Vox, the flagship of Vox Media, has two high-profile vacancies: Editor-in-Chief and Senior Vice President. Both jobs will be filled by Lauren Williams, one of the relatively few black women to have run a large general interest media company. In November, she announced that she was heading to a startup, Capital B, a website targeting black communities nationwide. Vox Media has limited its search for the next Vox editor to three finalists, said two people with knowledge of the matter who were not empowered to publicly discuss it.
HuffPost will likely not name its next editor until after it completes its sale to BuzzFeed, a deal that was announced in November. Jonah Peretti, who will be the managing director of the combined companies, is leading the search with Mark Schoofs, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News.
HuffPost hasn’t had an editor-in-chief since Lydia Polgreen, a former New York Times deputy editor-in-chief who ran the site for three years, left Spotify in March for podcasting company Gimlet Media. A BuzzFeed spokesperson said the search involved “a strong pool of diverse candidates.”
A number of other outlets are on the alert. Since December Wired, Condé Nast’s tech-oriented magazine, has been looking for a replacement for its editor-in-chief Nicholas Thompson, who is leaving as the Atlantic’s chief executive. Leading candidates for the wired job include Nilay Patel, 40, editor-in-chief of The Verge, a Vox Media website, and Megan Greenwell, 37, editor of Wired.com, according to three people with search skills.
Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s Chief Content Officer, has the final say on the election. A Condé Nast spokesman declined to comment on the details of the search.
As members of the emerging generation of journalism refine their résumés, watch a possible change at the New York Times as its editor-in-chief Dean Baquet approaches the newspaper’s usual 66-year retirement age for editors and top executives. Mr Baquet turned 64 in September and there have been numerous promotions among the newspaper’s editors lately.
