I googled and it turns out - he has yet to join The Times. He starts his job on the 25th.

Blake Hounshell Is Joining The Times | The New York Times Company

Blake, who spent the last eight years in a series of important roles at Politico, is joining us to help re-engineer and build a new team for On Politics, already one of the biggest and best newsletters of its kind. Read more in this note from Adam Pasick and David Halbfinger.

Newsletters are an increasingly important platform for Times journalism, and a way for millions of readers to connect to original reporting and incisive analysis from some of our most talented reporters.

As part of this growth, The Times is making significant investments in newsletter talent. In the newsroom, our national security editor, Amy Fiscus, recently joined David Leonhardt’s Morning team, and Opinion has recently added high-profile newsletters from Kara Swisher, Tressie McMillan Cottom, John McWhorter and many others.

Now, with a firehose of political news for our readers to make sense of each day, we’re turning to an expert on both newsletters and political coverage, Blake Hounshell, to help us as we re-engineer and build a new team for On Politics — already one of the biggest and best newsletters of its kind. It will soon become part of the Times newsletter portfolio available only to paying subscribers.

To say that Blake is broadly knowledgeable about politics and government is an understatement. He comes to us from Politico, where he was known as an idea machine and spent the last eight years in a series of important roles, most recently managing editor for Washington and politics. In that post, he oversaw coverage of Congress, the White House, the judiciary, national security and defense, the federal budget, politics and campaigns — a 70-person operation.

He is also a newsletter native, and has been editing, writing and launching newsletters and blogs for 15 years, beginning at Foreign Policy magazine in 2006. He brings long, valuable experience in achieving the right combination of content, form, tone and style to engage a discriminating, busy digital readership, and in balancing the interests of paying customers against the goal of reaching the widest possible audience.

A native of Pittsburgh, Blake calls himself a “politics junkie who grew up reading great Times reporting at my parents’ kitchen table.” He got his start in journalism after a stint in Cairo studying Arabic, and was a finalist for a Livingston Award in 2011 for his reporting on the Arab uprisings that year.

We’re looking forward to welcoming Blake into the brain trust and seeing how he helps us reimagine the politics newsletter and chart a path for its growth. He starts on Oct. 25.