Damon Darlin, 56, who has enjoyed one of the great runs in international journalism, working for a wide variety of publications in an incredible variety of major cities, has been appointed international business editor at The New York Times and will be relocating from San Francisco to New York to assume his new responsibilities.
Here’s his peripatetic path, with a little help from his friends. Originally from Dubuque, Iowa, Darlin attended the University of Chicago and began his career in 1979 at the St. Cloud Daily News in Minnesota. He landed at the Wall Street Journal in Cleveland and Detroit. Then he lived and worked in Tokyo for the Journal in the 1980s, where he knew our mutual friend Jim Impoco (until recently at Reuters and with earlier stints at AP, U.S. News & World Report, Fortune, the New York Times and Portfolio). According to Impoco-san, Darlin in Tokyo “will be best remembered for an A-head he wrote on Japanese scatology.”
Darlin was then the Journal’s bureau chief in Seoul from 1989 to 1992. Forbes magazine lured him to Los Angeles. The next thing I knew, Jim Fallows seduced him into becoming an assistant managing editor at U.S. News & World Report in Washington in 1996, at about the same I joined that magazine. “He was at U.S. News with the rest of us,” Fallows recalls via email. “He is a great person, a great journalist, a great American, a great man-with-an-eye-on-practicalities, a great Iowan, and a great Turkish-American — though I am not sure in which order he would place that list.”
In 2000, at the height of the Internet bubble, Darlin took the plunge to Business 2.0 magazine in San Francisco. He listened to Russ Mitchell‘s sweet siren call, as did I a few months later in early 2001. Mitchell had worked at Business Week and U.S. News and was highly persuasive. “Damon’s intelligence is wide-ranging,” says Mitchell, now writing for Kaiser Health News. “He can also go deep. Whether the subject is collateralized mortgage obligations, Web 2.0 scripting languages, or the scientific merits of organic foods, Darlin is capable of challenging a reporter, in a good way, and make the story a whole lot better.”
The Business 2.0 adventure crashed and burned in the summer of 2001, when Time Inc. bought it and fired the entire staff. Darlin, however, was seen as so valuable that he was asked to return to the magazine. Business 2.0 ultimately was shut down despite Darlin’s editorial savvy and Time’s deep pockets.
In 2005, Darlin joined The Times as a columnist on the West Coast. He became technology editor in 2007 while based in San Francisco. But now with his new title, he is relocating to New York. “It’s a very good move for The Times, and reflected glory for all of his friends,” says Fallows, now back at his beloved Atlantic magazine. Darlin will be responsible for the newspaper’s staff of foreign business reporters. His appointment was announced by new business editor Dean Murphy, who replaced Larry Ingrassia.