Today, June 14, 2022, is the day that gossipy media types have been breathlessly gabbing about and speculating over for the better part of the past few years: Joe Kahn’s first day as executive editor of The New York Times. In an April announcement that surprised absolutely no one, publisher A.G. Sulzberger confirmed what Times Kremlinologists had long expected—that Kahn, a mild, Harvard-educated, Pulitzer Prize–winning newsman who rose up from the foreign reporting corps to the paper of record’s top management ranks, would succeed Dean Baquet to become the institution’s next newsroom leader. I caught up with Kahn in a video call on Monday afternoon and got his thoughts on steering the paper’s ongoing digital transformation, building a diverse workplace, and handling journalists’ social media use—as a Twitter-fueled controversy recently consumed a rival. We discussed everything from a certain photo shoot to the role of independent outlets, like the Times, in an increasingly polarized society. Our conversation is condensed and edited below.

Vanity Fair: I was looking back at the the first time I interviewed you, and it was 10 years ago, when you were international editor and the Times was launching a Mandarin language site in China.

Joe Kahn: Yeah, that path to growth is not yet open [laughs]. [Chinese censors ended up blocking the Times' website in October 2012.] But some things are continuous with what we might have talked about back then, in terms of, that was sort of the early days of our real push to become more of a true international news organization. We were building up much more sort of full-stack operations overseas, that could deliver the many things The New York Times needs in order to have a full report about the world, as well as to create its own continuous 24-7 news operations. So after that time was really the full realization of like, you know, creating this big hub in London, and now also in Seoul, with a variety of different coverage areas, different desks, having some of their editing staff and reporting staff abroad, having elements of our live team and breaking-news teams, but also putting in really smart editors who can direct and assign and help shape coverage in their own time zones. And also having the flexibility to be able to jump in on a huge American story that requires top editors to drive during the late-night and the early morning, to keep our report really urgent and fresh. So in that sense, some of the things we were working on back then have become more of a reality for us.

One of the things you’ve been credited with as managing editor is sort of quietly driving the Times’ digital transformation, further from the primacy of the print edition into this realm of, like, all-encompassing 24-7 digital responsiveness. Can you give our readers a sense of what that looks like in practice? Take the January 6 hearings, since that’s this massive news event happening right now. How is the Times covering the hearings and how is that different from how the Times would’ve covered it, say, five years ago, or certainly 10 years ago when when we first talked?

We covered it with something that we call a live blog, which is a blog in the sense that it is organized according to reverse chronology, essentially with—

It kind of feels like a passé term, which is ironic because it’s such a huge part of the Times’ news report now.

Yeah, around the time that we talked 10 years ago, I think that was around the time we stopped using blogs at all. There had been a little flurry where everybody wanted their own blog, and we had too many of them, and they weren’t really on the news and they weren’t getting promoted. So we just said, we’re not doing blogs anymore. Now we use a really evolved form of the blog format, which can integrate streaming video, it’s a much more visual form, it can integrate a lot of reporter inputs that give us an experience to draw on some of the stuff that people might have gone to Twitter for, but to draw that back into our own experience. So when we have our own expert reporters involved in covering one of the major news stories of the moment, we’re hoping they can channel their expertise and their insights into an experience that we create rather than rushing to Twitter to do that.

I’ve noticed that you really push readers into the live blogs. When I click on something from the Times I’m often getting directed straight to a live blog about some big story.

It’s not for just anything. We want to use them for a fairly limited number of really major news-type events. The Uvalde shooting. The January 6th hearings. The Ukraine war.

And this live format is something that you championed during your time as managing editor, right?

I was concerned with that and also the tools that we have for creating these more robust digital packages, so that you can more intuitively guide readers through the full range of coverage that we have. You know, charts and data and explanatory pieces that help people get leveled up on the subject.

Your transition to executive editor was very carefully stage-managed and drama-free, and also widely expected. But there was still such a voluminous number of words written about it, including multi-thousand-word profiles delving into your childhood and college years and the minutiae of your career. Were you surprised by the level of interest?

