The New York Times announces a new role for Bill Brink in Opinion

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Sports, Politics, International, Media, Business, The Magazine. There is hardly a desk at The Times that Bill Brink hasn’t worked on during his long and storied career. Now we are delighted to share that he will add Opinion to his résumé as he brings his editing chops and journalistic leadership to the section.

Bill is joining us in a key new role: to expand and modernize how Times Opinion approaches providing guidance and endorsements in political races. As many of you know, this is a conversation we’ve been having for years, and our Harris endorsement in the presidential race last fall reinforced the important service they can offer in American politics. To this end, Bill will work closely with Opinion’s Graphics and Design teams and other editors to develop new formats for assessing the candidates on a range of issues, values and governing priorities. He will get to work right away on New York’s upcoming mayoral election, as well as the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey this year.

During his decades at The Times, Bill has worked on many of the biggest stories of our lives. Since joining International in 2021, he has overseen coverage of Russia and Ukraine and their three-year-old war, responsible for a Moscow bureau displaced from Russia and a team of Ukraine reporters working in challenging and often life-threatening conditions. That coverage was part of a newsroomwide reporting effort that earned a Polk Award and a Pulitzer in 2023. In London, Bill also handled coverage of Britain with stories that included the flameout of Boris Johnson, the death of Queen Elizabeth and the coronation of King Charles.

Bill was a deputy Politics editor during the 2020 presidential campaign and the 2018 congressional midterms, working closely with Patrick and Rachel Dry to oversee coverage of a historic race upended first by the Covid pandemic and then the rout of an incumbent president who sought to overturn the election.

Before that, Bill was a high-impact Media editor for several years in Business, where he edited David Carr for four years and supervised coverage by Emily Steel, Mike Schmidt and others on the sexual harassment scandals at Fox News, Roger Ailes’s resignation and the downfall of Bill O’Reilly, which became part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning #MeToo coverage of 2018.

And he spent two decades in Sports, where he supervised coverage of five Super Bowls, four World Series, countless major golf tournaments and the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Bill also spent three years as managing editor of a Times magazine, the sports publication Play. Through all of this work, Bill was someone the newsroom could always call on with an urgent assignment.

In addition to the public-service effort of our new candidate/voter project, Bill will work with some of our columnists and in-house writers, tapping his expertise in international, politics and other areas. Bill is an editor who is beloved by his colleagues, a leader who takes great care in listening and understanding the dynamics of a story or project and the needs and concerns of the journalists working on it. Few people have been devoted so long and deeply to the mission of The Times and helping readers better understand America and the world.

Welcome, Bill, to Opinion.

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