Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times, is a contained presence. When I met him at the Times’ offices in midtown Manhattan in June, he wore a dark, collared knit shirt beneath a crisply pressed tan blazer and kept small talk to a minimum. Kahn was a star reporter—in 2006, he won a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting—but presiding over the Times newsroom, which numbers more than two thousand employees, can seem, from the outside, like something more akin to the role of a highly credentialled H.R. manager. In February, 2023, an open letter signed by some Times staff and contributors criticized the paper for “editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people,” citing specific writers and articles. Kahn’s team held meetings with some of the signatories, and he wrote to the newspaper’s staff that “participation in such a campaign is against the letter and spirit of our ethics policy.” After the attacks of October 7th in Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza, Kahn was again confronted with a newsroom grappling with the convergence of personal conscience and traditional journalistic norms. The Times pushed out a prominent staff writer for its magazine who had signed both the February open letter and another one from last October that called out a Times editorial and broadly criticized mainstream media coverage of the conflict as “racist and revisionist.”
If the Kahn era has been defined by anything so far, it is this struggle to police the newsroom culture at a moment when the paper’s size and influence have never been greater. According to one estimate, nearly seven per cent of American newspaper employees now work at the Times. The growth comes as almost every other corner of media has been beset by layoffs. The Times has become indispensable in readers’ lives but also an institution that sparks frustration across the political spectrum. In our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Kahn emphasized that the Times should support work that might be met with strong criticism; it seemed implied that he was mostly talking about flak the paper gets from the left. “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,” Kahn told me. “Those sorts of people are very valuable in journalism today and are going to get ahead.”
We talked about the paper’s ethics guidelines, the concept of independent reporting, and his desire to instill “resilience” in his reporters. We also discussed his family’s charitable giving. Kahn, who comes from significant wealth—his late father, Leo, co-founded Staples—is the only individual named in tax records as a trustee of the Kahn Charitable Foundation. (A financial institution is also listed.) According to records from the office of the Massachusetts attorney general—the foundation is based just outside of Boston—Kahn is also the only named individual with check-signing authority for the foundation, which had assets of more than twelve million dollars according to the most recently available public filing. During that fiscal year, which began on July 1, 2022—a month after Kahn became executive editor—the foundation gave to various causes, including the American Cancer Society and a number of music and Asian-culture foundations. (Kahn is a fan of the opera; he and his wife met in China, when he was a foreign correspondent there.) The foundation also gave ten thousand dollars to the Center for Reproductive Rights and six thousand dollars to Planned Parenthood. When I asked Kahn about these contributions, he told me that he had never personally donated to the organizations but that he did not restrict the giving of other members of his family. The Times’ ethics policy says employees “must be sensitive that perfectly proper political activity by their spouses, family or companions may nevertheless create conflicts of interest or the appearance of conflict.” In such situations, employees are advised to speak with their department head and the newspaper’s standards editor, or another senior newsroom leader. Depending on the situation, the employee “may have to recuse himself or herself from certain coverage or even move to a job unrelated to the activities in question.”
In a follow-up after our interview, I asked Kahn if he had consulted with anyone at the Times about the contributions made by his family’s foundation to reproductive-rights organizations. A Times spokesperson said that Kahn “adheres to our ethical guidelines on these and all matters” and that he “had no involvement in the specific donations you’ve flagged, and was unaware of them.” She said that the work of managing the trust day to day, including the signing of checks, was handled by a professional at the financial institution that administers it.
Your father, who co-founded Staples, also went to Columbia Journalism School when he was a young man. And I’m wondering if he’s part of the reason you ended up being a journalist.
It is—partly. Because he was never a practicing journalist himself, except very briefly after journalism school. But he was always a devoted newspaper reader and critic—a very excitable critic of newspapers. He read the Boston papers, but also the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and he would compare and contrast how they covered something and point those things out to me, and he had his favorite columnists, and also his favorite columnist to hate.
Name names!
Back in those days, it was Anthony Lewis who was the New York Times’ more left-leaning columnist, but he preferred William Safire. He was a little bit more on the right. He would compare and contrast the way they covered the same things and sort of get angry at Lewis and very happy when Safire contradicted him and he had his own little narrative going on.
What did you pick up from that kind of early passionate journalism discourse?
