Here’s a big announcement: Julie Pace has been named senior vice president and executive editor of The Associated Press. Pace, who has been assistant managing editor and Washington bureau chief, replaces Sally Buzbee, who left the AP in May to become executive editor of The Washington Post.
Pace, 39, becomes the third consecutive woman to lead the AP news operation, which includes news content from journalists based in 250 locations in 100 countries. Kathleen Carroll was the first woman to lead the AP, from 2002 through 2016.
In a statement, Pace said, “I am honored to be leading AP’s team of talented and courageous journalists, who work tirelessly to break news and tell impactful stories from every corner of the world. We have great opportunities ahead to modernize our news report and better serve the needs of our customers and audience, while always maintaining AP’s standing as the world’s preeminent fact-based news organization.”
Pace joined the AP in 2007 as a video producer and was the AP’s first multimedia political journalist. Before the AP, Pace was a TV reporter and freelancer in South Africa and a general assignment reporter at the Tampa Tribune. She’s a native of Buffalo and earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School. Pace clearly has an eye on where to take the AP next.
As Associated Press media reporter David Bauder wrote, “In some ways Pace is herself a symbol of the AP’s transition,” noting Pace’s background as a video producer and her comfort appearing on TV to offer her analysis and represent AP.
Pace told Bauder, “We are in a position where we have an opportunity to really modernize our news report. We have an opportunity to take all of the fantastic journalism that we do across formats and think of ways we can make it more digital-friendly, to make it more social-friendly.”
In an interview with The New York Times’ Katie Robertson, Pace said, “I understand that sometimes there is an outdated impression of The A.P. or a feeling like we’re just a basic wire service putting out choppy sentences. If that is your impression of The A.P., then you haven’t been paying attention to The A.P. We produce just incredibly high-level, sophisticated reports across all formats every day.”
Pace also told Robertson this welcomed message: “Being a fact-based news organization does not mean that everybody on every side of an issue gets equal hearing, gets equal voice. In certain cases, the facts are just really clear, and we want to make sure that we are amplifying the facts and not muddying the facts. So Covid vaccines are safe. Climate change is real. There was no widespread fraud in the U.S. election. Those are not political positions; those are fact-based positions.”
USA Today and Gannett reveal latest diversity report
“Women now make up the majority of the newsroom at USA TODAY.”
That’s the first sentence in a new piece by USA Today editor-in-chief Nicole Carroll.
In USA Today’s latest survey on staff diversity, released Wednesday, 51.7% of all journalists at the organization were women. The survey also found that journalists of color made up 34% of the newsroom, including Black (13.6%), Hispanic (10.1%) and Asian American (7%) journalists.
Carroll notes that in 1991, which is as far back as USA Today’s numbers go, women were 27.6% of the paper’s newsroom. In 2001, that number was 29%.
Holly Moore, USA Today Network planning director, told Carroll, “It matters because the news industry records history and for a very long time that history has been written from a male gaze. People in newsrooms are making decisions about what’s covered, who’s interviewed and the language we use to tell stories. Having more women in those conversations is key to presenting the most accurate version of history.”
Check out Carroll’s story for details on female journalists at USA Today.
This was all part of Gannett’s companywide effort regarding diversity transparency with most Gannett outlets publishing its results.
Maribel Perez Wadsworth, president of news at Gannett Media and publisher of USA Today, wrote a column with links to the individual newsroom reports. Perez Wadsworth reminded readers that Gannett pledged to build a workforce that mirrors the demographics of the country and the communities they serve by the end of 2025.
She added, “I am pleased to note that we have made solid progress toward our goal, with increased representation of journalists who are female, Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) across our local-to-national network of newsrooms. Though our work is far from over, we continue our commitment to achieving racial and ethnic parity over the course of the next four years.”
Ed Yong’s latest
If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you know my tremendous respect for The Atlantic’s Ed Yong, who won a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year for his coverage of COVID-19. He has been, in my opinion, the most important journalist in the world over the past two years when it comes to the pandemic.
He is now out with another lengthy and important piece: “LONG-HAULERS ARE FIGHTING FOR THEIR FUTURE.” He also has a Twitter thread introducing the piece.
In The Atlantic story, Yong writes, “After a year and a half, the risk of long COVID, for both unvaccinated and vaccinated people, is one of the pandemic’s biggest and least-addressed unknowns. The condition affects many young, healthy, and athletic people, and even now ‘none of us can predict who’s going to have persistent symptoms,’ Lekshmi Santhosh, the medical director of a long-COVID clinic at UC San Francisco, told me. A small number of fully vaccinated people have become long-haulers after breakthrough infections, although no one knows how common such cases are, because they aren’t being tracked. Mysteries abound; meanwhile, millions of long-haulers are sick.”
With significant reporting and always-measured analysis, Yong delivers another must-read COVID-19 piece.
A powerful remembrance
