A Quiet Intensity, Matched With Big Ambitions
Joe Kahn, the next executive editor of The New York Times, has had a steady rise in journalism. It began with a decision to turn his focus to China.
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Joseph F. Kahn’s first job out of college in 1987 was covering Plano, Texas, for The Dallas Morning News, and he was impatient at the prospect of a slow career path.
“I realized that filing on deadline and slipping the occasional felicitous phrase into a news story may not get me much farther than the city hall beat, and then only after years of hard work,” he wrote in a Harvard alumni note years later. “Suddenly a nation with a billion-plus people and a remarkably thin foreign press corps beckoned.”
That nation was China, whose potential as the next great story had been impressed on Mr. Kahn by one of his professors. At the time, ambitious young reporters flocked to high-profile bureaus like Moscow and Jerusalem; Mr. Kahn reasoned that China, not the pivotal power it is today, gave him a better chance to stand out.
On Tuesday, Mr. Kahn, 57, was named the next executive editor of The New York Times, the culmination of a steady journalistic rise that began with his decision to move overseas. In China, he collected two Pulitzer Prizes, met the woman who would become his wife and spearheaded exposés of excess and corruption, the consequences of which are still being felt.
Now he has been asked to forge the next chapter of The Times, a 171-year-old institution that is adopting the global outlook Mr. Kahn embraced 35 years ago.
As the paper’s managing editor since 2016, Mr. Kahn built a 24-hour operation with hubs in London and Seoul, South Korea. He helped re-engineer a print-focused newsroom into a more agile digital outfit, and introduced real-time news updates that The Times believes can compete against the speed and immediacy of cable TV and social media.
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