A Times Company press release carries a memo from the executive editor, Dean Baquet:
After a dozen remarkable years as chief television critic, Alessandra Stanley has decided to return to reporting. As part of The Times's deepening focus on economic inequality in America, she will be creating a new beat: an interdisciplinary look at the way the richest of the rich — the top 1 percent of the 1 percent — are influencing, indeed rewiring, the nation's institutions, including universities, philanthropies, museums, sports franchises and, of course, political parties and government.
This is a subject both intensely timely and well suited to Alessandra's skills as an observer, reporter and writer — one that has fascinated her, she says, since she wrote about the first generation of Russian oligarchs as a foreign correspondent in the mid-1990s. Now, she'll be reporting on what she describes as the "psychology, rituals, costs and contradictions" of a new generation of American titans. Her work will add to The Times's ongoing reporting on inequality in all its forms. More announcements will come on that front.
This is the same Alessandra Stanley whose tendency to make factual errors requiring correction has attracted extensive press coverage.