Well, I’ve never been through it before, so I didn’t have a baseline expectation. I was happy that we were able to achieve what I think both Dean and A.G. really wanted to achieve, which was a really sort of intentional transition process that allowed me, but also a team of people who will now move into fresh positions in newsroom leadership, to really have time to work closely together. So many transitions in the past, in fact the majority of them, have taken place in a somewhat herky-jerky or unexpected way, where something happens, somebody departs suddenly, someone is dismissed from the job. And even when it has been a more kind of consensual transition, a lot of the work of really getting ready, or thinking hard about the transition, postdates the naming of the executive editor rather than predates it. You want the early days to actually be a time when you’re marshaling your forces and really working closely with the staff in pushing forward an agenda. In terms of the coverage itself, I was a little surprised, but I guess not shocked by the way everybody went further back in history and tried to find little things from the past that I would’ve thought would not necessarily have been as much of a part of the coverage as they were, like college friends or people I had known as a journalist.

I had no idea you had a Jeff Zucker connection.

Yeah, Jeff and I at The Harvard Crimson. I thought people might have mentioned those things in passing, but there was a bit more focus on them that I wouldn’t necessarily have expected.

I know we kind of joked about this over email at the time, but that New York magazine photo shoot—I mean, people think of you as this very tame, measured, private-facing sort of guy. And yet those shots were like, highly stylized, dare I say a bit dark and provocative? Were you just at the mercy of an artsy photographer, or were people getting a little slice of your personality they’re not familiar with?

It was a lesson in dealing with talented photographers, which, I know it will shock you, but I didn’t have a ton of experience doing. There was nothing unprofessional about it. It’s just, you need to know enough about what to say yes to and what not to say yes to.

Two years ago, I wrote about an internal town hall where A.G. was asked something along the lines of, whether he felt like it was feasible for his next executive editor to be white at a time when the newsroom had been grappling with these really fraught conversations about race. As I reported at the time, A.G. pushed back quite angrily, saying, “I find that question very offensive,” as if it cast Dean as a token Black newsroom leader, which obviously was far from the truth. Nonetheless, it’s undeniable there’s a huge amount of scrutiny on the industry’s top leadership positions and how diverse they are, and I’m sure some people look at the masthead and think, well of course, after the Times’ first Black executive editor and first female executive editor, here’s another Ivy League–educated, middle-age white guy running the place. Do you feel that tension at all as you step into this role?

I would say that, what I feel is the need to continue to deliver on genuinely making the Times a fully diverse workplace, including the leadership team, but also more thoroughly the workplace culture of The New York Times. Obviously the identity and background and experience and gender and race of the top editors is relevant. And it has continued to be relevant in this transition. So we want a top of the masthead that comes from a range of different journalistic experiences, and also comes from a range of different backgrounds in terms of race and ethnicity and gender. But I think it also needs to go deeper than that. We need a workplace culture where a much larger journalistic team from a much wider range of experiences really know how to navigate the place and get ahead and have a career at The New York Times. The diversity of leadership is part of that, but really, the most important part of that is creating an experience and a commitment to diversity at all levels

Do you feel like the Times is better equipped now to handle some of these kind of difficult internal discussions about race and representation than it was, say, last year or the year before, when you were dealing with these mega controversies about the Tom Cotton op-ed or Donald McNeil, or whatever it was?

One of my key considerations in putting this team together was to have the right voices in the room, the people who would be willing to have good connections throughout the organization, good instincts about American culture and American life, to be able to deal with the inevitable controversies that will come with being a leading news organization. You don’t know exactly what they’re gonna be, but I wanted to make sure we had the right voices in the room, people who were willing to talk to each other with candor about what we were seeing and what we were dealing with and the decisions that we have to make. But also a deep commitment to the integrity of the journalism and the values of the institution. I do hope that we’re in a stronger position. I’m not predicting that we’re not gonna face moments of controversy going forward. It’s in the job description. We’re in the business of looking deeply at some of the most polarizing issues in society and trying to offer stories that open up people’s perspectives on those issues. And inevitably in doing that, you’re gonna court controversy from time to time.

The controversies might not just be about coverage—they could involve the actions of your staff. I can only imagine that as you watched this epic social media convulsion at The Washington Post last week, at least a part of you had to be thinking, thank God for once it’s them and not the Times! Because it usually is the Times when it comes to situations like this. In all seriousness though, as someone who’s had to deal with things like this and will likely have to deal with them again, what did you think of how it all played out? Like say it was the Times in the eye of the storm last week over these same circumstances, and there was a Times reporter criticizing colleagues and management on social media even after the institution fired a warning shot to knock it off. Would you have fired that reporter? 

