The New York Times is making some changes to its arts and culture department, with the paper reassigning four critics to new roles and opening up a search for new writers to fill those vacated positions.
In a memo sent to the NYT Culture team on Tuesday, editor Sia Michel said music critic Jon Pareles, TV critic Margaret Lyons, chief theater critic Jesse Green and classical music critic Zachary Woolfe were the four writers who would be taking on new roles. Michel said the four are “best in class” and that she would be alerting the team to their new roles in the near future.
“Our readers are hungry for trusted guides to help them make sense of this complicated landscape, not only through traditional reviews but also with essays, new story forms, videos and experimentation with other platforms,” Michel told her team. “Our mission is to be those guides.”
Moving forward, Michel and the Culture department are aiming to fill those open roles with at least four new hires, a person with knowledge of the situation told TheWrap.
Michel acknowledged “these are big changes” in her memo; Pareles has been with the Times since 1988, Green has been the Times’ top theater critic since 2017, Lyons joined the paper a year earlier and Woolfe has been working for the paper in some capacity since 2011.
At the same time, Michel said “It is important to bring different perspectives to core disciplines as we help our coverage expand beyond the traditional review.”
The Times, relative to other media outlets, has been thriving of late. Last week, Bloomberg News added to the growing number of media outlets that have laid off employees this year — a list that includes IndieWire, Forbes, Vox, The Washington Post, Scripps and the Huffington Post. The NYT, meanwhile, has seen its stock price increase about 4% year-to-date, and its digital subscriptions during the first quarter of the year were up 14%.
Variety was first to report the NYT shakeup.
