Kathleen Kingsbury, 41

Kathleen Kingsbury was named opinion editor in January. She joined the Times in 2017 from the Boston Globe, where she served as managing editor for digital. Kingsbury joined the Globe’s editorial board in 2013 and later edited the Ideas section. In this role, Kingsbury was also deputy managing editor for the paper and the deputy editorial page editor.

Kingsbury has also worked as a

New York-based staff writer and Hong Kong-based foreign correspondent for Time Magazine. In addition, she has contributed to CNN, Reuters, the Daily Beast, Businessweek, and Fortune.

What are you most excited about in the news industry today?

One thing that is inspiring right now is there has been a real democratization of where ideas can come from. For an opinion editor like me, the opportunities to find expertise, voices or experiences you never expected—and to interrogate ideas, offer solutions or explore the human condition—have never been greater. Making decisions about what gets discussed and derided, debated and decided has never been more of a power and a privilege. Finding the right form for those ideas—between text, audio

and visual journalism—is so compelling. And it’s incredibly fun work.

What is your advice for aspiring women journalists?

A few years ago, when I was still at the Boston Globe, more than 100 of my journalist colleagues and I found ourselves assisting with home delivery after the company switched delivery vendors for the print newspaper and customers saw widespread delivery problems. We woke up well before dawn for days in a row, tried to make heads or tails of town maps and ensured that newspapers ended up on front stoops.

The experience reinforced for me the importance of learning the business models and levers that support your journalism and what’s needed to make them sustainable.

Yes, today that is more about understanding funnels, algorithms or KPIS than paper routes. But the days I spent delivering papers gave me a direct connection to the Globe’s subscribers and my colleagues who worked on subscriber engagement. I’ve since found that when you take the time to get to know your businessside co-workers, you all end up even more excited about collaborating toward the same goal: getting more journalism into more people’s hands.