Read more in this note to staff from Business Editor Dean Murphy and Technology Editor Pui-Wing Tam.

“Katie Benner of Bloomberg joining The Times as a technology reporter.

She’s covered Wall Street and Silicon Valley. She’s been a magazine writer and a columnist. Early in her career she wrote for Beijing Review, and since last fall, she has been based in San Francisco for Bloomberg View.

Now Katie Benner is coming to The Times, our next Apple beat reporter.

Katie writes a daily newsletter on tech happenings for Bloomberg, as well as regular columns about tech.

Previously, when at the tech blog The Information, Katie was among the first in the tech press to identify a key hedge fund manager pouring money into Silicon Valley start-ups. She also wrote deep dives on up-and-coming companies that are now part of the elite group of Valley start-ups.

Katie brings financial chops to the job, having written about Wall Street for nearly a decade at Fortune magazine, TheStreet and CNNMoney. She also has an eye for the offbeat and unusual. When she lived in Beijing, she wrote about “everything from monks to music,” she says. Not that she hasn’t endured some journalistic drudgery. At another point in her career, she was tasked with listening to Jim Cramer’s radio and television shows and writing synopses. “Yeah, it got a little repetitive.”

Katie grew up in Vermont, studied English at Bowdoin in Maine, and as careful readers of The Times will know, already has a Times byline – a Thursday Styles freelance piece about an artisanal fabric dyer from Brooklyn. We look forward to her finding similarly interesting characters in Silicon Valley, while also bringing to life the biggest and most influential company in the world.

Katie starts next month in San Francisco.

– Dean and Pui-Wing”

Starbucks customers can enjoy a free New York Times Crossword puzzle pack today via the Starbucks “Pick of the Week” program.

The offer includes a free Times Crossword “Jumbo Mondays” puzzle pack, which normally costs $2.99.

Any Starbucks customer with the Starbucks app for iPhone can access the offer through the app inbox.

Get the Starbucks app here.

(Media contact: Linda Zebian, @lindazebian)

Times Company CEO Mark Thompson delivered the Sacred Heart University Graduate School Commencement address on Saturday, May 16. An excerpt:

“And what’s happening to media is happening to pretty much every other industry. So what are the special qualities you need to thrive when you walk out of this university and into a career as an employee or an entrepreneur and one day perhaps as a leader? We’ll take expertise, talent, focus, a willingness to work hard, and yes, real ambition. They’re all necessary, of course they are. They used to be sufficient too.

But not anymore. In addition, first you need extraordinary adaptability. Whatever it is, your discipline will change before your eyes. Nurture the appetite for learning that brought you here, because you’ll need it every day of your career. You’ll need to get comfortable in the space between different disciplines, quantitative and qualitative, sciences and arts, because that’s where much of the innovation and the growth are coming from today.”

Read his full remarks.

The International New York Times (INYT) is an official media sponsor for the Hay Festival for the second year running.  The Hay Festival takes place from 21st to 31st May in Hay-on-Wye, on the edge of the Brecon Beacons National Park.

All festival goers are invited to visit the INYT stand in the Festival Bookshop for a chance to sign up for a digital subscription at a discounted rate.

And INYT subscribers can also attend an exclusive brunch on Monday May 25th.  The event will give existing INYT subscribers the chance to chat with Katrin Bennhold, an International New York Times journalist based in London, and meet other Times subscribers.

This year, Hay Festival celebrates the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, and invites writers and thinkers to discuss the new ideas driving the arts, sciences and politics. Some of the star speakers this year include Stephen Fry, Kazuo Ishiguro, Colm Toibin, Anne Enright, Meera Syal, Irvine Welsh and Helen MacDonald. The programme also features lectures from Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen and Nobel Prize winning physicist Andre Geim and many more. To view the full programme of events, visit Hayfestival.org.

Fans of NYT Now rejoice: The Times’s news app — designed to get you caught up on the most important and interesting stories — is free starting today.

NYT Now is the only news app from The New York Times to offer free, unlimited access to non-subscribers.

