Next Chapter for Ellen Pollock

One of Ellen Pollock's many charms is her steady stream of self-deprecating one-liners. "Remember," she often says when feigning confusion about the ways of The Times, "I'm new here."

In fact, she is not new here. Ellen has been at The Times for nine years, all of them as our creative, aggressive, indefatigable and, yes, entertaining Business editor. In recent months, Ellen has told us that she felt it was time to move on from leading our business and economics coverage.

Ellen will step down as Business editor in September, but happily she is not stepping away from The Times and will be putting her editing and reporting skills to good use. We'll have more to say about her next role soon, but let us first take a moment to salute her success as Business editor.

When Ellen came to The Times in 2017 she had already had a distinguished career as a reporter and editor at The American Lawyer, The Wall Street Journal - where she was a deputy page-one editor - and at Businessweek, where she was editor in chief.

Ellen likes to joke that she knows nothing about business and that at her first job she realized she didn't know the difference between revenue and profit and had to call her father, a physics professor, to learn how to calculate percentages.

She seems to have picked up enough along the way to remake almost every aspect of The Times's business coverage from tech, to economics and monetary policy, to business investigations, to media and personal finance. And, given her magazine and feature background, she has emphasized sharp storytelling in all forms.

In accepting the Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021, she said, "When it comes to business reporting, getting the story behind the story, and telling it through real people is journalism magic, whether you are writing about private equity and taxes or Ozy or Dollar Tree."

We know from experience that Ellen is not shy about pushing against authority. But perhaps the biggest mark Ellen has left on business coverage has been expanding the definition of what makes a business story, while making sure we continued strong coverage of the more traditional beats that readers would expect from the report.

"It's anything that touches on a job or money or something that involves someone who works for a company or the government," said David Enrich, whom Ellen recruited as her department's finance editor and later appointed its investigations editor. "They are stories about people. That is a very liberating interpretation."

Under Ellen, the Business desk has produced groundbreaking investigative work on airline near-misses and sexual assaults in Ubers, deep features on how tech has invaded everyday life (including one reporter who tracked her husband with an AirTag), the schisms and evolution of the A.I. business, and all things Musk and Murdoch.

Adrienne Carter, Ellen's first deputy, said, "She has created a business section that both appeals to the general interest reader but is also a must-read for leaders in industry and government."

And, anyone who has worked with Ellen knows that at least a touch of her cut-to-the-chase honesty and wit gets sprinkled into any piece. "She can pull a line out of the air and make a story better with a little cheeky wink," said Pui-Wing Tam, Ellen's deputy and the tech editor.

Speaking of cheeky, no one will forget Ellen's standing stock prediction, always delivered with authority: "The stock market goes up. The stock market goes down." She's never wrong.

We will begin a full search for a new Business editor immediately. For now, please join us in congratulating Ellen on her tenure and on her next chapter .

- Joe, Carolyn and Marc