Nestor Ramos named Metro editor of The New York Times

Nestor Ramos

Even as we expand nationally and internationally, and our storytelling embraces audio and visuals as well as text, New York infuses The New York Times. Our coverage of our home city remains core to our identity and the source of some of our strongest journalism.

Which is why we’re delighted to announce a new Metro editor who enthusiastically embraces that mission, loves the city, and inspires our growing team of Metro reporters and editors. That person is Nestor Ramos.

Though Nestor joined us during the pandemic, which means he had to learn the ropes and guide his teams remotely, he had impact — and a constituency of enthusiastic colleagues — right from the start. He has shepherded some of the desk’s highest impact stories, including the unraveling of the Trump investigation inside the Manhattan district attorney’s office, the exoneration of the men convicted of killing Malcolm X, and, more recently, the mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket.

He believes deeply in nurturing and developing the staff, in working with young reporters and veteran journalists, and in building on Metro’s ambitions in investigations and narrative storytelling. Reporters on Metro rave about his ability to sharpen and elevate ideas, and his ability to bring out the best in their work.

Cliff Levy said, “Nestor has an old-school reverence for our craft, deft hands, a collaborative spirit and a bountiful enthusiasm for a great story. All of which explains why reporters have clamored to work with him pretty much from the day he joined The Times.”

Prior to joining The Times, Nestor was a columnist at The Boston Globe, and a Pulitzer finalist for feature writing for “At the Edge of a Warming World,’’ a deeply reported exploration of the effects of climate change on Cape Cod.

He began his career in newspapers in an unglamorous role — sorting the mail at The Oregonian — but everywhere he has landed, he has quickly become a leader.

After Oregon, he went to South Dakota, where he ran a weekly newspaper focused on the state’s nine Native American tribes and their reservations, and then became an editor of local news at The Argus Leader in Sioux Falls. He moved from there to Rochester, where he rose to enterprise editor at the Democrat and Chronicle.

The Boston Globe hired him to be a general assignment reporter, then made him a columnist. In those roles, he wrote about mass shootings and gun control, and worked on narrative features about the opioid crisis and death in the White Mountains. (And be sure to check out his sweaty turn filling in for Slyde the Fox, the mascot for The New England Revolution soccer team.) Eventually, The Globe made him a city editor and then appointed him on the masthead as an assistant managing editor.

Please join us in congratulating Nestor.