March 1, 2022

Four Editors Are Joining Flexible Editing

The Flexible Editing desk is delighted to be welcoming Elizabeth Yuan, Mike Peed, Dan Schneider and Hannah Wulkan as senior staff editors in the coming weeks. Read more in this note from Pete Blair.

Clockwise from top left: Elizabeth Yuan, Mike Peed, Dan Schneider, Hannah Wulkan

With the demands on the Flexible Editing desk growing and a number of our editors moving on to other jobs over the past few months, I am pleased to announce that the reinforcements are about to arrive: We’ll be adding four senior staff editors over the coming weeks — and they almost certainly won’t be the last.

Elizabeth Yuan joins The Times from The Wall Street Journal, where she worked for nine years, most recently as a publishing editor, serving on the final line of defense for stories before hitting the publish button.

Before that, she worked for 14 years at CNN, starting as a VJ at the Atlanta headquarters and within months writing for broadcast: first with CNN Headline News, then CNN International and CNN/U.S., followed by CNN’s wires, CNN.com and CNN.com’s international edition in Hong Kong, where she was a digital producer. She was also part of a team that covered slice-of-life stories during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.

At one point, she became a freelancer, working at CNN on overnights while by day distributing a Greek feature film, “Hard Goodbyes: My Father,” taking it to 40 theaters across the country over two years, culminating with a one-week run at Village East Cinema and a review by Laura Kern in The Times (a “life highlight,” she says, and the print edition carried a still from the film, a bonus).

Mike Peed is joining Flex in what qualifies for him as a return to The Times: He was first hired by Opinion in 2011 to establish that desk’s fact-checking department and came to assign and edit pieces for the Op-Ed page and Sunday Review.

Before The Times, Mike spent many years on the editorial staff of The New Yorker, helping to manage the magazine’s fact-checking department and writing Tables for Two columns and Talk of the Town stories. A feature he wrote for The New Yorker on a blight destroying the world’s banana crops was cited by the “Best American Science and Nature Writing” series. Mike has also edited at Men’s Journal, and he began his career at National Journal, then a weekly magazine covering politics and public policy.

Mike left The Times to report and research a book of literary nonfiction and to teach classes in journalism, narrative nonfiction and literature at Choate Rosemary Hall, the Connecticut boarding school. He returned briefly to Opinion in the summer of 2020.

Mike has contributed to the Book Review for more than a decade, and he’s written for Metro and the erstwhile City section. His byline has appeared in many other publications as well, including The Washington Post.

Dan Schneider is returning to the newsroom after spending the last few years as a senior editor at The New York Times Syndicate, where he handled editing duties for news services including The Economist and The Harvard Business Review, and worked with essayists and writers to create and develop international projects.

Dan is a veteran Times hand, with years of deadline experience working as a copy or slot editor on most of the traditional daily and weekly news desks. He first found a home on the Metro copy desk and was later a part of The Times’s original emergency editing team (SWAT). Dan taught at The New York Times Student Journalism Institute from 2016 to 2018.

He has written for the news and Sunday sections, the magazine and the Book Review, and contributed articles to Artforum and ArtNews magazines. Before working on the copy desks, Dan was a producer and editor for Times Topics, the early digital news encyclopedia, and a longtime editorial assistant at The Times’s United Nations bureau. He began his Times career as a copyboy.

Hannah Wulkan began her Times career as a news assistant in 2017 and was the first person to work on the Proofing Project, where she was responsible for proofreading as many as three dozen articles a day after publication.

In 2019, she was promoted and became contest coordinator and an assistant editor, overseeing The Times’s submissions to over 40 contests, including the Pulitzers. In that role, she was also an editor on Neediest Cases Fund campaigns and worked on other newsroom initiatives, including P.P.E. distribution at the start of the pandemic.

Over the past two summers she has embedded with the Flex desk, and she is excited to make the move permanent.

Elizabeth and Mike join The Times next week. We’ll welcome Dan in April and Hannah in May. Please join me in congratulating them.

Pete

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