Curiosity, Connection and Community
Wisdom from Mitra Kalita
In our third week at CUNY, we were privileged to have Mitra Kalita, managing editor of the LA Times speak to our Social Tools and Platforms class. Before class, I googled her name and found a copy of the actual memo sent to staff at the Times when she was hired — it read:
“The news environment and the needs of readers are changing more rapidly than at any time in the history of our industry. The Los Angeles Times should do more than keep pace with that change; we must strive to lead it.
To that end, we are expanding the newsroom leadership and announcing an important new hire. These moves continue our efforts to create a newsroom of the future that can innovate even as we deliver robust digital and print coverage for our readers.
The newest member of our leadership team is S. Mitra Kalita. A creative force behind the business news site Quartz, with a background in traditional journalism as well, Mitra will join The Times as managing editor for editorial strategy. She will focus on helping us remake how the newsroom works and on creating new forms of journalism.
Mitra, who will report to Davan, will be one of three managing editors in the new structure. Marc Duvoisin, as managing editor for news, will continue to be the senior editor overseeing news and enterprise coverage, a job he has done with great skill. Larry Ingrassia, currently associate editor, will become managing editor for new ventures, focusing on developing editorial products with revenue potential.
Deputy managing editor Megan Garvey, our leading digital practitioner, will also play a key role in our broader digital transformation while running all aspects of our daily digital news report.
All of us will coordinate with our colleagues on the business side as we develop new journalism efforts and offerings that strengthen us commercially. Our common mission is to maintain the editorial excellence and integrity of all we do.
The new structure is aimed at helping us build on the progress we have made by picking up the pace of change in what we do and how we do it.
Mitra will work to develop and refine new styles of journalism similar to those she helped pioneer at Quartz. Launched in 2012, Quartz is known for its lively mix of news and analysis, its Daily Brief of worldwide business news, its creative use of social media and its focus on “obsessions” of special interest to its readers rather than traditional beats. Mitra will also lead newsroom efforts as part of an enhanced effort at audience acquisition — bringing more people to see our terrific journalism and finding new communities of readers.
Mitra has a notable record in high-quality journalism. At the Wall Street Journal, she oversaw coverage of the Great Recession, launched a local news section for New York City and reported on the housing crisis as a senior writer. In 2007, she was part of the team that created Mint, a business newspaper and website in India launched in collaboration with the Journal that has become that country’s second-largest circulated business newspaper. Before that, she worked for the Washington Post, Newsday and the Associated Press.
At Quartz, part of the Atlantic Media family, Mitra was ideas editor and, more recently, executive editor (at large). She was behind some of the site’s most viral stories, on subjects as varied as monetary policy and baby blankets, and the force behind Quartz India and the upcoming Quartz Africa. She is the author of three books related to migration and globalization and has taught at Columbia Journalism School, among other institutions. She has won numerous reporting awards and was named one of Folio’s Top 100 Women in Media for 2014.
Mitra was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and raised in Long Island, Puerto Rico and New Jersey — with regular trips to her grandparents’ villages in Assam, India. She speaks Spanish, Assamese and Hindi and studied Mandarin for a year. She lives in Queens, N.Y., with her artist husband and two daughters. She tweets @mitrakalita.
Please join us in welcoming Mitra to Los Angeles and The Times.
— Austin and Davan”
WOW. We’re a class of social journalism students wanting to learn how to engage with our communities — who better to speak with us than Malita Kalita.
I knew from a reading assignment published by Nieman Lab that her goal at the Times was to expand their audience beyond traditional readership to incorporate new platforms for storytelling that would identify communities of interest — she wanted to write for these communities, not just about them.
Mitra was warm, engaging and authentic —her extraordinary ability to connect with people was immediately evident. I was mesmerized by her insights and particularly interested in how she has been able to write about communities that other readers don’t identify with, making her stories accessible and personal by finding common threads and using multiple elements that would allow readers to identfy with them. What are these connections that everyone can relate to? Examples included motherhood, pizza, and even toilet paper (lol) — through pictures that evoke a universal emotional connection — a brilliant, yet simple way of helping people everywhere identify with what someone is going through (empathy).
I was particularly inspired by Mitra’s baby blanket story that went viral. For years and years she watched her friends post pictures of their newborn babies on Facebook, until one day after two friends had given birth, she suddenly saw something she had never seen before — every one of those babies were wrapped in the exact same blue and pink baby blanket. (My own three babies had been wrapped in that same blanket and I’d never thought to ask why — note to self about the importance of curiosity for journalism.)
She commissioned a freelancer to look into the blankets and discovered:
1) they were all made in Pakistan. Now you have a personal connection to Pakistan knowing that your own baby is swaddled in one of their soft and cuddly baby blankets; and 2) the blanket is a product of hospital births and it’s become standardized since that time, which wasn’t that long ago when you consider that most births occured at home until the 20th Century when women sought “pain-free” (haha-right?) childbirth with anesthesia.
The headline of a story is perhaps more important than the story itself — it has to draw people in or they may never read the story. It read, “Why Every Newborn You See on Facebook is Wrapped in the Same Baby Blanket.” It definitely drew people in, and it went viral because it was universal. Kalita told us that the headline is a way into the story — it services the reader, not the media outlet.
Our challenge from Mitra Kalita was to wake up every morning and see the world through new eyes, as a new canvas — as journalists, we’re here for discovery. I left inspired and challenged to be passionately curious — to write for my community and not just about them.
Thank you Mitra Kalita for taking time out from your busy schedule to stop by room 430 on a Wednesday evening to speak with our class. Your authenticity is inspiring and your desire to connect people from all backgrounds has reminded me of why I’m here at CUNY in the social journalism program.
