ABC News said Tuesday that it had hired Susan Saulny, a national correspondent for The New York Times, to be a correspondent for the network in Washington.

Her hiring came one day after ABC poached Jeff Zeleny, one of the newspaper’s best-known political correspondents, to be the network’s senior Washington correspondent.

“Susan has spent the last 12 years with The New York Times covering national news and contributing to the paper’s digital video efforts,” the ABC News president Ben Sherwood wrote in an internal memorandum that called her “a superb reporter and writer.” She will start work at ABC next month.

Before joining The Times, Ms. Saulny was a staff writer for The Washington Post. Jill Abramson, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement last week that “the second I asked Susan to focus on video during the 2012 campaign, I knew TV executives would come swooping down on her.” She added, “She’s a tremendously gifted reporter and writer who, perhaps unfortunately for me, lights up any screen.”

The Times increasingly finds itself in competition with television, as it produces more video for its Web site and as television networks produce more articles for their Web sites.

Two weeks ago, Ms. Abramson appointed Rick Berke, a former political correspondent, Washington editor and assistant managing editor for The Times, to direct the news organization’s video content development. She said at the time that Mr. Berke “will give us a fresh eye as we rethink and reexamine our video priorities and he will play a pivotal role as we make video a much larger part of our journalistic mission.”

A week earlier, The Times hired Rebecca Howard, the head of video development at the AOL Huffington Post Media group, to be the company’s general manager of video production.

The back-to-back departures by high-level reporters are rare for an institution like The Times, and they caused some uneasiness when they were reported to be imminent by Politico last week. They come at a time when The New York Times Company has sought to shrink newsroom expenses. Last month, the company completed a round of buyouts and layoffs of about 30 managers.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/susan-saulny-leaves-the-times-for-abc-news/?partner=rss&emc=rss