He would often cut things out from the newspaper that he didn’t quite like and he would say, “Explain this to me, explain why they wrote it this way. You’re the journalist, you explain why they did this.” And when I started writing myself and had my own byline in the school paper, and then later professionally, he collected every one of those things. In fact, after he passed away, which was in 2011, one of the mementos that I had from the things that he collected were these notebooks full of my own press clippings that he just read up to the end and was cutting out. He was a supporter, a little bit of a provocateur about some things going on in the industry.
I read that, when you were at Harvard, the president banned university officials from speaking to the Crimson because of your reporting.
True. The president at that time was Derek Bok, and my job as a correspondent for the Harvard Crimson was covering the president’s office. And we wrote at one point about some policy issue that was in dispute and in which some people had made allegations that President Bok had given inaccurate information about the decision-making. And the way we framed the story and wrote the story, he interpreted it as the Harvard Crimson was calling him a liar, and he was quite upset and offended by that and he cut us off for some period of time. Not only stopped talking to us but stopped all the people in the Harvard administration from speaking on any subject to the Crimson. So we decided at that point that we would print this box on every story that we published that would otherwise have had comment from someone in the Harvard administration saying that, “under orders from President Bok, all Harvard administrators have been told that they are not to accept any phone calls or give any comment to the Harvard Crimson, so we were unable to get their point of view on the story.” And we published that box on the front page every time we had one of these for about two weeks, and he rescinded the ban after that. So that was sort of a little bit of a lesson, both in the responsibility and the opportunity of the press.
What qualities would you say distinguished you as a reporter?
The part that I just enjoyed the most about reporting was getting completely immersed. I spent a lot of my early years as a reporter in Texas. And that was already enough of a culture change—I grew up in the Boston area. But then I went even farther afield, and I was in China for almost a dozen years. And I think what I enjoyed the most was just trying to get my head around and understand a totally different culture, and applying some journalistic skills to telling stories that people would be interested in, in a place that in my early years wasn’t really on the radar the way it is today. It was an adventure to find stories that you could get a real reaction to and would open people’s eyes about the developments in China. And just finding individuals who could help narrate that story, bring it alive for the Wall Street Journal, later for the New York Times, was an exciting thing to do. I took on a series of stories when I was still working for the Dallas Morning News on violence against women. [Kahn’s reporting helped the newspaper win a Pulitzer in 1994.] And then a colleague and I, Jim Yardley, did something similar looking into the way the legal system was manipulated in China. [Kahn and Yardley won a Pulitzer in 2006 for their reporting.] Doing that kind of investigative reporting, in a very different culture, with a very different kind of access to officials and access to documents, was also a really interesting experience.
Why was China the place that you decided to go? Was it just, “This is a story that hasn’t been covered”? Was it an earlier interest from your younger years?
I think I, like many correspondents, somewhat romanticized the notion of being a foreign correspondent when I was first starting out in journalism. I realized I didn’t have any natural claim to be a foreign correspondent in any given country, I was going to have to figure out some place to focus on and so I actually made a little bit of a bet that China was kind of under-resourced, journalistically. This was the late nineteen-eighties and Japan was very much in people’s focus. Russia and the Middle East were big stories. China was not as much of a story. There were very few correspondents who spoke Chinese or had much grounding in Chinese history or politics, and so that felt like an opportunity. I very much wanted to go overseas and work overseas, and China just suggested itself as someplace where if I put some time and energy into studying it and learning about it, maybe there would be some doors that would open there.
What’s your sense of what China coverage will entail during the rest of your tenure, the next five years or so?
China itself went, I think, unfortunately, in a very different direction, even from the time since I left, in 2008, which may have coincided roughly with the peak period of China’s interest in and openness to the outside world. You remember 2008 was the Beijing Olympics, and there was a lot of attention on presenting the best side of itself to the outside world for those games and showcasing the development China had had, and actually liberalizing a lot of the rules around media. That was also the period where the Times had the peak number of correspondents in China, probably twelve, and many more Chinese staff working there, and it looked like the future was bright. A few years later, Xi Jinping came to power and he had a very different idea about China’s relationship with the outside world, and now we have only two correspondents in China. They’ve forced most of our correspondents to leave. So there’s been a collapse of the Western news media industry inside mainland China, which I think is a real loss, certainly for people’s understanding of what’s happening in China. I think it’s also a loss for China itself and its relationship with the rest of the world.
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.
You launched an investigation to ascertain who leaked details to The Intercept about an internal deliberation over whether to air an episode of “The Daily” based on a story that ran about sexual violence on October 7th. It struck me as odd to respond in such a muscular way, particularly since journalism is a profession that thrives off of leaks, and journalists have a more permissive sense of how information should be shared. Do you think that a leak investigation does damage to the work of building a productive, healthy newsroom?
