We've traditionally thought of media on this traditional left/right spectrum and most media's kind of clustered in the center and I think people have traditionally thought of HuffPost as being this kind of liberal, progressive voice and that's, you know I think they're are good reasons for thinking that. I mean it started after George W. Bush was reelected and was an answer to the Drudge Report.

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.

I have a perhaps naive point of view informed by my own kind of snowflake-in-the-unique-sense rather than the political sense, personal story. I mean I feel like my experiences are so hard to map onto any kind of generalized identity. For example, I'm a black person, but I come from a very particular black experience which is not unlike the experience of the Barack Obama. I have an African mother and a white father and I feel like I have a different experience of being a black person as a result of that identity than someone who is from the descendants of slaves.

To me the sort of like, the ethos, if you will, of like tabloid is like Daily News in the 1970s. It's a news organization that thinks of its mission to speak directly to people who are kind of , the people who are sort of the foundation of the American workforce or were at one time. What I love about this conception of the tabloid is that actually everybody read it.

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.

My father was very much a child of the counterculture movement and was drawn to the idea of alleviating poverty in the developing world, helping farmers diversify their crops and stuff like that.

To me, that's the foundational fact of my identity is that I'm a journalist and so it's hard to imagine putting anything else first.