Bringing news perspective to magazines

Susan Goldberg joined National Geographic after a long career in news. Her previous positions included being executive editor at Bloomberg, the editor in chief position at two of the US’s biggest metropolitan newspapers and reporting stints at USA Today, The Detroit Press and the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Goldberg is also the first woman to hold the top position at National Geographic, but that was not the first time Goldberg was a leader for women’s equality in the newsroom. She was the first female editor in chief at the San Jose Mercury News and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She was also the first woman to report on the Michigan legislature for the Free Press in 1986.

She said it was not a difficult move to go from daily news to a weekly magazine. “I don’t think it was that different going from a daily news cadence to National Geographic because I don’t just work on the magazine, I work on our content across platforms,” she said. “So the shock wasn’t too great. If I’d gone to National Geographic 30 years ago before there was a web coming out of the daily news environment — that would not have been for me.”

Despite the changing face of journalism, she still thinks it’s a great profession. “I tell young people every day, this is the best time ever to be a journalists, because while there has been an enormous amount of disruption … the opportunity to use all of these tools that we never had before, to tell stories in different ways, allowing us to reach a larger and more diverse audience that we have ever been able to reach, is super exciting.”