I don’t wanna try to second guess exactly what happened at the Post. Obviously we all paid close attention to that, but I don’t know all the details and I don’t know all the individuals. What we’ve done is, a few weeks ago we put out our own sort of restatement of our approach to Twitter, which many of us spent quite a bit of time thinking through. And I’m glad we did it. I think it’s time for people to put that particular platform into a bit more perspective, and frankly, to take a step back from an overreliance on Twitter as a place to vet grievances with your own news organization.

Or with your readers and critics, right?

Yeah. We did not say to people, we want you to block your Twitter account or drop the platform entirely. I mean, you can get ideas, you can develop sources, young journalists can begin to create a following, you can help drive some audience and conversation around the good journalism that you do. I think there are some reasonable uses of Twitter for, say, beat reporters as part of their job. The message that we had for our staff was, just do it less, and in particular, the parts that we would want you to do less of are, you know, getting into fights with trolls, going down rabbit holes, battling with your sources, airing grievances with your colleagues or other pieces of journalism. If you weren’t gonna create a public record about your journalistic dispute with a colleague in your own report, why would you run to Twitter and do it there? And included in that is, understanding that collegial behavior requires a certain amount of discipline about public expressions of discontent about your workplace. We’re not saying people don’t have speech rights. We’re just saying that those things should be channeled productively into making it a better place to work for you, but also for your colleagues. There’s no worse feeling than working hard on a piece of journalism and then being undercut by your own colleagues on Twitter.

Does that mean you have zero tolerance for that sort of thing?

We’re committed to enforcing the policy, which includes helping guide all of our journalists on the proper uses of Twitter and giving them real feedback. I don’t think that's the same thing as an absolute zero-tolerance policy. We asked [our staff] to use their judgment, to be good colleagues, to use the platform for what it’s good for, but to steer clear of the ways in which the platform can take you into some difficult situations that are actually bad for your journalistic reputation, and for the reputation of your colleagues. We will provide quick and real feedback to people if we think that they’re falling short of those standards.

Are there any other sort of evolving newsroom policies that you're looking at?

Broadly speaking, we do need to be able to help people manage their careers, especially for talented journalists who have a variety of ways to express their journalism: a social media following, aspirations to create an audience through newsletters, opportunities to appear in audio or television or to develop their journalism into TV or film or books. We are creating a stronger culture of talent management that balances the idea that The New York Times is home to a wide variety of really talented journalists, who are in demand in many different forms, and have a lot of demands on their time, even internally, from different kinds of media and platforms, and how to help guide people into those opportunities, but also help keep them focused on the journalism that’s gonna make the biggest difference for us. We want people to be able to spread their wings and to realize their full ambitions. We also don’t want them to be, you know, engaged in things which are ultimately gonna be in conflict with what we’re producing. So we need a kind of a system of managing some of those outside opportunities, as well as inside opportunities. A bunch of senior people are involved in that, and it includes, you know, requests to create a new audio podcast, start a new newsletter, a book opportunity, a TV or a film opportunity, what role the Times is gonna play in that, when we can free people up to do things like that, when it’s too much of a conflict with their other work, how to balance it against other people who want to do those sorts of things at the same time.

And that’s a concrete initiative or more of an ongoing discussion?

We have, in the last few months, put a couple of teams in place to review requests to take on outside opportunities that might take people away from their duties for us, and also to figure out whether any of those things ought to continue to have the participation of the Times, or whether we can grant permission to people to go ahead and do things on their own. We set up a new team of senior leaders to help do those things. That’s fairly recent.

What are other sort of back-end initiatives that are among the most important things the Times is working on right now?

There are several big things. Obviously the first and foremost concern of mine has to be the competitiveness and the excellence of the report. That sort of underscores everything. It’s also a responsibility that’s shared among leadership. Then there’s a few other things that are gonna be ongoing challenges. One of them, clearly, is how to continue to develop good journalism that responds to intensive polarization, especially in this country, but not exclusively in this country. How do you continuously create journalism that feels relevant to the broadest possible kind of audience of curious readers, who want to, or need to, have their eyes open to how, culturally, politically, socially, our society is being divided and torn apart? We’re an independent news organization. We’re not a partisan fighter in those wars. We need to create journalism though that responds to those moments, and that feels continuously like we are helping people to navigate and understand, from a variety of perspectives, how we’re getting ourselves into these polarizing situations. So we have to cover, intensively, the ongoing threat to democratic integrity, and that’s a difficult thing to navigate.

