Huffington Post Hires Nick Baumann

Mother Jones senior editor Nick Baumann will join the Huffington Post as senior enterprise editor, HuffPost DC bureau boss Ryan Grim tells staffers in a memo. His work will complement the longform initiative Rachel Morris and Greg Veis are working on; they came to HuffPost from the New Republic after its management canned former editor Franklin Foer.

Grim’s memo:

Some exciting news: Nick Baumann will be joining us in May as our senior enterprise editor. As Rachel and Greg continue building out our longform unit, creating this position enhances our ability to produce stories that are not simply quick, breaking news items and aren’t massive takeouts, either. The pieces that fall in the middle of those two poles can end up being the most impactful things we do, changing the way people think about an issue in real time, drawing on and adding to news we’ve been breaking in an incremental fashion along the way. Once upon a time, these types of stories, at their best, would run on the front page of the newspaper, when such things existed. The printed product may be obsolete, but the front page itself was a good mechanism to force editors and reporters to think about how a story will be relevant 24 hours or more from now. These stories aren’t determined by an arbitrary word length, but by their approach to the piece. Nobody is better for this task than Nick, as many of you who’ve had the pleasure of working with him in the past know already.

Nick, as is the model here at HuffPost, is a reporter at heart and in his eight years writing for Mother Jones has produced some of the magazine’s finest journalism. He is also a longtime contributor to The Economist (or so he claims; he can’t produce a single bylined piece to back that up) and has published everywhere across the spectrum.

But, of course, most importantly, if you don’t already follow him, he’s @NickBaumann.

Andrew Beaujon

Senior editor

Andrew Beaujon joined Washingtonian in late 2014. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. He lives in Del Ray.