New York Times : Shawn McCreesh Rejoins The Times

Politics is a serious business, and you have been a seriously unbeatable team in covering this extraordinary campaign in every conceivable way. You've led the field in defining the enormous stakes of this election, capturing the candidates' strengths and stumbles, getting inside the legal battles, zooming us up close with frazzled voters in a polarized electorate, and responding to political shock waves that buffet us almost daily from every direction.

Your aggressiveness in breaking, analyzing, investigating, exposing and reporting the news, fast and fearlessly, is only matched by the stylishness of your prose. Our readers have gobbled up every morsel of irony, hypocrisy, skewering wit and just plain sparkling writing that you've served up to lighten or just capture the mood. And I'm delighted to announce that we will soon be joined by someone who can contribute on both fronts and help us deliver even more.

Shawn McCreesh is joining The Times as a feature writer for the Politics desk.

This is another happy homecoming. Shawn, who has been the media writer for New York Magazine for two and a half years, worked at The Times as Maureen Dowd's assistant for five years beginning in 2017. He interviewed with her on St. Patrick's Day. Allow Maureen herself to set the scene:

"His hands were shaking," she remembered. "He was working as a waiter at a Lower East Side joint called Birds & Bubbles that served only fried chicken and champagne. He had cold-emailed me about the assistant job, leading bluntly with 'I did not go to an Ivy League school.' At the interview, he played his only card immediately, saying 'My grandfather was from Armagh.' He was sweetly oblivious to the fact that I didn't want to hire a scrappy Irish redhead from a turbulent working-class family with no Ivy League degree. I had that covered.

"But Shawn's clips were really well written and evocative," Maureen continued. "He had a voice that was a throwback to the giants that flourished in magazines in New York in the 60s and 70s. And it was, like all great feature writing, backed up by assiduous reporting, which gave it a jolt."

Hired, he moved to Washington, where, Maureen recounted, "He was able to cajole, wheedle, charm, finagle, and yes, blarney his way into all sorts of places he wasn't supposed to be to write the - I have to use my favorite adjective here - ensorcelling stories that put him on the journalistic map."

Shawn reported from outside the White House the day protesters there were tear-gassed and President Trump took a walk with a Bible in hand. He crashed Sarah Huckabee Sanders's going-away party and James Comey's book party. He was on the front steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6. And, for Opinion, he filed moving reported essays about how his hometown in the Philadelphia suburbs was being torn apart by the 2020 election and ravaged by the opioid crisis.

More recently, Shawn's magazine work has taken him everywhere from Queens to Cannes to the White House and to a right-wing watering hole on, of all places, the Upper East Side. On the media beat, his reported column "Stop the Presses" required casting a gimlet eye on The Times from time to time, and he wrote long-form profiles of Peter Gelb, Mathias Dopfner, Walter Isaacson and Emma Tucker.

Now, beginning on May 28, Shawn, a graduate of St. John's University, will apply his many gifts and prodigious skills to bringing this campaign to life in vivid color and delectable detail, following in the sizable footsteps of such feature-writing forebears as Matt Flegenheimer, Frank Bruni and, well, you-know-who.

"In a world where no one seems to know how to talk to each other anymore, Shawn can talk to anyone - high, low, red, blue, green, polka dot," Maureen added, ensuring she'd own the kicker of this announcement. "He can be wickedly funny and trenchant in his writing, but it is always laced with humanity. Like those fast-talking, hard-boiled hacks of yore, he's a softie underneath."

- Dave

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