Hasta La Ideas

Nick Baumann is joining The Huffington Post as a senior enterprise editor. He was most recently a senior editor at Mother Jones, where he has worked for the past eight years.

Baumann is also a contributor to The Economist and his writing has appeared in publications such as The Atlantic and Washington Monthly.

In a memo to staff, Ryan Grim, HuffPost’s Washington bureau chief wrote that adding Baumann “enhances our ability to produce stories that are not simply quick, breaking news items and aren’t massive takeouts, either.”

Baumann will join HuffPost in May. You can read Grim’s full note below.

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.