David Halbfinger | The New York Times
I am thrilled to announce that Michael Gold, a lavishly talented story spotter, reporter and writer who has been a rising star on the Metro desk since 2018, has joined the Politics desk as a campaign correspondent.
It goes without saying that for much of the past year, Michael has, with Grace Ashford, utterly owned the George Santos saga — a story that they broke and then dominated, delivering scoop after scoop laden with the kind of delicious details you couldn’t possibly make up.
On our team, Michael will do double duty, applying a marathoner’s stamina to the role of road warrior as he follows Donald Trump and other candidates on the trail, but also bringing his speed, smarts and wit, and his writing flair, to our breaking news operation, giving it a powerful boost as the cycle heats up.
Everywhere he’s been, Michael has made a mark. As a breaking news reporter for Metro, he brilliantly covered everything from crime to Pride, wrote countless snappy and informative explainers, documented natural and unnatural phenomena and pondered if Happy the elephant was truly happy. He’s also “written an embarrassing amount about Jennifer Lopez for this newspaper,” Michael acknowledged, “but we all have to be experts in something.” And for evidence of his ability to hatch a fun idea and then carry it through to execution, check out his New Year’s Eve Covid story written in the form of a countdown.
On the transportation beat, perhaps his most memorably written feature concerned some Christmas decorations that turned the Holland Tunnel entrance into a giant typo. We are suckers for wordplay on the Politics desk, and Michael rendered one of the best puns I’ve ever seen in The Times.
“Michael is a monster talent whose amazing versatility has helped make him a huge contributor to Metro,” said Metro Editor Nestor Ramos, who was Michael’s editor in 2021. “But just as importantly, he’s an all-time-great colleague whose wit, generosity and kindness will be even harder to replace than his remarkable deadline skill and investigative chops.”
Michael hails from Northern Virginia and went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he edited Matt Flegenheimer on the Daily Pennsylvanian. He went on to Philly.com, The Baltimore Sun (he remains an Orioles fan) and The Washington Post, where he ran the social desk, before joining The Times’s audience development team in 2015. He was a big part of our live operation on the 2016 presidential cycle.
We are incredibly lucky to have Michael as a colleague. Please welcome him.
