Paula Szuchman Joins the Enterprise Team

Every day, the Times newsroom is unmatched in producing ambitious enterprise and investigative journalism. We investigate presidents and dictators alike. We write spellbinding narratives and deeply reported explanatory pieces. We do groundbreaking visual investigations, audio projects and multimedia extravaganzas that blend graphics with photos, video and text.

Our ambition and output keep growing, and I'm pleased to announce that we have found the perfect person to round out our Enterprise team: Paula Szuchman.

As a senior editor for enterprise, Paula will join Hannah Fairfield, Dean Murphy, Karen Workman and myself in coordinating, vetting and encouraging major enterprise coverage across the newsroom. Like Dean and Hannah, Paula will partner with different departments while also taking turns running the noon meeting. (She already has her first assignment: coordinating our enterprise coverage of gambling and prediction markets.)

Paula is a journalistic entrepreneur, with a long career shaping stories in all forms, most recently in her role as our director of Audio, one of the most dynamic and creative departments at The Times. Under her leadership, "The Daily" last year shattered 500 million streams on Spotify - a milestone that only four other podcasts globally have reached. She was also essential in building out our full audio menu, including shows like "The Headlines," "Hard Fork," "Cannonball," "The Run-Up" and "The Daily Sunday."

Last year, I worked closely with Paula, Lisa Tobin and Larissa Anderson on "The Protocol," the multipart enterprise audio project that featured Azeen Ghorayshi and Austin Mitchell and examined the history and politics of gender care for minors. The news kept forcing us to change our approach but Paula always had a clear-eyed vision for the narrative throughline.

"Paula is a creative force who makes stories better by always asking the right questions and pushing for sharper angles," said Sam Dolnick. "I'll be excited to see what she does next to elevate our work across the report. The Audio department's loss is the newsroom's gain."

Paula's journalism career began in print, with jobs at Condé Nast Traveler, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, where she spent eight formative years, including three years as an editor on Page One. At The Journal, she shaped stories on the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the presidential election of Barack Obama and the Arab Spring. She left to become a deputy editor at Newsweek under Tina Brown before running the newsroom at The Daily Beast. Then public radio called, and she spent five years as head of development at WNYC Studios.

Paula (whose surname is pronounced SHOO-min) joined The Times in March 2020 as the founding head of Opinion Audio, where she built a team from the ground up and launched several new podcasts, including "The Ezra Klein Show." She joined the newsroom as director of Audio the following year.

We are thrilled that she is now joining us on enterprise.

- Jim