When I first signed up for a Twitter account - I was to say it was in 2007, people are going to think it's some weird self promotional thing or it's going, but in time I was called upon to like try to persuade other foreign correspondents and journalists to get on Twitter and see the usefulness of it which is kind of ironic. I think the journalists who are leading the digital charge at the Times have, all have that background as a foreign correspondent, which I think is not accidental.
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 PolgreenIndia's notoriously difficult. It's visa routine is notoriously difficult to get a residency permit and all that stuff, so that threw up all kinds of complicated barriers for us. I remember once having to go meet with the foreign ministry official and say 'You know look I have a real problem here. Is this person really important to you?' And I just thought 'My God.' You know my wife and I have been together since college. You know it's 20 years.
Lydia PolgreenFor us what we're trying to do is find the right balance of creating a space for emotion that leads to a sense of empathy and solidarity rather than a sense of division. In my most grandiose moments I think of HuffPost as a platform that makes solidarity possible, that really thinking about the emotional content of stories is a way to help people who think, or who have been manipulated to think, that they're interests are opposed to one another, that they actually are aligned in a fundamental way and they're actually in the same boat.
Lydia PolgreenAbility to have that sort of feedback loop with your readers to me felt incredibly powerful.
Lydia PolgreenThe level of dependence on government among rural populations is actually extraordinary. They suffer even more when that assistance is taken away because they don't have access to the economic dynamism of cities. So if there are ways to tell stories that help people in rural areas see their kind of mutual need for care, that to me is the kind of thing that I want HuffPost to try and do.
Lydia PolgreenAnything that I'm doing I think I always come at it from an outsider perspective. The first like real front page story that I had for the Times was about how after decades of battles over public restrooms in New York City, effectively chain stores had become the public restroom of choice for New Yorkers, it's sort of a silly little thing, but coming as an outsider, I was like 'Oh this is actually really interesting.'
Lydia Polgreen