The New York Times’s International's leadership team published the following piece regarding Matt’s appointment on their website last week:
In 2018, Matt Apuzzo had one of the highest-profile investigative jobs at The Times, covering national security during the Trump administration. He was delivering scoop after scoop on a beat most investigative reporters could only dream of having.
Yet Matt chose to try something new.
He left Washington and moved to Brussels to join a small team of Europe-based investigative reporters, figuring it was time to reinvent himself.
Nearly four years later, after a passel of scoops and groundbreaking projects – as well as a piece of The Times’s Public Service Pulitzer in 2021 – Matt has again decided he wants to reinvent himself.
We are thrilled to announce that Matt will be our first international investigations editor, a role for which he will be a player-coach leading an overseas investigative team.
This is a big step for Matt, and for the International desk. Investigative work has long been in the lifeblood of International and will remain the work of reporters and editors across the desk. But this move will for the first time set up a formal structure dedicated to investigative work.
Matt will run a reporting team that will soon be named. But he will be available to work with other editors on the desk on projects involving other correspondents. The idea is to have someone whose role is to help catalyze, not monopolize, investigations across the International report.
Matt thrives when working in teams and has been a part of three that have won Pulitzer Prizes, for investigative, national and public service reporting.
When he joined International, Matt teamed up with Selam Gebrekidan to show how oligarchs and populist politicians have gotten rich off corrupting the European Union’s farm subsidy system. In 2020, they teamed up again to lead the Behind the Curve investigation into the world’s failed coronavirus response. Their most recent collaboration is coming soon.
Matt joined The Times in 2014 to cover the Justice Department. He wrote about the militarization of police and covered civil rights investigations in Ferguson, Mo. and elsewhere. He covered Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Trump administration and its tumultuous relationship with its own intelligence agencies.
Before joining The Times, Matt worked for The Associated Press, where he covered law enforcement and national security. Working alongside Adam Goldman and Eileen Sullivan (both now at The Times) he revealed the New York Police Department’s surveillance of innocent Muslims after 9/11. He got his start at The Standard Times, based in New Bedford, Mass., where he covered heroin trafficking and organized crime on the docks of America’s richest fishing port.
Matt is a former board member of Investigative Reporters and Editors (I.R.E.) and a frequent trainer on topics like source development and story structure. Through I.R.E. and The Times, he has mentored young reporters for years.
A graduate of Colby College with a degree in biology, Matt lives in Brussels.
Matt starts in his new position at the start of May. Please congratulate him on his latest reinvention (and ours).
— Michael, Jim, Greg, Adrienne, and Francesca
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