I think the real sort of decision moment for me was president Donald Trump election night and just realizing that there was something happening in the country and in the world that had a very deep relationship to the nature of the current media landscape and that this opportunity that was in front of me could be a place to try to work on that. To try to fix what was going wrong and, or at least make an attempt.
Lydia PolgreenThe New York Times I think really is the gold standard of a certain type of journalism and in some ways it's the most important type of journalism, this chronicle of the biggest and most important stories of our time covered with a level of rigor and seriousness that is really unparalleled.
Lydia PolgreenI have this very kind of like heterodox idea of what an education is, what underpins identity. I don't think I'm very easily pigeon holed in any of those boxes, so I confront this. I have a staff full of young people who came up in a very different tradition and who feel very fired up about the big identity battles. I listen and I try to navigate them, but I don't find them mapping onto my life in a personal way which is, which is hard.
Lydia PolgreenI think I'm this sort of perpetual outsider, I grew up most of my life in countries that were neither where I was born nor where either of my parents were from. I was part of a weird religion that nobody had heard of.
Lydia PolgreenJim Rich is many different things but he has a great combination of a kind of old school tabloid reporter and editor's sense for what's a great story, but he's also incredibly passionate about social justice. I think Shaun King called him the most woke editor in American, if that's a compliment.
Lydia PolgreenOnce I came out in college I just have always been out and at work with pretty much everybody. My wife and I both working as journalists, because she's a photographer, and often working together, would have to kind of navigate this weird world. When you're trying to develop sources, when you're trying to you know make personal connections with people, you inevitably want to share things about yourself and that can be really tricky.
Lydia Polgreen