Once 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 PolgreenAbility to have that sort of feedback loop with your readers to me felt incredibly powerful.
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 PolgreenThe great tabloids were always driven by a sense of outrage, a sense of righteous indignation...and had this sensibility of, like, there are people out there that are trying to screw you - and we're going expose them for it.
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 PolgreenI think all of us in the pursuit of more perfect version of the truth and the story need to reckon with what we bring to the story, and I think that I'm confronting that in a very real way everyday. I'm extremely proud of who I am and it's nice to see it celebrated, but if someone were to ask me to list in order the biography, you know journalist comes first.
Lydia PolgreenI don't even know what being left wing means anymore. I feel that the left/right spectrum has been so fundamentally scrambled primarily by the politics around globalization - and you saw it in Brexit, you saw it in the French election, you see it in our election, it's happening everywhere.
Lydia Polgreen