Over the past year, the Styles desk has covered the intersection of culture and politics and increased its news metabolism. To continue with both of these efforts, we are announcing a new addition to the team, Jesse McKinley, and a well-deserved promotion for Benjamin Hoffman.
Jesse McKinley, who has traversed the newsroom and the country for The Times, moves to Styles as a domestic correspondent, where he will write about the confluence of lifestyle, pop culture and politics.
Jesse started at The Times as a copy assistant when he was 18, and never left. He worked as a clerk and news assistant, before starting to write for the late, great City Weekly section, covering the East Village. He moved on to the Culture desk, where he wrote the On Stage and Off column.
After eight years of covering Broadway, he moved to the National desk and California as the San Francisco bureau chief. While there, he covered the administrations of Jerry Brown, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gavin Newsom; followed a series of devastating wildfires; embedded with a group of white supremacists; and reported on the occasional tremor, both seismic and cultural.
Returning to the East Coast, he wrote features for the How We Live pod before moving to Metro, where he served as bureau chief in Albany, covering state politics. In recent years, he’s been using his upstate perch to cover upstate events, and more recently, the action in the trial of former President Donald Trump.
“For years, Jesse has been Metro’s go-to reporter whenever we needed a thorny story reported deeply and written clearly and elegantly,” said Nestor Ramos. “Whether the assignment was about a complex state political dynamic, a mass shooting or an uncommonly large and fragrant upstate landfill, Jesse reliably came back with the goods. And he did it with the humility and grace that makes him an all-star colleague, too.”
He has already gotten started with Styles, with stories about how Mr. Trump speaks about the appearance of others and what Dave Grohl’s announcement of having a baby outside his marriage says about crisis communication.
Jesse studied acting and political science at New York University.
We are also thrilled to share that our new senior editor for news is Benjamin Hoffman. For the past year, Ben has been working with Alicia DeSantis on multimedia projects and specifically on Styles assigning, editing and writing some of the desk’s most popular stories.
Coming off of two decades as a Sports editor at The Times, Ben joined us just in time to cover the effect of Taylor Swift on the N.F.L. He watched hours of game footage to determine just how often Ms. Swift was actually on camera, and shepherded a story about the managers who helped to make Travis Kelce a celebrity long before he made a friendship bracelet. During this time, he also assigned and published stories ranging from $100 chicken nuggets to nepo children.
On Sports, Ben became known for his creativity and hard work under pressure. His roles included baseball editor, night editor, writer and print designer; he pioneered the desk’s live coverage, encouraged the adoption of new article formats, and increased its news metabolism and speed in publishing during high-profile events like the N.F.L. draft. Early in the pandemic, Ben was also instrumental in the launch of At Home, where he worked closely with all of the Culture and Lifestyle desks to help readers live a fuller, more cultured life under lockdown.
When he joined Styles, Ben brought The Times’s signature coverage of the Westminster Dog Show to the desk, and worked with the wider newsroom’s Olympics team to assign and shape lifestyle stories about the Games. He will spearhead the desk’s daily and weekly news hits.
He is a firm believer that sports league abbreviations should continue to take points — N.B.A., M.L.B. and N.F.L. forever — and attempts to say “That’s not the way we do it” no more than once a week.
Please join us in welcoming Jesse to Styles and congratulate Ben on his new role.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here