An Independent Press
Roger Berkowitz
08-04-2024 Clare Malone interviews Joe Kahn, Executive Editor of the New York Times, and talks about the challenges of nurturing professional journalist ethics of impartiality amidst the culture wars. Malone asks:
In a recent interview, you said, “I don’t think that this generation of college grads has been fully prepared for what we are asking our people to do, which is to commit themselves to the idea of independent journalism.” You went on, “The newsroom is not a safe space. It’s a space where you’re being exposed to lots of journalism, some of which you are not going to like.” You said that some employees have left the Times because they might disagree with that notion and that you’re asking more questions and interviews with prospective employees about whether covering a certain kind of story would make someone uncomfortable. How do you affirmatively build a culture with young reporters that cultivates those journalistic values that you think a Times reporter should aspire to? Because you’ve also said you want a diversity of talent, you want a diversity of people, and it is apparent that younger people think about institutions, broadly, very differently than they used to, let alone journalism. So what does that grooming of good reporters look like?
It’s something I think about a lot. Independence has always been an important guiding principle for us, and resilience—not only the ability but the willingness to embrace multiple perspectives and follow the facts on difficult stories, including some stories that upset people as individuals. But we need to provide good, well-rounded coverage of all the issues that are out there in the news for the broadest possible audience, and we need to create a culture where people feel incentivized to take on those stories even when they will sometimes engender a lot of scrutiny, some backlash. And I don’t think that comes automatically. I think that comes from a lot of devotion to talking to the staff, listening to the staff, building a culture and an understanding about what we do in the craft of journalism that requires training, it requires patience, it requires sort of an evolution in the culture. As you said, we’ve brought in hundreds of people, many next-generation journalists with a wider range of skill sets that are really important to what we’re doing now as a news organization. For them, but also for an older generation, we can’t assume that people are coming to the Times with the full set of values of the mission of independent journalism, even more so now because we’re recruiting people from very different kinds of backgrounds, people who came from the design world, people who were data experts, people from audio and visual backgrounds who weren’t trained at newspapers. And how do you build a culture where there’s a common consensus about what we do and why we’re doing it and what the craft and discipline is? You do it very intentionally. You do it by talking to people. You do it by projecting our values. But we also do it by listening and evolving those values to feel important and relevant to a new generation of journalists.
How do you get people to drink the Kool-Aid? “We’re going to take you out for happy hour at Margaritaville because you had a story that the Internet didn’t like, but it was good reporting”? What does it look like to a young reporter when they’re running up against the opprobrium of their age cohort?
Certainly it means coming strongly in behind the work of someone who does get that kind of scrutiny or criticism for journalism that we think is valuable. When a very strong correspondent like Apoorva Mandavilli, on our science desk, took on a difficult story looking at people who had actual strong negative medical reactions to vaccines and what the federal government and health authorities have done to address that. That’s a sensitive issue that’s in the news. But there are also some facts to be explored and there are some problems with the way federal officials have dealt with some of these vaccine problems. And Apoorva, I think with a lot of courage, undertook to look into that issue, and she did a great and very nuanced story about it. So when she does something like that, when any reporter on our staff takes on something that we think is important, but that gets a certain amount of blowback, we have to come in strongly in support of that, back their work, but also give them the incentives and the support to be able to do that sort of thing. And then to let the rest of the staff know that we feel that way. And those sorts of people are very valuable in journalism today and are going to get ahead. And that’s young people, older people, experienced journalists, new journalists—when they undertake that kind of work, you want to let the rest of the newsroom know how much we value it.