The incident that you’re referring to was really into how pre-publication materials that had been gathered and shared in a small group in preparation for doing, in this case, an episode of “The Daily,” were provided to someone outside the Times. To me, that was the sort of breach that should alarm anybody involved in the journalistic process where there’s a vigorous give-and-take about how to do a story, how to edit a story, the questions that an editor asks of a reporter and the development of it, the writing of it. “Should we say it this way? Should we do it this way? Can we stand this up? Should we combine this with something else?” That kind of give-and-take is what’s necessary to strengthen the journalism pre-publication—and the idea that someone would go into our systems and try to take a snapshot of that and provide it to someone outside the organization to feed some kind of criticism of what we’re doing was unacceptable to me and, I think, to the leadership team, and also to many other journalists around the newsroom. It did, in my view, warrant an inquiry to find out how that happened. And we have taken some steps to tighten some of the procedures but also to let my colleagues here know how much we value that kind of frank exchange of views about a story as it’s developing—but also why that needs to remain confidential until we’re ready to go ahead and publish.
There have been some well-publicized flareups where New York Times staffers have expressed their personal displeasure with the paper’s coverage, going back to 2020, but then also more recently on transgender issues or the war in Gaza. And, during that time, the paper often points to its editorial and ethics standards, which say that, and I’m quoting here in part (they’re very long): “Journalists have no place on the playing fields of politics. Staff members are entitled to vote, but they must do nothing that might raise questions about their professional neutrality or that of the Times.” I think some people might argue, O.K., that’s actually a little bit of a fiction to bolster a sense of objectivity. What’s your response to that argument?
I don’t think it’s a fiction. I think it is really important for journalists to understand that the craft of journalism requires you to put the journalistic mission before your own personal views about the issues. We’re not going to neutralize people’s personal perspectives. We’re not going to remove them from their social context. We’re not going to require them to stop talking to their family. They are going to read and interact with news and events like anybody else. But when they’re working for the New York Times and they’re representing the New York Times and they’re reporting on sensitive stories for the New York Times, they have to put that journalistic mission first. And that mission requires openness. It requires a willingness to put your own personal views aside, and to put the facts first and reporting first and humility and understanding first. And if you can’t do that, then working in journalism, at least here, isn’t necessarily the right thing for you. We’re very clear about that with our staff. And I think our ethics guidelines reflect that.
Your family is wealthy and you have a family foundation of which you are a trustee, and it gives generously to a number of causes that seem to speak to your interests in music and Asian culture and journalism. The foundation also gave to Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights during the last fiscal year, which encompassed the months after you had been named executive editor of the Times. Do those donations fall afoul of Times guidelines in rule or in spirit?
I have not made any donations to Planned Parenthood. There is a pool of assets of charitable donations that members of my family make, but they are not from me.
So it’s fair because it’s a pooled family asset?
I’m not making any donations to political organizations, full stop, and I have not in the past, ever.
Would it be O.K. for a Times employee to give to Planned Parenthood or the Center for Reproductive rights?
I would say no, particularly if they’re at all involved in the coverage of those things, and I would not give to those organizations, whether I support them or not. But I don’t give to any sort of political candidate or political organizations.
Do you have a say over where the funds are apportioned in the Family Foundation?
No, I don’t. I don’t constrain other members of the family who have access to those funds on what they do with their own personal donations.
I don’t think every journalist at the Times has a family foundation, so it seems to be specific to you.
I don’t know what other journalists have access to in terms of their own—I think many journalists make charitable contributions.
I want to move on to the war in Gaza. Broadly, what have the reporting challenges been? I know there’s a lot of internal strife, but, logistically, what have you faced as an organization as far as getting out factual information in a war that’s very fact-disputed in a lot of ways, especially inside Gaza?
It’s been an enormous challenge from the start of the conflict. Many of the journalists we’ve had work for us suffered deaths or injuries among their immediate family or their relatives. A couple of them asked for our assistance in getting out of Gaza. We’ve had to recruit new journalists after that, in really difficult situations. I’m really proud of the work that they’ve done to help document what’s happened inside Gaza. The dangers are inherent, but also the personal trauma suffered by the journalists themselves has been something we’ve been dealing with pretty constantly through this period.
