NEW YORK, United States — Former Gawker editor Choire Sicha has been named editor of the New York Times Styles section, multiple sources have confirmed to BoF. (A spokesperson for the Times would not confirm or comment. Sicha did not respond to an email request for comment.)
The news, first reported by Vanity Fair, confirms industry chatter that Sicha, currently on the leadership team at Vox Media, was one of three candidates being considered by executive editor Dean Baquet to replace outgoing Styles editor Stuart Emmrich.
Sources inside the Times say that while Sicha was long the favoured choice above internal candidate Jim Windolf (current men's style editor of the section) and Lori Leibovich, editor of Time Inc.'s Realsimple.com, some were concerned that Sicha, whose work at Gawker and The Awl helped to define the voice of internet-era journalism, would deviate too much from the Styles' current, if oft-ridiculed, formula. Which, by the way, Sicha has himself skewered time and again over the years.
But regardless of whether or not the section is in desperate need of an editorial refresh, top editors involved in hiring for the position — including Baquet, food editor Sam Sifton and Trish Hall, who works on "new projects" — were eager to hire someone with a deep understanding of digital publishing. (The Cut's Stella Bugbee was offered the position earlier this year, but chose to remain at the New York Magazine-owned brand, where she has now been promoted to president.)
In addition to starting on the ground floor at pioneering online tabloid Gawker and founding zeitgeist-y culture-and-humor publication the Awl, Sicha has also spent the last year at Vox Media, where he manages partnerships with social-media platforms such as Facebook and Snapchat. As video increases in priority for every publication, but especially mass publications, understanding how these platforms — where most video is watched — operate has never been more important.
He is also a wildly admired writer, whose well-circulated 2015 Eater profile of American cooking show star Ina Garten could easily fit onto the pages of a reinvented Styles section.
What Sicha does not have is a background in news or fashion, which plays into the speculation that the paper may split the section into "Styles" and "Fashion", more akin to how the food section is split into "Cooking" and "Restaurants". This split would allow the fashion section to develop its news operation further — something that has been encouraged by senior editors who want to see more A1 fashion stories —and perhaps also allow for further development on the commercial side. In 2015, the paper launched a monthly men's style section, which was seen as a bid to woo more advertisers.
A spokesperson at the Times did not respond to a request for comment regarding this potential shift.
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