Rebecca Blumenstein Biography | Rebecca Blumenstein
Rebecca Blumenstein is a journalist and newspaper editor. Blumenstein is currently one of the highest-ranking women in the newsroom at The New York Times.
Blumenstein started her career at the Tampa Tribune and then contributed to Gannett Newspapers and Newsday. Blumenstein started working for the Wall Street Journal in 1995 as a reporter for Detroit covering General Motors, then began covering China in 2005.
She became The Wall Street Journal’s Deputy Editor in Chief in January 2013. After more than two decades at The Wall Street Journal, Blumenstein joined The New York Times as the Deputy Managing Editor in February 2017, making her one of the highest-ranking women in the newsroom.
Blumenstein has reported on General Motors, Detroit, AT&T Corp., WorldCom Inc., the New York State legislature, China, and mergers in the telecommunications industry.
In 1993, she won the New York Newswomen’s Award for coverage of the Long Island Railroad shootings. In 2003, her team won the Gerald Loeb Award for coverage of WorldCom.
In 2007, her team in China won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. In 2009, she was named to Aspen Institute’s Henry Crown Fellowship. She received the Gerald Loeb Award’s 2015 Minard Editor Award for career contributions to business journalism.
Rebecca Blumenstein Age
Rebecca Blumenstein is Deputy Editor-in-Chief of The Wall Street Journal, a role she assumed in January 2013. Previously, she was the Page One Editor, appointed in September 2011, and a deputy managing editor and international editor since December 2009.
Ms. Blumenstein has also served as managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Online and as the China bureau chief, overseeing China coverage for the Journal. Her pieces of information about the birth date, age, month, place of birth are unknown but stay ready for the update soon
Husband, Married
This is an article from the fall 2017 issue of LSA Magazine. Read more stories from the magazine.
It is the summer of 2017 and Rebecca Blumenstein, a deputy managing editor of the New York Times, is wondering what is going to happen next.
“Everything is changing,” she says, ”from trade policy to taxes to healthcare to social safety nets to relationships with almost every country in the world.
Companies’ relationships with the government are changing, and the very notion of whether GM should even have plants in Mexico is being challenged. Retail is falling apart because Amazon is so successful. It’s just a giant story and I feel, like many others, supercharged by it.
“And if you’re a political reporter now,” she adds, “it’s just an endurance test. Rarely has one seen such an intense news cycle last for so long. We are following bigger stories than we’ve seen in many, many years.”
Blumenstein speaks from experience. After four years at the Michigan Daily, including one in which she was editor-in-chief, Blumenstein began her career as a political reporter covering county government at the Tampa Tribune.
An economics major in the Residential College, she moved on to Gannett Newspapers and Newsday before joining the Detroit bureau of the Wall Street Journal to cover General Motors.
She stayed with the Journal for more than 20 years, covering technology and telecommunications before becoming the paper’s China Bureau Chief.
She continued to climb the ranks until she became the Journal’s deputy editor-in-chief, a position she held until this year when she joined the New York Times.
To manage the steady onslaught of news, consumers are increasingly returning to an old reliable guide: the front page of the daily paper. Digital or physical, the front page curates and organizes the superabundance of stories, and they’re stories people want to read.
In the first quarter of 2017, the Times added 300,000 new subscribers. The Columbia Journalism Review and the Wall Street Journal have seen upticks in their paid support, too.
“It crystallizes our job,” Blumenstein says, “simply do journalism that’s good enough that you’re willing to pay for it.”
Blumenstein and her husband, author Alan Paul (A.B. 1988), on the cover of the fashion issue of the Daily’s Weekend Magazine. Courtesy of the U-M Bentley Historical Library.
Rebecca Blumenstein Quartz
A New York Times editor’s advice to help women stand out in male-dominated offices
Historically, journalism (like most industries) has been heavily male-dominated—especially among the top editors. And even today, as women comprise over two-thirds of journalism school graduates, the media industry is just one-third women, a percentage that only decreases for women of color.
As of 2017, men received 62% of bylines and other credits in print, online, TV, and wire news, according to a Women’s Media Center report.
Amid these statistics, Rebecca Blumenstein is something of an anomaly. Now deputy managing editor at the New York Times, a post she assumed in Feb. 2017, Blumenstein spent 22 years at the Wall Street Journal.
There she held various roles, including deputy editor-in-chief (her final role), page one editor, international editor, and China bureau chief. Blumenstein remains the highest-ranking woman to lead the Journal’s news organization to date.
So, what’s Blumenstein’s advice for women who hope to emulate her success, in or beyond journalism?
“A long time ago I learned a couple of techniques, and one is that I speak up early in meetings,” she told a gathering of Quartz reporters and editors in a newsroom forum about mentorship in New York today (Aug. 24).
Even now, as deputy managing editor of (arguably) the most prestigious paper in the world, Blumenstein admits she’s still sometimes intimidated to speak up during morning news meetings—especially when her Times colleagues discuss controversial topics like Trump, or when prestigious guests drop in. (“Bill Gates came by recently,” she noted.)
Blumenstein is not alone. Research suggests that in most mixed-gender meetings, men suck up approximately 75% of the talking time. What’s more, even the most powerful women in business and politics are routinely interrupted by men.
“I think as women, not to generalize, but many of us can feel intimidated to speak up—even with 25 years in your business and knowing the topics relatively well,” said Blumenstein.
“So I just made a point of speaking up early in meetings, because if you don’t, you begin to have thoughts, then someone else will make your point, and you begin to feel like not so much a part of the meeting.
It may seem silly, but that basic meeting dynamic is something that’s very important to our peers, and something I’m still working on now.”
Simple as it may seem, speaking up early in a meeting, especially as a woman, establish your confidence and knowledge while protecting your ideas from being hijacked by a (probably male) colleague.
Countless studies (and even more hilarious cartoons) have shown that even when women do speak up, male colleagues frequently receive credit for their ideas.
Ultimately, speaking up early won’t reverse sexism, but it does challenge your colleagues to take you seriously and sets a powerful example for younger employees, especially young women.
According to Blumenstein, higher-level culture shifts come from male and female employees making a genuine effort to get to know one another as human beings, not just coworkers. As she said:
People who are like one another can end up hanging out with one another. Personally, I like going out to drinks (with teammates). I think there’s a breaking-bread element out of the office, where it’s really important to get to know one another.
But you have to make sure that you do that in your own terms, and in doing so, you fight that tendency of guys just hanging out with other guys.
Despite the cultural and economic forces that favor men, Blumenstein said the Journal was particularly good at promoting and mentoring women.
Two of her promotions occurred when she was on maternity leave, she said, one of which led her to move from Detroit to New York City with a six-month-old baby.
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