In a speech this spring, A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, said this of criticisms of the paper’s coverage of the war in Gaza: “Those on each side of the conflict will find stories they like and dislike.” It’s sort of the very old saw that newspapers are the first rough draft of history, and I think they’re inevitably buffeted by outside forces. People have critiqued the fact that the Times avoids words like “massacre” or “slaughter” to describe civilian loss of life in Gaza. And I’ve also read recent criticisms that the Times is being too sympathetic in its coverage of Palestinians by emphasizing the deaths of civilians at the hands of Israelis but not dwelling enough on the fact that it is a Hamas strategy to embed in civilian population centers. Looking back over the past eight months, are there any specific things regarding coverage of the conflict that you would have done differently?
Looking back over these eight months and what the team has gone through to try to take into account everything that you’re describing—the fact that there are very passionate views on opposite sides of this conflict. The suffering of Palestinians in Gaza has been an absolutely vital part of the coverage that we’ve had. The displaced people, the civilian casualties caught up in the conflict have been a constant focus for us. On the other side of the equation, the trauma of October 7th, the shock of what was the largest attack on Israeli soil that Israelis had experienced, the mobilization to defeat Hamas, have also been an important story for us, and we’ve tried to tell it fully. And it’s really true that there isn’t that large a slice of the audience that’s neutral on these issues. But I’m immensely proud both of the news that we’ve done day to day—and this is a huge news story every day, every cycle—but also of the investigative work that we’ve done into the failings of the Israeli military, into the nature of some of these strikes, but also into the enablement of Hamas by the international community, the money that flows to Hamas, and the issues around the way Hamas embeds itself in the civilian population, and its treatment of hostages has been a really important part of our coverage as well. And partly it is that investigative work, that has targets on opposite sides of this conflict, that I think has really distinguished our coverage.
So, hindsight being twenty-twenty, there isn’t anything you would do differently?
I have hindsight every single day in every single news cycle on every story that we cover. There isn’t a single day or a single story where I don’t look back and say, “Hmm, I wonder if we could have given a little more prominence to this. I wonder if we should have gone back at that issue. I wonder if we should have asked another question this way. I wonder if the headline could have been tweaked a bit to be more sensitive to this point of view.” My job is defined by having second thoughts about the way we’re covering something essentially all day long.
Are you uncomfortable with answering the question because it opens you up to outside criticisms from people who might be of bad faith?
No, I’m not uncomfortable with that question. I think the question slightly implies that there’s a perfect draft of history, whether every day or every week or whatever.
In the first few weeks of the conflict, headlines became a flash point for readers. Often, people only read the headlines. Has the conflict made the Times think at all about the way headlines are written?
Early on in the conflict, I did something that’s still fairly rare for us, which is to write an editor’s note about a headline related to an explosion at a hospital in Gaza that was initially blamed on an Israeli strike and later turned out to be—nobody knows exactly what the cause was. And there was a headline that took the word of officials in Gaza and used that as a framing device for a headline. So that was something where our attention to that kind of detail has continued to evolve. The truth is that headlines for a real-time developing story change very quickly. They change multiple times, sometimes even within an hour. You get new information. The story itself evolves, and you want the headline to evolve to reflect the story as new information comes in. So we do have to put a lot of time and emphasis on how a headline is, and our general approach is to stick with the facts, not to go beyond them, not to go for anything sensational. Particularly on a big breaking story, you can let the story itself guide people through it. You don’t need the headline to be provocative, you don’t need the headline to be too forward, you should stick to what we know and what we can say with confidence.
People have described you as a person who holds your cards close to your chest. “Cerebral” is a word that comes up a lot. It’s been a heated couple of years at the Times, perhaps some of your employees dislike you or your decisions, but they also still work for you and believe in the mission of the paper. How do you think about managing at this tense, precarious moment for journalism? And again, do you think you’ve made any mistakes from the leadership perspective?
What I’ve really learned about managing, particularly at the Times and particularly in this job, is to be as immersed as I possibly can be in the journalistic work that we’re doing every day. I have the word “executive” in my title, but actually the more important part is “editor” and being involved with the journalists themselves, with their editors, in working through the stories as they’re developing, in the promotion and play of them when they’re ready, of giving feedback to the journalists when they’ve done good work. It’s a less executive job than the jobs that I’ve had in the past and a more hands-on role. So a lot of my job has been actually getting into the details every day, starting early in the morning and working through the evening on the stories themselves and how they’re evolving. And have I made any mistakes? I’m sure that you can collect a lot of examples of mistakes. I mean, I’m not the best person to ask what my mistakes are.
Sometimes we’re not self-reflective, I understand that.
