With so much going on in the news and at TPM, I wanted to take a moment to introduce you to our two new reporter-bloggers at TPMmuckraker.com. Reporting from Washington, DC is Andrew Tilghman — see his bio here. And working from the New York headquarters is Kate Klonick.
We got a lot of great applications. (If our means allowed it we probably would have hired a half dozen of them.) And one thing I will say is that these are really challenging jobs to hire for because there’s no real track record of anyone doing precisely what we have these folks doing. If I were hiring for a politics reporter at a big city paper or a story editor for a magazine, I know that would be hard too. But there’s a track record of people doing this kind of work and with a resume and clips and recommendations you can make reasonable judgments about whether the applicant has the experience and skills to do the job.
In our case, we need to rely a lot more on intuition since by definition, almost no one we hire has done what we’re hiring them to do. But we took a lot of time with this process. And we’re confident that we’ve got a pair of new reporter-bloggers who are going to carry on the tradition of their predecessors at the site and dig like crazy to find the stories that others are missing and bring you the nimble mix of aggregation and original reporting that the site has gained a reputation for.
So I encourage you to drop either or both of them a line welcoming them aboard, offering encouragement, advice, critiques and tips on stories that you think are ripe for more digging.
