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Successful writer and journalist and the former NBC News National Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff is going to Yahoo News. He will be the website’s chief investigative correspondent starting in August 2014.
While with the American broadcast television NBCnetwork, Isikoff served as a commentator on its Sunday morning Meet The Press weekly news roundup show and contributed to its cable channel MSNBC.
Isikoff sees the future of print journalism on the Internet. Newsweek, for whom he was a long time correspondent, recently ended its print publication and is now only available on line.
As he told The New York Times, “Digital is the future of the news business. That’s the cold, hard reality.”
The addition of Isikoff is part of Yahoo’s plan to build up its new investigative news division. The editor in chief of Yahoo News, Megan Liberman, told The New York Times of Isikoff, “He’s a guy who breaks a lot of news and starts huge national conversations.”
Under the leadership of its CEO Marissa Mayer, Yahoo now aspires to be a leader in news content.
Mr. Isikoff will be joining fellow network television news alum Katie Couric who is currently Yahoo’s global news anchor. Couric joined the website from ABC News. Isikoff will also be reunited there with his former Newsweek colleague, Daniel Klaidman, who is the deputy editor at Yahoo News.
Other notable journalists who have made the move to Yahoo include, Liberman who was a deputy editor at The New York Times, that paper’s David Pogue and its political writer Matt Bai.
Michael Isikoff, 62, has a BA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MA in journalism from Northwestern University in Chicago. A native of Long Island, Isikoff became an investigative correspondent for Newsweek in 1994.
The reporter has a number of best-selling and award winning books to his credit. These include, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin and Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War, a 2006 book about the selling of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq to the US public and the ensuing Plame scandal which became a New York Times best seller.
His 1999 book Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story is about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It is based on his investigation into that story. Isikoff would have gotten the scoop and been the first to report it, but Newsweek executives killed the piece.
He broke the news that American interrogators in Guantanamo Bay flushed a copy of the Quran down a toilet as an interrogation tactic in the May, 9 2005 edition of Newsweek. But after it caused rioting in Muslim nations the magazine retracted the story, saying that a key source for it could no longer remember important facts that were included the article. However, The Pentagon later confirmed it.
Isikoff joined NBC News in July, 2010. He resigned from that network in April of this year, saying that he was unhappy with their new direction in news coverage which left him with fewer opportunities as a journalist.
