New role for Deborah Solomon at The New York Times

Deborah Solomon

We’re thrilled to announce that Deborah Solomon is now our economics editor, with expanded responsibilities overseeing reporters in New York as well as Washington, D.C., where she already is in charge of economic policy coverage.

Deborah will preside over a newly formed group of reporters, some of whom are assigned to the Washington bureau and others to Business. This group is tackling many of the most pressing stories out there: trade, fiscal and monetary policy, employment, inflation, taxes — and the country’s overall economic well-being.

As many of you already know, Deborah is uniquely suited to this role and has distinguished herself for her understanding of economic policy, her dedication to her colleagues, her ability to run two blogs at once and her stamina. She joined The Times in September 2017, just as the first Trump administration was weighing a big package of tax cuts and, yes, sweeping tariffs. She oversaw our coverage during the Federal Reserve’s historic response to the Covid crisis and the inflation that came afterward. Now she is our tariff queen.

Deborah has previously worked at Bloomberg, The San Francisco Chronicle and USA Today. She spent 15 years at The Wall Street Journal, in New York and then Washington. As a reporter covering the telecommunications industry, Deborah co-wrote a story about how three midlevel accounting staffers uncovered billions in fraud at WorldCom, leading to its collapse. It was part of a package of stories that won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.

She later led The Journal’s coverage of the federal government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis and was a finalist, along with her colleagues, for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. As an editor in Washington, she oversaw The Journal’s regulatory and law enforcement coverage.

At The Times, Deborah has won admirers in both Washington and New York. “Anyone who has ever worked with her knows that she loves the news and cares deeply about getting it right. She fights for her reporters when they need it, cheers them on when it matters, and is tough on content but not on people,” said Jeanna Smialek, who covered the Fed before moving to Brussels for International last year. “Working for her was the best thing that ever happened to my career. I learned so much from watching her: She spends every day thinking about how to make our economic policy coverage more accessible, interesting and ambitious than the day before, and she will do incredible things in an even bigger and more ambitious role.”

Please join us in congratulating her.