(Newsglobal.com)- According to his relatives, a political journalist for the New York Times died at 44 “after a long and heroic fight with depression.”
Blake Hounshell was a senior editor at Foreign Policy magazine and Politico until joining The Times in 2021. He passed away on Tuesday in Washington, DC. A police officer said that his death would be investigated as a suicide.
Executive editor Joseph Kahn wrote in a memo to coworkers that the new employee quickly distinguished himself as our principal politics newsletter writer and a brilliant observer of our country’s political landscape after joining The Times.
Sandy, Hounshell’s wife, and their two children are left behind.
In an essay he started for Politico Magazine, he was complimented for his “encyclopedic” knowledge of the world and quick understanding of how technology may affect journalism.
Hounshell, a Yale alumnus who graduated in 2002, was born in California in 1978 but was reared in Pittsburgh and Delaware.
He began his career in journalism after studying Arabic for a while in Cairo. He was a finalist for the 2011 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists for his coverage of the Arab Spring.
From 2009 until 2013, he served as managing editor of Foreign Policy, overseeing the magazine’s move to the online era.
Following that, Hounshell worked for Politico for eight years in various executive roles, including magazine editor-in-chief.
After gaining expertise with a growingly popular format at Foreign Policy and Politico, he was then hired by The Times to start a newsletter.
The Times said it was “making huge investments in newsletter talent” when it hired him.
In his most current On Politics newsletter, published on Monday, Hounshell investigated the death penalty in California and the political pressure it was putting on its governor Gavin Newsom. On Friday, he wrote on how the Republican party is struggling to draw in young voters.
Scott Jennings, a conservative political commentator, and broadcaster, claimed to have recently spoken with Hounshell about a story about the Kentucky governor’s race.
“Always felt he was a fantastic reporter and a wonderful guy,” the author wrote. It reminds us that we can never truly know what people are going through on the inside.