The app has also been updated with new features and a single-stream design that combines the best stories from The Times with the best from around the web, curated by NYT Now editors.

The new version features a fresh look and improved card designs to help readers catch up even faster. Screenshots of the new cards can easily be shared with friends. Content is updated around the clock, and the app now highlights new stories since your last check-in.

NYT Now’s popular Morning Briefing now comes with an alert feature to notify users as soon as it’s ready.

NYT Now is free to download and use on iPhone. Get it on the App Store.

(Media contact: Linda Zebian, @lindazebian)

Today, May 1st, the first edition of the International New York Times Chinese Monthly was published. It is a print publication that presents content from the NYT in Simplified Chinese for Chinese audiences in Hong Kong and Macau.

As we reported back in March, the 24-page publication is now available in luxury hotels, airline lounges, high-end residential complexes, premium outlets and on newsstands across Hong Kong and Macau. The editorial content will be overseen by Ching-Ching Ni, editor in chief of cn.NYTimes.com and the topics covered include world news and opinion, fashion, shopping and food, business and technology news and personal wealth. In addition, approximately 20 per cent of the content is devoted to local news and events in Hong Kong and Macau.

Helena Phua, Executive Vice President, Asia Pacific, International New York Times said: “As two of the most popular destinations for Chinese tourists globally, Hong Kong and Macau have an important role to play in expanding our Chinese audience. With the launch of the Chinese Monthly, we are thrilled to be introducing this audience to some of the best content The New York Times has to offer in their native language.”

For the three-month period ending March 31, 2015, The New York Times saw solid circulation growth according to the most recent Alliance for Audited Media (AAM) report. Total average circulation, which includes total print and total digital, was 2,178,674 for Monday-Friday and 2,624,277 for Sunday.

The gains in total average circulation represent a 7.3% increase for Monday-Friday and a 3.2% increase for Sunday. The weekday and Sunday gains can largely be attributed to the growth in The Times’s digital subscription packages.

Total average digital circulation for this most recent AAM reporting period was 1,552,723 for Monday-Friday and 1,476,385 for Sunday, a year-over-year increase of 14.2% and 10.7%, respectively. This category includes all paid and qualified digital subscription copies, including core and NYT Now subscriptions, as well as paid subscriptions to replica editions and e-readers including Amazon’s Kindle and the Barnes & Noble NOOK.

Total average print circulation for The New York Times was 625,951 for Monday-Friday and 1,147,892 for Sunday. These figures represent declines of -6.8% and -5.2% respectively, when compared to the same period last year.

(Media Contact: Linda Zebian, @lindazebian)

Charles Duhigg Named Senior Editor of The New York Times’s Live Events Business

The New York Times announces today that Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, has been named senior editor of The New York Times’s live events business. Read more in this note to staff from executive editor Dean Baquet and editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal:

All:

We are pleased to announce that Charles Duhigg, one of our most acclaimed financial writers, will become the newsroom’s leader for an events and conferences business that builds on our journalism and authority. Charles will partner in this important enterprise with a new business leader Meredith Levien will announce soon.

Charles will work with colleagues throughout the company to expand the conferences The Times already runs, like Cities for Tomorrow, the Luxury Conference, the magazine’s events, DealBook, Schools for Tomorrow, Food for Tomorrow and the INYT conferences, and he will provide support to TimesTalks and our other successful live journalism events. He will also work with the newsroom, the Editorial Department and our business-side colleagues to find other ideas that allow newsmakers and our journalists to take the stage together to discuss the biggest issues of the day.

Our goals for this enterprise are ambitious. Some of the most important news organizations in the world have built hugely successful events businesses — from The New Yorker festival, which draws writers and thinkers to discussions across the city, to the Los Angeles Times book festival, which has become one of the nation’s premier literary events. We have already made a renewed push in this area by investing in Tina Brown’s Women in the World event, which drew major speakers here last week.

Until the new business lead is in place, Charles will work closely with Gerald Marzorati, who has already taken a leading role in our events business.

The selection of Charles, one of our biggest stars, is another example of how we are pushing our best journalists to take on larger roles for The Times. We believe journalists must help lead as we navigate the future of our company.

