The New York Times: Rebecca Chao and John MacDonald are on the move

Rebecca Chao

Last fall, two talented editors, Rebecca Chao and John MacDonald, took on temporary assignments to help meet the editing needs of Flex, Metro and Obits. The arrangement was an immediate success, thanks in no small part to their terrific work. In fact, everyone agreed it was so successful that we’re excited to announce that we’re making it permanent.

Rebecca, an editor on the Metro desk for the past two years, will rejoin Flex — where she started her career at The Times in 2019 — to take on the important task of editing advance obituaries, a role that will provide her with more stability than she enjoyed during her first stint with the desk, when she floated to more than a dozen other departments around the newsroom, including Politics during the 2020 election cycle.

For the past two years, whenever a second editor was needed to assist with copy, Rebecca was there to lend a hand. She jumped in on live coverage of Salman Rushdie’s stabbing in upstate New York, the trials of Ghislaine Maxwell and R. Kelly, the Gilgo Beach murders, and the criminal and civil cases against Donald Trump. She also helped edit many of the stories that arose from the arrival of Ukrainian refugees and Venezuelan migrants, and protests over the Israel-Hamas war. And with so much of the city’s fauna making news last year, she had the “delight,” as she called it, of editing articles about escaped zoo animals, pet alligators, Long Island turtles in need of rehab and even a school of 300 fish living in a hospital basement.

John MacDonald

John, who joined Flex two and a half years ago after 12 years at the Licensing Group, has become an invaluable part of the desk’s efforts to train editors and has been in high demand as a floating editor with scattered assignments on desks like Sports, International, Obits, Graphics, Washington and Express.

But he felt most at home on Metro, where he has twice floated for multi-month stints, including his current deployment. During his time there, he has handled a variety of second edits, while also backfielding the odd feature and breaking news story and occasionally working shifts as day editor. In fact, he’s been steadily filling in as the day editor on Saturdays since the fall.

Please join us in congratulating Rebecca and John on their new roles, which become official next week.