Jennifer Cunningham
Executive Editor, Newsweek
Breaking news and breaking barriers
Jennifer Cunningham is executive editor at Newsweek. Before that, she served as editor-in-chief of the news division at digital-media company Business Insider. In that role, Cunningham oversaw news operations across the company’s bureaus in the U.S., the U.K., and Singapore.
Cunningham started her career as a beat reporter for newspapers such as the Bergen Record in New Jersey and the New York Daily News (where she covered crime). She eventually edited stories for digital outlets like Bossip and Interactive One, both of which focused on Black audiences.
Cunningham originally majored in public relations, but a feature-writing class at Penn State University sparked a love of narrative storytelling so strong that she switched to journalism. She received a master’s degree in international journalism at City University of London.
By Agnes Cheung
Three and a half stories a week was my quota at the Daily News many years ago. Nowadays, some reporters in digital journalism write three and a half stories a day, if not more.
I once worked for a broadsheet as a municipal reporter in northern New Jersey. I would go to a council meeting, take notes with a pen and a pad and file from the scene, which meant that I typed up the story in my car using a “MoJo,” which was a “mobile journalist” computer three times the size of a laptop today. I still have stacks of notebooks at my parents’ house from those days!
I covered crime for a large portion of my career. I once had to knock on a family’s door in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City at 11 p.m. Their 15-year-old daughter had killed herself. I was sent to interview the family hours after this gruesome and horrific incident, which was setting me up to possibly be injured: Grief can turn into anger very, very quickly.
Readers are turned off by too much gore. If I had been the supervising editor, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near that story. You just leave it at the circumstances of the death. It’s an isolated crime, there’s no bigger story that we could do that looks into trends in society. The family didn’t want to talk and I would just respect that.
Balancing the Needs of Breaking News
In this day and age, information flows so much faster. I have mixed feelings about that. I think that a well-reported story is not always a story that you can write in an hour and get it up and out. Good things come to those who wait.
Sometimes you need time to sleep on it; sometimes you need a source to get back to you. That’s a dichotomy with the need to produce a lot of stories, and it’s a tension that can manifest itself in newsrooms. It’s good to balance those two competing needs.
When we looked at breaking-news stories at Business Insider, we weren’t so much thinking about aggregating whatever the breaking news story was. We verified the information ourselves, whether through a state-police statement on social media or eyewitness testimony from court documents.
I think that a well-reported story is not always a story that you can write in an hour and get it up and out. Good things come to those who wait.
But in that same vein, while verifying, you also have to figure out how to move the story in question forward. You don’t want to just write about, say, a plane crash in a town. You want to seize interesting elements of the story. That could include details from the Coast Guard if the plane crashed near the ocean, or the Federal Aviation Administration if there was foul play.
It’s not so much aggregating what the New York Times reported about the set of events, it’s also about figuring out how to help readers make sense of those events while contextualizing the story.
Bringing Authenticity into Your Job
Journalism today is still overwhelmingly white and male, especially with leadership roles. It’s something that I keep in mind when I’m in spaces where I’m the only woman or the only person of color.
I’m lucky that my newsroom allows me to be authentically myself every day. I don’t have to feel like I’m putting on a show.
I think representation matters. It’s important for young women of color to see me, to know the work that I’m doing and that I worked really hard to get here. Then they know that they can do it too.
My little girl tells everyone that Mommy is an editor. As she grows up and sees me in authority, she’s going to think it’s normal — and I love it.
I think about the experiences of my ancestors, especially when I have to make tough decisions or have a hard day at work. My grandmother Annie was a domestic worker who never learned to read. Whatever I’ve had to deal with is nothing compared to what my grandmother had to deal with.
It’s very important for more people of color to consider leadership and for more newsrooms to be open to cultivating talent in their midst and raising them up.
I live in New York City, and I would love for all newsrooms to be more reflective of the societies they serve. I feel like we’ve come a long way, but there’s still a lot that we need to do. Diversity of opinion, for example, is just as important as ethnic diversity. I want Democrats and conservatives to feel comfortable in my newsroom. I want us to hit both sides really hard.
While covering the disappearance of Gabby Petito at Business Insider, we were among the first to highlight “missing white woman syndrome” and spotlight a multitude of men and women of color who disappeared around the same time. Counterbalance is really necessary. I think a lot about how to make the coverage more inclusive.
The reporters of today are making their voices known. Our newsroom is such that we can have a healthy discussion about how we want to cover something, or even whether it’s appropriate to cover something at all. We did not have those kinds of discussions when I was a tabloid reporter. It was very much “Keep your head down, just do as you’re told.”
In hindsight, when I was a young reporter, I should have spoken up more. The way Jennifer in 2011 approached stories and newsroom politics could use a word from Jennifer in 2023.