Last week I announced that Adrienne Green would be coming aboard as a new deputy editor overseeing special projects. A few weeks before that, Jeannie Choi became our new managing editor. Yesterday I announced a few more changes to our top edit group that will help the magazine continue to grow and evolve. Going forward, Bill Wasik's title will be editorial director; Jessica Lustig's title will be deputy editor, Politics and Investigations; and Ilena Silverman's title will be deputy editor, Features. The changes in titles will also come with changes in responsibilities.

Ilena has been our features editor for the past seven years. During that time she's played an important role in helping to chart the magazine's editorial course; and she's story-edited some of the most important pieces the magazine has published (including two that won Pulitzers). She's led many special issues and cultivated many new writers. She's also been a part of our top editing mix, but the heavy load she carries as a story editor has prevented her from taking on more of this work. As she transitions into a deputy editor role, Ilena will be doing more top editing, bringing her incredible skills as a shaper of great writing to the magazine's feature stories.

As deputy editor, Politics and Investigations, Jessica will be responsible for deepening our politics coverage and building up our investigative capacity. Jessica has always been a source of great politics and investigative coverage for the magazine, editing writers like Matt Flegenheimer and Linda Villarosa, brainstorming sharp and original ideas, and steering writers through complicated terrain with authority and expertise. Her superb instincts for political coverage have guided us to many successes already, from big cover pieces, like Matt's recent Andrew Cuomo cover story, to faster features, like Audra Burch's Georgia voting story on the eve of the special election. Jessica takes on the role at a critical moment when the country's politics are more complex and the stakes are higher than ever. In it, she will be assigning, developing, editing or top editing all politics and investigative stories, and she'll be the main point of contact for the newsroom's politics and investigative teams as well.

In moving into this role, Jessica takes the reins of overseeing our political coverage from Charlie Homans, who will become a story editor. Charlie has been a brilliant politics editor for the magazine, and he will continue to be a close collaborator with Jessica on our political coverage. But Charlie, as we all know, is also a brilliant writer, who's been responsible for some of our best politics stories of the past couple years, including the Mitch McConnell profile in 2019 or the militias piece earlier this year. This change will free him up to write more of our political coverage, acting as a kind of player/coach, something he's been eager to do and something that will be a happy outcome for the magazine.

The last piece of this puzzle is Bill's move into the new role of editorial director. In this job, Bill will be taking over from me much of the oversight of the way our issues come together every week. Bill is already deeply involved in the early stages of the process, as a frequent reader of first drafts and source of guidance for story editors on the front end of the process. In this new role he will continue to do that, but he'll also have more responsibility for the back end of the process as well, where he'll manage the myriad decisions that come up in the final four weeks before a given piece gets published. He will be helped in this by our new assistant managing editor, a position we are currently looking to fill, who will report to Bill. Together they will maintain a deep understanding of the status of all drafts in the system, and generally keep our process running smoothly, which in turn will enable us to raise our level of ambition. In addition to this, Bill will continue to be a top editor on many stories, along with Ilena, Jessica, Sasha and Charlie.

These new roles (along with Adrienne Green joining the staff in September as a deputy editor of Special Projects) will complete a process of reorganization that gives the magazine a leadership structure with greater capacity to tackle the big ambitious work that lies ahead. They will also make the management of the magazine more transparent, with more clarity about who does what. Please join me in congratulating Ilena, Jessica, Bill and Charlie on their new roles.

Jake

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The New York Times Company published this content on 30 July 2021 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 30 July 2021 10:48:02 UTC.