Joe Kahn

Joseph F. Kahn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning China correspondent who rose to lead the international desk of The New York Times, and then as managing editor helped steer the newspaper into the digital era, has been selected to be The Times’s next executive editor, the top newsroom job. He is to succeed Dean Baquet, whose eight-year tenure is expected to conclude in June.Mr. Kahn, who was promoted to managing editor in 2016, is among Mr. Baquet’s closest confidants. Mr. Kahn grew up outside Boston, the eldest child of the entrepreneur Leo Kahn, a retailing pioneer who started supermarket chains in the Northeast and was a founder of Staples, the chain of office-supply superstores. Joe Kahn served as president of Harvard’s undergraduate daily, The Crimson, before graduating in 1987 with a degree in history. He re-enrolled at Harvard in a master’s program for East Asian studies and began learning Mandarin. By 1989, he was writing freelance articles from Beijing for The Morning News. In 1994, he shared in a Pulitzer Prize awarded to The Morning News for international reporting. He was hired by The Wall Street Journal, where he was assigned to Shanghai. After a stint as the editor and publisher of The Far Eastern Economic Review, a now-defunct weekly owned by The Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones, Mr. Kahn jumped to The Times in 1998. He covered Wall Street and economics before moving back to Shanghai; in 2003, he became the paper’s Beijing bureau chief. He returned to New York in 2008 as a deputy foreign editor and was appointed international editor in 2011.