After nearly four years at Politico, Dylan Byers is joining CNN as a media reporter to “focus on the intersection of media and politics.” He will continue to report from Los Angeles.
CNN has been building up both their political and media staff recently. The political side has been adding numbers in light of a new digital focus and in light of the upcoming presidential election. CNN has also been adding to the media beat ever since Brian Stelter joined the network in 2013. Since then, the news organization has also started CNN Media, under the umbrella of CNN Money. The CNN Media team includes Stelter, Frank Pallotta, Tom Kludt, editor Mark Mooney, and producer Molly Shiels.
A good deal of CNN’s recruitment has come at the expense of Politico, which has recently been expanding its version of hyper-coverage to outside Washington, D.C. Byers is the thirteenth member of Politico to decamp for CNN. Recently, it was announced that Manu Raju would join the cable news network as a congressional reporter.
During Byers’s tenure, Politico has also expanded its media reporter roster. He took over the beat from Michael Calderone when the latter went to the Huffington Post. Byers ran the eponymous media blog on Politico and was joined by Hadas Gold recently. Mackenzie Weinger also was a part of the blog for a period of time.
Capital New York was also purchased by Politico and its stable of media reporters have joined with Gold and Byers to form Politico Media. The combined media desk covers New York and Washington, D.C. An internal memo was sent to Politico staffers about Byers’s departure and reassuring them regarding the future of Politico Media. The memo, from Susan Glasser and Tom McGeveran, says that Media’s launch was “only the beginning of this effort, about which you’ll here [sic] a lot more as we expand our reporting on the media industry and its part in the great drama of American politics and power.”