But do you think you can really reach the type of people you want to reach on these issues who are not already reading the Times? Like how are you gonna reach all the people who have already written off mainstream media in general, and just don’t believe it or trust it at all anymore? It just doesn’t feel like there’s a big audience of people who are on the fence at this point.

I guess I don’t fully buy that. I’m not necessarily making the case that hard-core Trump supporters, whose media diet consists mainly, or exclusively, of Fox News or Newsmax or something, are just waiting for The New York Times to publish some kind of story, and they’ll come back and, quote unquote, trust us again. I think that that’s a little bit of a straw man. I do think there’s a very large audience of people who may have biases about certain kinds of mainstream media, but are actually reasonably curious and open-minded about what’s happening in the world, and want to have good, deeply reported journalism that is relevant to them. In many parts of the world, you can ask people broad questions about their trust in certain brands, and they’ll answer it in a certain way, but when it comes to actually wanting to understand what happened with, you know, the recent election in Georgia and the primaries, we’ll get a very broad audience for that. People come to us both for deeply reported coverage and also for real-time coverage from all over the place, and in very large numbers. COVID was another example. We draw a very broad audience for that when we’re reporting in a way that helps guide people through the pandemic. When we’re reporting in real time on election results, whether in blue states or red states. When we’re reporting on the effects of climate change, or the course of a wildfire, or the tracking of a storm. I also think that good, fair investigative reporting that focuses attention on issues that should be of concern to people, whether at the national level or the local level, will find a broad audience and people will pay attention to it. The Times can make a difference in those moments. And I do think there are far more people who are still curious and open-minded and responsive to evidence than the polls about extremes on both sides of the political spectrum might suggest.

What are other challenges you think the Times will face over these next several years of your editorship?

The ongoing digital transformation does not feel finished to me. It feels very much midstream. The forms of our journalism, the way we engage with readers, the way our writing, visual storytelling, audio storytelling come together, how to create different experiences that feature one media or the other on our platform. The opportunities are really numerous, but we’re still at a little bit at the early stages. The management of that is gonna be a big part of my job, and of my leadership team’s. And then, with the culture of a newsroom that’s much larger than it was before, much more geographically dispersed than it was before, how to create a really strong and resilient culture, that understands and advances our journalistic mission, is also gonna be a big ongoing task.

I’d probably predict that one thing the Times might end up getting nailed for as we head into the 2024 election season, would be any inkling of, like, gratuitous both sides-ism. During the Trump era and its aftermath, the Times really sought to position itself as nonpartisan, or not the resistance, or whatever you want to call it. But the counterweight to that is, there’s a part of your constituency that feels like the Times isn’t meeting the moment in terms of how it covers certain political stories, right?

The idea that the Times is stuck in some 1980s paradigm of both-sides journalism, where we don’t help readers sort out what’s really true or untrue, is pretty factually false. If you look at our report, we very aggressively cover provably false assertions. We have a significant team of people covering and exposing disinformation and misinformation. We’ve created a very robust experience around reporting on efforts to undermine democratic integrity and electoral integrity. So I don’t really believe in the broad trope that The New York Times is still stuck in an old mindset. I don’t think though that that’s the same thing as saying that we are devoted, as an institution, to ensuring that one side or the other in a two-party political system is best positioned to win elections. That’s a partisan motive.

Do you think some people just want the Times to be more left than it actually is?

There’s no question there are people who want the Times to be more left than it is. And then there’s a lot of people on other parts of the political spectrum who think we’re hopelessly committed to the left. We need to hold ourselves to account for reporting in a well-rounded way on all the big controversies of the moment.

A lot of people view the 2024 election as nothing sort of existential for the country, in terms of the creep of authoritarianism and the future of American Democracy and all of that. Do you feel that Times is ready to meet the moment?

We have to be ready. Presidential elections are giant for us. These midterms are really big. This will be a test of, you know, a bigger and more robust version of political coverage, and how politics spreads over into every part of the social and cultural fabric of the U.S. We’ll have our best people digging deeply on that, and hopefully having really compelling coverage, whoever the candidates end up being and whatever the outcome is.