Pessimists predict the death of paper, but any early New Yorker comes across several copies on their doorstep, surprisingly fat on weekends, of the city’s leading newspaper, New York Times. From the city and from journalism, which is looked at in the newspaper in search of inspiration or a model, or both things at the same time and some more, as a clear direction in times of change: from the turbulence of the world and the information ecosystem. Pilot the New York Times (with a staff of 1,700 journalists among its 5,000 employees and editions in Chinese and Spanish) requires a firm hand and knowledge of the trade, something that Joseph F. Kahn, whom everyone calls Joe and who will occupy as of this week the throne of world journalism, will help him print “a very fluid change in leadership”, as he promised when his appointment as director was made public. Serenity and solvency as refuge values in troubled times.
the mirror of the Gray Ladyas it is known Timesbrings back the brightest shades of the color that is often dismissed as mediocre: the auctoritas, reflection, reserve by system; a patrician discretion, bordering on invisibility. All these traits are in Kahn, a 57-year-old Bostonian, of good birth, with Lithuanian and Irish ancestors; Mandarin speaker, winner of a couple of Pulitzer Prizes, subtle and firm manager of the continuous updating of the newspaper until it became an informative model, but also a business model. After years as a correspondent in China, he has been responsible for the International section and since 2016, at the head of a global newsroom that has grown in size, complexity and ambition, number two From the newspaper. The figure of him, still enigmatic even in the newsroom, seems the reverse of his predecessor, the expansive and more popular Dean Baquet, but also the perfect complement to underpin the new maturity of the masthead. The photographs that show them together, posing, define them: Baquet’s open laugh against Kahn’s half-smile.
Long before landing on the Times in 1998, he had already shown signs of his interest in current affairs, as well as his ambition. At Harvard, he directed The Crimson, the university newspaper, which, like so many others on American campuses, has little to envy a professional publication (and which, moreover, is often a source of notables). Asked then about his future, the young Kahn answered with determination: “I hope to try my hand at journalism, print journalism, for a while. I won’t be happy until I make it.”
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He achieved his goal in Dallas Morning News, after graduating in 1987. But local information was too small for him and, as often happens among Anglo-Saxon journalists, he decided to broaden his training, in his case with a master’s degree in Asian studies. “I realized that delivering the text on time and slipping a timely phrase into a story would not take me much beyond the municipality, and that after years of work,” she wrote in a note to alumni years later.
“Suddenly, a country with more than a billion people and very few foreign correspondents caught my attention,” he added. She landed in Beijing as freelancing in the middle of the Tiananmen storm, in 1989, and managed to get his old newspaper to publish his chronicles. Authentic journalistic nose: if then the most desired destinations of the profession were Moscow or Jerusalem, even Beirut, Kahn was right looking at China, where he returned hand in hand with the Morningthen he Wall Street Journal and, since 1998, of the Times. In China he met his wife, with whom he has two children. Kahn’s efforts were decisive in launching the Mandarin edition of the newspaper.
Kahn is an exponent of the most hard, DNA from a medium such as Times. But the diary he came to years ago has become something else. His millionaire audiences cannot be understood without his offer of hobbies -the purchase in January of the fashionable game, Wordle, was a master move-, leisure (the sports portal The Athletic); their cooking recipes, with a legion of followers, or, among the new informative bets, podcasts, documentaries and multimedia specials. In an internal evaluation in 2014, the Times he admitted that he was falling behind in the battle on the Internet, with 966,000 subscribers. Today that venerable institution, with 171 years of history, reaches ten million.
against populism
Kahn rises to the top of world journalism amid the gale of polarization, old and new populism and resentments that dig the trench of cultural wars or raise the threat of cancellation: phenomena that have taken place in the US its test bed, with Donald Trump as the standard bearer of national tension. “We don’t know where the political spirit will evolve over time,” he said in a recent interview. “An institution seething with internal conflict over whether it has evolved enough, or too much, from its historic approach to journalism, [es la institución que debe] record the erosion of American democracy without inadvertently promoting it.” Ensuring public trust “at a time of polarization and partisanship” is one of his priorities.
Music lover -it is usual to see him in the premieres of the opera-, amateur oenologist, poker player of those who keep their cards, Kahn convinces in short distances, say those who know him. In the description that the American media offer of him these days, he does not appear, unlike his predecessor, as the king of the dance, but as that man of the house, so disciplined and so devoted to the mission of the Times which turns out to be the safest option in stormy times.
The man who has helped prop up the digital conversion of the newspaper recently agreed to pose, with an unfolded copy of the paper beside him, in a photo shoot for the magazine nyc, nail highly commented images in the cenacles of the Big Apple by the seductive gesture of Kahn. Above him, one thing was clear: the Gray Lady she’s still photogenic, sexy even. On paper and in any format.
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