Post Becoming a Farm Team for NYT

It seems like only yesterday that newspapers across the country served as training grounds for the Washington Post. Reporters came from the Dallas Morning News, the Boston Globe, and the Raleigh News & Observer. Miami Herald alums like Gene Weingarten and David Von Drehle became stars at the paper of Watergate fame.

Now the Washington Post seems to have become a farm team for the New York Times. Business writer Peter Goodman, the most recent convert, made the leap and starts this month. Goodman brings the number of former Post staffers now at the Times to 17.

“It’s a big list,” says one former Post Metro reporter, “and it’s going to keep growing.”

Why do Post writers jump ship? Investigative reporter Serge Kovaleski wanted to write for his hometown paper. His wife, Jo Becker, made the move to be with her husband.

But in every case, the new Times writers say they left the Post for better editors, broader readership, more freedom, and better pay. All who leave profess love for the Post, but they still leave.

The list of former Post writers and editors now at Brand X includes New York–based Style writer Michael Powell; Metro reporters Ray Rivera, Manny Fernandez, and Sewell Chan; religion writer Laurie Goodstein; and fashion critic Cathy Horyn.

You can read John Schwartz’s accessible science stories on the Times’s front page. Ditto the political dispatches of Mark Leibovich, once the darling of the Post Style section.

And whom has the Post lured from the Times? Political writer Anne Kornblut is about it.

This article first appeared in the October 2007 issue of Washingtonian Magazine, available on newsstands.

Harry Jaffe