I think a lot about how I spend my time and parts of the newsroom and parts of the report where I need to devote more time and energy personally.
You seem to have come in at a time when the paper is really trying to push people in line as far as independence. “Let’s go back to old-school reporting.” Do you think, temperamentally, you are the kind of person who’s suited for that kind of “get in line” period? Does some outspoken portion of the newsroom voicing their dislike get to you?
I don’t mind people who are outspoken or have critiques about the journalism that we’re doing. In fact, I encourage a newsroom where we’re constantly debating how we’re doing on various stories. I think what you’re implying is that there’s an old-school kind of hierarchical decision-making that we want to impose, and that’s not really the case at all. One thing that I do feel strongly on, seeing the way it is increasingly difficult for reporters to take on difficult reporting topics that are sensitive, and seeing the kind of vitriol that’s unleashed on social media about those things, I think it’s really important that the rest of the staff understand that they need to stand behind their colleagues in those moments. So I do have less tolerance for internal criticism of each other as journalists. And I do think it’s important to build a culture where people feel they’re supported by their colleagues when they’re doing difficult stories, yes.
You were pretty central to helping create the live-blog format that often dominates the Times’ coverage of events, and you’ve been vocal about favoring shorter stories, and I understand that has lots of advantages for drawing readers to the site, particularly during a breaking-news event or a big news event. But often, when I’m reading about Gaza, for instance, I feel like I’m abreast of the latest events, but I don’t have context about, say, what Benny Gantz is thinking, or what Yahya Sinwar is thinking. And it might be a rich question coming from a New Yorker writer, but do you ever feel like you’re losing something when you’re not going long with context? When it is broken up into more bite-size bits?
What I’d say about that is it’s not an either/or. We do both. We have really excellent real-time news coverage of big breaking events that keep people informed about developments as they’re unfolding, in a way that newspaper editors could never have imagined in the past, that probably puts us more directly in competition with what you might have thought of as broadcast news at one point, particularly 24/7 cable news. And I think we offer a context-rich and expert-reporter-rich alternative to that. But we also do kind of classic newspaper coverage, wrapping up the big events of a day that is infused with color and analysis. We still really emphasize the analytical reporting and investigative reporting that goes deeper on all the questions that you’re talking about.
When a person is scrolling the New York Times app, there’s tons of stories. Some are about yoga, some are about Gaza, some are about Trump or Biden. How do you communicate the editorial judgment that came from people opening up the newspaper and seeing what was on the front page?
I think the difference between coming to the Times at any given moment and going to many other places where you can find news on the Internet is we’re constantly thinking about the hierarchy of the stories that we’re promoting, which is a big part of my day and a big part of my leadership team’s day—the play and the prominence of the different story lines that we have.
What does that look like?
Oh, multiple times a day, we’re debating essentially what the top of the home screen, what the top of the digital feed should look like. The big stories that we’re covering, how many should be in the package that goes along with those stories, making sure that that package has something that has an explanatory element to it, that if it’s a controversial story where there’s been a strong reaction, you want to have a piece of journalism there that gives people a glimpse into the range of reactions to it. The depth of the New York Times’ coverage is a big part of what I do, what the leadership team does, what our news desk does. We hope to provide a much richer, fuller experience of the news than you can find anywhere else. Now, of course, you will also find, as you scroll down the feed, any number of things that might be diversions from that, particularly as you go deeper into the feed, and you find cultural life-style coverage, or health-and-wellness coverage, or some of our other journalistic offerings like sports in The Athletic, or Wirecutter, or other things. The ranking of those, the packaging of those, is very much a human curation task and an editing task. And we try to put them together really with a lot of intent every day and multiple times a day.
The Washington Post’s new publisher, Will Lewis, just announced that the Post will have three newsrooms—a classic news one, an opinion newsroom, and then a third, for service journalism and social media. What do you make of that? And would the Times ever consider a division that’s more wholly devoted to creating content for people who get their news mostly from social media?
The Washington Post is among our most traditional and competitive rivals out there on just about every story that we cover. And it would be a loss to us and to the news media in general if the Post didn’t continue to thrive. As much as we’re competitors and as much as I want to beat them on any given story on any given day, I also want them to succeed. I hope Will Lewis has something figured out that will help the Post grow its audience, and we’ll be watching to see what he does. Our approach has been different. We do divide news and opinion into separate operations and we feel strongly about that, as the Post does. We don’t divide some sort of social or viral news—
I’m noticing more and more, let’s say Jonathan Swan, a vertical video of him summarizing his reporting.
