Joe Kahn, editor-in-chief of the New York Times, is a low-key presence. When I met him at the Times’s offices in midtown Manhattan in June, he was wearing a dark-collared knit shirt under a crisply ironed brown blazer, and he kept small talk to a minimum. Kahn is a star reporter, winning a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 2006, but from the outside, presiding over the Times’ newsroom of more than 2,000 employees might seem closer to the role of a highly qualified human resources manager. In February 2023, an open letter signed by some Times staff and contributors criticized the paper for “editorial bias in the paper’s coverage of transgender, nonbinary and gender nonconforming people,” citing specific reporters and articles. Kahn’s team met with some of the signatories, and he wrote to the paper’s staff that “participating in such a campaign is contrary to the letter and spirit of our Code of Ethics.” After the Oct. 7 Israeli attack and the ensuing war on Gaza, Mr. Khan again found himself facing off against an editorial team grappling with blending personal conscience with traditional journalistic norms. The Times fired a prominent staff writer at the paper who had signed both the February open letter and one from last October that denounced the Times’ editorials and broadly criticized mainstream media coverage of the conflict as “racist and revisionist.”
If there’s one thing that has characterized the Khan era so far, it’s this struggle to police newsroom culture at a time when newspapers are bigger and more influential than ever before. By one estimate, about 7 percent of American newspaper employees now work at the Times. This increase comes as nearly every other media sector is plagued by layoffs. The Times has become an essential part of readers’ lives, but it’s also an institution that stokes discontent across the political spectrum. In our conversation, which was edited for length and clarity, Khan stressed that the Times should support stories that might be subject to strong criticism. It seemed like he was talking about the criticism the paper receives, mostly from the left. “When reporters on our staff cover something that we think is important and it receives some backlash, we have to strongly support it,” Khan told me. “Those kinds of people are invaluable in journalism today, and they’ll get ahead.”
We spoke about the paper’s code of ethics, the concept of independent reporting, and his desire to instill “resilience” in his reporters. We also talked about his family’s philanthropic efforts. Khan is a man of great wealth; his late father, Leo, was the co-founder of Staples. Khan is the only person named in tax records as a trustee of the Khan Charitable Foundation (which also lists financial institutions). He is also the only person with check-signing authority for the foundation, according to records from the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office (the foundation is based outside Boston). The foundation’s assets, according to its most recent public filings, are more than $12 million. During its fiscal year, which began on July 1, 2022, one month after Khan became editor-in-chief, the foundation made donations to a variety of causes, including the American Cancer Society and several music and Asian cultural foundations. (Khan is an opera fan and met his wife when he was a China correspondent.) The foundation also donated $10,000 to the Center for Reproductive Rights and $6,000 to the Planned Parenthood Federation. When I asked Khan about these donations, he said he has never personally donated to these organizations, but that he does not restrict donations by others in his family. The Times’ ethics code says employees “must be sensitive to the possibility that even entirely appropriate political activity by a spouse, family member or associate may create a conflict of interest or the appearance of a conflict of interest.” In such situations, employees are encouraged to consult with their department head and the newspaper’s standards editor or another senior editor. In some situations, employees “may have to step back from certain coverage or move to work unrelated to the activity in question.”
In a follow-up after our interview, I asked Khan if he had consulted with anyone at The Times about his family’s foundation’s donations to reproductive rights groups. A Times spokesperson said Khan “adheres to our company’s ethics guidelines on all matters, including these,” and that he “has no involvement in or knowledge of the specific donations you have identified.” The day-to-day administration of the trust, including signing checks, is handled by professionals at the financial institution that manages the trust, she said.
Your father, the co-founder of Staples, also attended Columbia University’s School of Journalism at a young age. Was that one of the reasons you became a journalist?
That’s partly true, because although he had been a journalist for a short time after graduating from journalism school, he had always been an avid newspaper reader and critic, and a very enthusiastic critic of newspapers. He read not only the Boston papers, but also the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and he would compare and contrast what they were reporting and point it out to me. And he had his favorite columnists, and he didn’t like some.
Name it!
At the time, the left-leaning columnist for The New York Times was Anthony Lewis, but he liked William Safire, who was a little more to the right, and he would compare and contrast the way they handled the same issues, and he would get angry at Lewis, and he would get very happy when Safire would counter Lewis and tell his own story.
What did you learn from those early passionate journalistic debates?
He would cut out things from the newspapers that he didn’t like and say, “Explain to me, explain why you wrote it like that. You’re a journalist, explain why you wrote it like that.” When I started writing my own articles and had my own byline in the school paper and then went professional, he collected all of those articles. In fact, one of the mementos of his article collection that I got after he passed away, in 2011, was a notebook full of newspaper clippings of articles that I had written. He would read my articles to the end and cut them out. He was an advocate for me and a bit of a provocateur towards what was going on in the industry.
I read that when you were at Harvard, the president banned university officials from speaking to the Crimson because of your reporting.
That’s true. The president at the time was Derek Bok, and my job as a correspondent for the Harvard Crimson was to cover the president’s office. We did a story on a contentious policy issue where someone made the claim that President Bok had provided inaccurate information about decision-making. He took the structure and writing of our story to mean that the Crimson was calling him a liar, and he became very upset and offended, and he stopped communicating with us for a while. Not only did he stop talking to us, but he banned everyone in the Harvard administration from speaking to the Crimson on any subject. So we decided at that point that every story that had a comment from a Harvard official would have a comment section that said, “By order of President Bok, all Harvard administrators have been informed not to accept any calls or comments to the Harvard Crimson, so we couldn’t get their perspective on the story.” And we ran that section on the front page every time a story like this came out for about two weeks. President Bok subsequently rescinded the ban, which served as something of a lesson in both the responsibility and opportunity of the press.
What qualities set you apart as a reporter?
What I enjoyed most about reporting was being completely immersed in that world. When I started working as a reporter, I spent a lot of time in Texas. Growing up in the Boston area, that was enough of a culture change for me. But then I went further afield and spent almost 12 years in China. What I enjoyed most was trying to understand a totally different culture and using my skills as a journalist to tell stories that people would be interested in, in a place that wasn’t as prominent as it is now when I was younger. It was an adventure to find stories that would get a genuine response and open people’s eyes to developments in China. And it was exciting just to find people who would help me tell those stories and bring them to life for The Wall Street Journal and later The New York Times. When I was working at The Dallas Morning News, I took on a series of stories about violence against women. [Kahn’s reporting helped the newspaper win a Pulitzer in 1994.] And my colleague Jim Yardley and I have done similar research looking at how the legal system has been manipulated in China. [Kahn and Yardley won a Pulitzer in 2006 for their reporting.] It was also a very interesting experience to do that kind of investigative journalism in a very different culture, with very different ways of accessing officials and documents.