It is hard to imagine a reporter better suited to lead the newsroom effort. No one has a stronger combination of journalistic ambition, broad vision and deep respect for our values. Charles joined The New York Times in 2006, and for nine years was an investigative reporter in the business section. He was a leader of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for Explanatory Reporting for the iEconomy series. He has won a George Polk Award and numerous business prizes. He has investigated companies that take advantage of the elderly, the roots of the financial crisis, and unchecked water pollution. He wrote a best-selling book, “The Power of Habit.” And he is, appropriately enough, a frequent and popular speaker at conferences.

Charles will have the title Senior Editor, and he will report directly to the two of us.

Dean and Andy

(Media contact: Stephanie Yera, @S_Yera)

Jordana Narin’s essay about what she sees as her generation’s reluctance to label relationships, won the 2015 Modern Love College Essay Contest. It was chosen from nearly 1,800 personal stories on the current state of love submitted by students from 489 colleges and universities nationwide. Ms. Narin, a sophomore at Columbia University, will receive $1000.

In addition to the publishing the winning essay (online now and in print on May 3), The Times will publish the essays of the four finalists each week in May and the honorable mention essays in coming months.

Daniel Jones, editor of the Modern Love column, was impressed this year with “the range of voices and material, with subjects ranging from asexuality to Tinder matches and from hooking up to purity pledges.”

The New York Times 2015 Modern Love College Essay Contest Results

WINNER

Jordana Narin, Columbia University in the City of New York, New York, NY, Class of 2017

FINALISTS

Arla Knudsen, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, NY, Class of 2016

Adam Lundquist, North Central College, Naperville, IL, Class of 2016

Jochebed Smith, Santa Monica College – SMC (Official), Los Angeles, CA, Class of 2017 (after transfer to university)

Davis Webster, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, Class of 2016

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Bindu Bansinath, Columbia University, New York, NY, Class of 2018

Emma Court, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, Class of 2015

Sophie Dillon, Yale University, New Haven, CT, Class of 2017

Claire Jia, Amherst College, Amherst, MA, Class of 2015

Kim Kaletsky, New York University, New York, NY, Class of 2015

Additional details on the Modern Love essay contest, held previously in 2008 and 2011, are available at: www.nytimes.com/modernlovecontest.

(Media contact: Danielle Rhoades Ha, @daniellerha)

Below is the note to staff from Dean Baquet, New York Times executive editor:

“NYT Now is one of our great journalistic achievements over the past year. It has drawn a young and enthusiastic audience, and turns up on every list of the most admired news apps. It has also taught us that we can present our coverage in a fresh, relaxed way without compromising our hard-won authority. This is a profound lesson as we build our digital coverage in the coming years.

So it is with great pride that I announce that Cliff Levy, one of the key architects of Now, will be promoted to assistant editor, a masthead role in which he will oversee the presentation of our report on all platforms: mobile, home page, watch. Cliff will also lead an expansion of our rewrite and curation capabilities so we can better leap on fast-breaking news and trends with context and sophistication.

Karron Skog will continue to run the daily digital operation, reporting to Cliff. Cliff will report to Susan Chira, though he will also work with Kinsey Wilson on matters of strategy.

Cliff is a Times lifer. He started as a news assistant on the foreign desk in 1990. In 2003, he won a Pulitzer Prize for a series that exposed the abuse of the mentally ill in state-regulated homes in New York City. In 2011, he and Ellen Barry shared a Pulitzer for international reporting for a series about human rights and freedom of speech in Russia.

Cliff jumped into digital early and aggressively. He first caught the bug in Moscow, where he proposed translating another series that he did, “Kremlin Rules,” into Russian, and sought comments from Russian readers. In doing so, he created something groundbreaking for its time — a dialogue between English and Russian speaking Times readers.

Cliff mixes the best of The Times. He is an aggressive journalist with a track record of breaking big stories — the key ingredient to our success, past and present. And he is someone who has thought long and hard about our digital future. Join me in welcoming him to the senior leadership ranks of The Times.

Dean”