Paula Reid started work at MS NOW on Thursday as the network’s chief White House reporter, taking a front-line role in coverage of the Trump administration after nearly four months away from. Her arrival adds a veteran Washington hand to a newsroom that is still being assembled.
The move had been rumored since July, but Thursday is when it became real. Reid joins after years in major Washington newsrooms, including and CBS News, and she steps into a job that puts her at the center of MS NOW’s effort to widen its White House coverage and make its Washington Bureau a more established operation.
Sudeep Reddy said Reid would bring deep experience to covering the administration, serve as a key reporting voice across the Washington Bureau and help drive investigative and enterprise journalism. He said she was joining an already busy group of White House reporters and producers who have covered the Trump administration day in and day out since the bureau was established.
That team includes Akayla Gardner, Laura Barrón-López and Jake Traylor, and it has been working while facing attempts to limit its ability to report from the White House. Reddy said the reporters have kept going without missing a beat, even as access has become more complicated. Reid’s arrival gives the bureau another senior reporter at a time when the network is still building a new operation after splitting from NBC News last year.
For Reid, the job is a clear next step after a long run in national political and legal reporting. At CBS News, she served as White House Correspondent, Correspondent, Reporter, Digital Journalist, Researcher for CBS Evening News and Intern at the CBS News Investigative Unit. At, she was Chief Legal Correspondent and Senior Legal Correspondent. MS NOW is betting that background will help deepen its coverage of the White House and Washington at the same time it tries to prove the new newsroom can stand on its own.
The unanswered part is not where Reid landed. It is why she chose this moment to make the move. That is still not public, even as MS NOW moves to turn a freshly built Washington team into a permanent fixture in the White House press corps.
