5: Lydia Polgreen

"I think facts and truth are essential to journalism but you need to reckon with emotion. You have to deal with how people feel, otherwise you miss the story."

The new editor-in-chief of the renamed HuffPost says she's positioning the site in the spirit of the best of tabloid journalism.

"The great tabloids were always driven by a sense of outrage, you know a sense of righteous indignation...and had this sensibility of, you know, like, there are people out there that are trying to screw you—and we’re going expose them for it," Lydia Polgreen tells Ben Smith. "The tabloid is fundamentally an emotional form of journalism."

Polgreen says she's steering directly into the populist moment, and aiming to write not about, but for, people who feel "screwed" by the existing power structure.

She also breaks the news in the interview of a major hire: Jim Rich, who turned the New York Daily News into a confrontational national voice on the 2016 election with a series of front pages mocking, usually, Donald Trump.

Polgreen also speaks of her career at the New York Times, about how foreign correspondents were often the first to grasp the power of new media, and of her singular life story — she was raised in Ghana by a Baha'i missionary — and her complicated reaction to being celebrated as the first black lesbian to lead a major publication.

Read the full transcript of this conversation. 

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