Johanna Barr and Shauntel Lowe Take On New Roles

To ensure that the Metro desk dominated mayoral election coverage last year, Johanna Barr was detached from her daily duties and joined Dean Chang, the deputy editor for politics, in shepherding the nonstop news.

From the run-up to the Democratic primary through the inauguration, she drove live coverage and assigned a range of stories that helped our readers understand Zohran Mamdani's rise.

We knew she would help to provide a sense of urgency to our politics team. In her job running the day, she has consistently shined during big live stories, which was never more apparent than during the Manhattan trial of Donald Trump in 2024. For weeks on end, Johanna distilled a never-ending feed from our team of reporters in the courtroom into an intensely readable narrative of the day's events. She assigned and edited fast breakout items that made our coverage smarter and deeper. And she helped plan for every possible eventuality, keeping us ahead of the competition at every turn. The result was a blog that readers flocked to multiple times throughout the day.

I'm pleased to announce that Johanna will rejoin Dean by taking her skills and knowledge gained and applying them to a new role as news director of politics, policy and government. Our politics pod will expand to include the beats that touch City Hall and New York State government. We believe this will streamline storylines and foster collaboration to deliver breaking news, deeply reported enterprise and creative storytelling to our readers.

Johanna's team will include Emma Fitzsimmons, Liam Stack, Stefanos Chen and Mihir Zaveri.

In a way, this is Johanna's return to her roots. Before joining Metro in 2021, she was an editor on Politics during the 2020 presidential race, running live coverage as well as assigning news stories, enterprise and explainers. She joined The Times in 2016 and after a stint as a copy editor, joined the Express team as an editor. Before that, she was an editor at HuffPost.

Shauntel Lowe, who has been a force as an assistant editor, will take over the role of jump-starting our daily coverage. She is dependable and trustworthy, with solid news judgment and the speed of editing to go with it, and we are expecting her to quickly adapt to her new role. She has already proved herself time and time again, revamping the Sunday Routine column and helming Friday nights in her current role. A memorable Friday of 20 stories, with Shauntel expertly juggling them, serves as evidence of her ability to handle anything that comes her way. As a former sports editor, she's also a natural at Live coverage.

We will also tailor the role to meet Shauntel's passion for digging. She will work closely with metro's investigations team, as we invest in optimizing our impact through strategic timing and our choice of targets.

But much of Shauntel's current portfolio will remain the same, and she will continue to work with James Barron, shepherding our New York Today newsletter, and Ed Shanahan, one of Metro's strongest storytellers and breaking news stalwarts. She will also work closely with Samantha Latson, our Metro fellow, who has had a recent run of insightful stories on the nurses' strike.

And Shauntel will serve as the point of contact and work closely with Davaughnia Wilson, the news assistant for Metro, and Jenna Milliner-Waddell, Metro editing resident.

Shauntel joined The Times in 2017 as an editor on the Sports desk, where she ran coverage of the W.N.B.A. and N.B.A., leading the around-the-clock coverage of Kobe Bryant's death. Before that, she was an editor at Bleacher Report, where she co-founded B/R Mag, and a local reporter and editor in California.

Johanna and Shauntel both start on Monday. Please join us in congratulating them.

- Nikita, Felice, Dean, Andres and Judy