The New York Times offers newsroom strategy team updates

I’m thrilled to announce that Carol Huang, a brilliant strategist who has led a range of high-impact work at The Times in recent years, will become deputy for newsroom strategy. And I’m very pleased to welcome Katherine (“Kat”) Chang to the team as a senior manager.

Carol Huang

Carol has made a quick and profound impact since joining The Times early in the pandemic, and her new role will come as little surprise to those who have worked closely with her.

As deputy, a new role on newsroom strategy, Carol will be my partner in pushing forward our journalism strategy and improvements to the way the newsroom operates, as well as shaping the priorities and the work of the team. She’ll be a thought partner for newsroom leaders and a resource for anyone in the newsroom who has ideas for our future. And she’ll continue to take on her own projects in critical areas as well.

Carol comes more than prepared for the job. She brings uncommon journalistic instincts, business judgment and analytical rigor, and she is bristling with solutions to intractable problems and ideas for big opportunities. And she moves at lightning speed to get it all done.

Carol’s accomplishments thus far have included mapping out the newsroom’s new culture and careers department, a centerpiece of the newsroom’s diversity, equity and inclusion action plan; partnering with Sam Sifton and his team to map a digital-first vision for our culture and lifestyle report; and leading early phases of our return to office planning. Among other work, she’s also partnered with the Cooking team to fine tune our strategy for recipes, consulted on production processes for narrated audio, and worked closely with Marc, Steve and others to sharpen our vision for the future of live journalism.

Carol joined The Times in 2020 from BCG, the management consulting firm, where she worked after getting her M.B.A. at Wharton and master’s in public affairs from Princeton. Before graduate school, Carol was Asia editor and deputy OpEd editor at The Christian Science Monitor, a general assignment reporter at The National in Dubai and a China correspondent for AFP in Beijing.

Kat Chang

Kat comes to The Times from Google, where she most recently led strategy and operations for the Google News Initiative, and previously worked on the Google business operations team. In those teams, she refreshed the strategy for the Google News Initiative’s multimillion dollar commitment to the news industry and re-evaluated Google’s approach to data privacy, among a range of other projects. Before Google, she worked as a management consultant at Strategy& and was formerly an intern here at The Times, in the marketing department.

Kat brings a wealth of experience in the technology and journalism industries, and has a keen sense for how to successfully navigate strategy issues in a complex organization like ours. Asked for fun facts, Kat relayed an experience of being charged by a bull while hiking in the Swiss Alps — just the type of bravery and taste for adventure it takes to do great strategy work in the newsroom.

Kat graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and was also advertising manager at The Daily Pennsylvanian.