Cable news outlets have made and are making similar moves.

In January, CNN announced it was moving chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta to a new beat. In mid-February, it announced more details on Acosta’s new role and changes to other parts of its morning and afternoon lineup that go into effect in April.

Fox News, meanwhile, debuted changes to its daytime and early prime programming in late January.