The difference is that it’s Jonathan Swan, or it’s Maggie Haberman, or it’s Jonah Bromwich. We’re using reporter-on-camera vertical video to offer a kind of explanatory layer to the journalism that we’re doing and to give people a more direct relationship with the beat reporters doing that work. But I consider that kind of the opposite—I want all those innovations to be within our own newsroom as a way of giving people other angles of entry into the good reporting that we’re doing.
The Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, but you also recently appointed a director of A.I. initiatives. Setting aside the lawsuit, can you talk a bit about how you’re thinking about A.I. positively?
Our visual investigations team has been using A.I. pretty natively in their reporting process. A.I. tools were of use to them in this big investigation about the use of two-thousand-pound bombs by Israel in Gaza, identifying craters and identifying remnants of weapons and quantifying the strikes that actually had a real result in having the U.S. restrict the sale of two-thousand-pound bombs to Israel. We used A.I. in a big investigative effort tracking the way Russia had evaded global sanctions on its oil sales and the ships that were carrying Russian oil—[A.I.] was of use in identifying those ships and running them through databases. Where we’re not using A.I., and where I don’t envision us using it, is replacing the role of human journalists and actually doing original reporting. You’re not going to read A.I.-generated stories in the New York Times. Human beings are going to be involved at every stage from the reporting process up to the final editing-and-publishing process. But there are ways that A.I. tools can enhance data gathering. They can speed up our production processes in some areas, and we’re actively exploring ways that we can use them that way.
It’s an election year. Can you describe what the paper’s philosophy is on political reporting?
We’re definitely in the most polarized time that I remember as a journalist, and we’re facing a readership and electorate that is frustrated and angry about the choices that they’re facing and showing a high degree of antipathy toward the political process at the moment. One of the things that I think the New York Times can do is to provide good, fair, well-rounded coverage of the actual issues that are at stake to try to take the temperature down and to give people good fact-based reporting and fact-based analysis that will help them to engage in the underlying issues in this campaign, as well as the stakes in the election itself, including some of the program that Donald Trump has outlined for 2025. I think we’ve had really leading reporting looking into his agenda, the people around him, the threat of mass deportations, the desire to use the Department of Justice to go after people he identifies as his enemies, the program to remake the civil service so that he can dismiss civil servants who are not in line with his agenda.
I want to cite an interview that you did recently with Ben Smith, a portion of which sparked a lot of conversation online. It was about whether the New York Times should be doing more to cover the threats to democracy that Trump poses. You said, in part, “It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one—immigration happens to be the top, and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them?” And a lot of critics—mostly, I think, from the left—jumped on this. There’s this idea that no, voters might not list democracy as their No. 1 issue because they take for granted the norms of a democracy and a democratic society, but some of those norms might be threatened by a Trump win. Should there be fewer horse-race stories? And should there be more on what a second Trump term would look like with threats to democratic norms?
Yeah, there will be more. I think we’ve done, honestly, more than anybody else. And we’ll have more to come. One of the things we’re trying to do with the packaging of this is to make some of that really impactful reporting on Trump, and the people around him, and his agenda for 2025 more present in the report throughout the campaign, rather than relying on people to search into the background to get it. The point I was making earlier [to Smith] is there are a lot of other issues in this campaign as well, and we should cover those, too. We should cover all the issues that are motivating people either to be involved or to be uninvolved and understand what those issues are as well and the way polarization is playing out.
If Trump wins a second term, can you outline how the Times plans to cover that? How are you thinking about this potential norm-breaking period?
Fasten your seatbelts. If Trump wins again, the New York Times will be committed to covering every aspect of that story as it unfolds. It would be, as our reporting shows, a disruptive Presidency if he wins. We will have a full-time job covering the implications of that. And we’ll need a team of people who are geared up, as in the first term, but even more so, for a very disruptive presence in the White House. And what we’ll do is we’ll show up and we’ll do our jobs.
[Our conversation took place before Joe Biden’s halting performance in his debate with Trump on June 27th. This week, I asked Kahn, by e-mail, a follow-up question about how the Times was preparing for the possibility of covering something historic, such as Biden dropping out of the race and an open convention.]
Clearly, the campaign has taken an unexpected turn. In my view, that reinforces the urgent need for deep reporting and careful analysis, pursued with curiosity and humility. We will continue to explore every angle and provide fact-based coverage that helps people understand the choices and the stakes. ♦
An earlier version of this article inaccurately described some elements of the Times’ response to the February, 2023, open letter.
