Joseph Kahn (journalist)


Joseph F. Kahn is an American journalist who currently serves as executive editor of The New York Times.

Education

Kahn attended Middlesex School as a boarding student, serving as editor-in-chief of both the school newspaper and its literary magazine before graduating in 1983. He attended Harvard University as an undergraduate, where he earned a bachelor's degree in American history in 1987 and was president of The Harvard Crimson. In 1990, he received a master's degree in East Asian studies from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Career

Kahn joined the Times in January 1998, after four years as China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Before the Journal, he was a reporter at The Dallas Morning News, where he was part of a team of reporters awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for international reporting for their stories on violence against women around the world. In June 1989, the Chinese government ordered Kahn to leave the country because he was working as a reporter while using a tourist visa.
In 2006, Kahn and Jim Yardley won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for the Times covering rule of law in China, including their coverage of the detention of American-Chinese entrepreneur David Ji.
Kahn was assistant masthead editor for International at the New York Times from 2014 to September 2016. In 2016, Dean Baquet appointed him as managing editor for the Times, where in time he was recognized as Baquet's likely successor as executive editor.
In 2025, Kahn defended and praised an article in The New York Times on Zohran Mamdani's college application to Columbia, in spite of reported claims of publishing the article in pursuit of getting ahead of a conservative activist Christopher Rufo. Rufo appeared on the April 11th, 2025 edition of the New York Times Podcast The Daily. The Southern Poverty Law Center has described Rufo as a "far-right propagandist," and Rufo has recommended a podcast published by the Human Diversity Foundation. The article on Mamdani's college application used information credited to the alias of Jordan Lasker, who has been described as a proponent of race science and has co-authored with self-described eugenicists.

Personal life

Kahn's grandparents on his father's side were Jewish from Lithuania. His mother's parents were immigrants from Ireland. Kahn is the eldest child of Dorothy Davidson and Leo Kahn, founder of the Purity Supreme supermarket chain in New England and co-founder of the global office supply chain Staples. Leo had been awarded a journalism degree from Columbia University, after which he briefly had worked as a reporter, prompting a continuing interest in journalism that was reflected in his frequent dissection of newspaper coverage with his son. Leo Kahn served on the board of the pro-Israel organization Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America from 1990 and up to at least 2008. CAMERA has successfully petitioned for amendments from The New York Times during Joseph Kahn's tenure at the organization.