Editor-in-Chief, The Emancipator

The Boston Globe and Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research are collaborating to resurrect abolitionist-era newspapers via a new multimedia platform for opinion journalism, called The Emancipator. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, antislavery journals published in greater Boston, including William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator and Frederick Douglass's The North Star, were the nation’s most influential megaphones for antislavery commentary and helped to bring about Emancipation. Today, we envision The Emancipator as a leading megaphone for commentary and ideas that are grounded in both scholarly research and journalistic reporting and that will reframe the national conversation on racial justice.

The Emancipator is named after the first antislavery newspaper in the United States, founded 200 years ago. Just as antislavery commentary and ideas were needed then to help bring about abolition in the United States, new ideas, debates, commentary, and solutions are needed now to bring about a racially just society. And the city of Boston yet again stands to lead the way through this historic collaboration between the Boston Globe opinion team and the BU Center for Antiracist Research. With this new initiative, Globe Opinion and the BU Center for Antiracist Research will take inspiration from a powerful chapter in Boston’s history to showcase powerful voices and ideas before the nation and the world today.

The Emancipator will serve as a venue for fresh voices, ideas, data, and analysis. Organized as a new media venture and partnership, it will include content ranging from written and video op-eds to data visualizations and virtual conversations. Two co-Editors-in-Chief will shape this vision, build a team, and lead the publication.

Job Description:

The Boston Globe Opinion team and the BU Center for Antiracist Research are seeking a visionary Editor-in-Chief to lead The Emancipator from the newsroom of The Boston Globe. The EIC should be a journalist and intellectual leader with the vision, creativity, and commitment to build and shape the publication as a unique platform for voices, ideas, policies, and debates on racial justice in order to engage a wide audience. The EIC will chart the editorial direction and will launch the periodical with the support of founders Ibram X. Kendi and Bina Venkataraman, and in collaboration with a Co-Editor-in-Chief based at Boston University. The EICs will share responsibility for content, features, voices, and management, with the BU editor bringing academic experience and the Boston Globe editor bringing a proven track record in journalism.  

Responsibilities:

• Co-lead the development and growth of The Emancipator
• Define editorial direction for the effort with co-founders and Co-Editor-in-Chief
• Curate opinion contributors and voices to develop a unique identity and content that reaches a diverse and highly engaged global audience across digital and social platforms
• Edit opinion content for the effort; serve as a voice and media presence for the effort
• Oversee multimedia content production on all channels and platforms while maintaining the highest standards for opinion journalism
• Recruit, hire, and manage staff including Columnists, Project Manager, Associate Editor, Data Journalist (Note that the first featured columnist and the newsletter writer for The Emancipator has already been hired: Globe Opinion columnist Kimberly Atkins.)
• Host and lead regular meetings with co-founders and Co-Editor-in-Chief to discuss content planning, concepts, events
• Collaborate with a world-class advisory board for The Emancipator whose inaugural members include Eddie Glaude, Sewell Chan, Joy Reid, Emily Ramshaw, Peniel Joseph, S. Mitra Kalita, Jelani Cobb, and Annette Gordon-Reed.

Skills & Qualifications / Requirements:

• A commitment to racial justice and inclusion and a passion for rigorous, evidence-based opinion journalism
• A commitment to and ability to cultivate a newsroom culture that upholds high journalistic standards for accuracy, fairness, and freedom of expression
• Minimum of 5 years of journalism experience, preferably including opinion writing/editing experience
• Minimum of 3 years of management experience 
• A collaborative, creative spirit and the ability to work across teams
• Demonstrated experience in building a culture of inclusion
• Inventive in using digital and multimedia tools and formats for journalism
• Strong leadership skills
• Exemplary writing and editing skills
• Ability to help develop and hone big ideas, identify and recruit important voices, and shape original and surprising points of view from writers
• Experience successfully growing audiences and building engaged, diverse communities
• Successful experience with collaborative leadership/management of projects
• Ability to manage multiple ideas and bring about consensus, make decisions

This position formally reports to the Boston Globe’s editorial page editor, who also leads the Globe Opinion team. 

About Globe Opinion

The Boston Globe opinion journalists (collectively, Globe Opinion), aim to provoke progress by holding leaders and institutions accountable, amplifying surprising and important voices, unearthing worthwhile debates, and showcasing solutions to society’s greatest problems. Led since 2019 by editorial page editor and author Bina Venkataraman, Globe Opinion is committed to carrying on the best of Boston’s journalistic traditions — and to imagining new ways to amplify powerful voices and perspectives on racial justice today.

About the Boston University Center for Antiracism

Founded on July 1, 2020 at Boston University by #1 New York Times bestselling author and National Book Award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi, the mission of the BU Center for Antiracist Research is to convene varied researchers and practitioners to figure out novel and practical ways to understand, explain, and solve seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice. We foster exhaustive racial research, research-based policy innovation, data-driven advocacy, and narrative change initiatives rooted in first-rate research and analysis. The Center’s commitment to ensuring scholarly expertise are at the center of pressing racial debates and making cutting-edge antiracist research accessible serves as the impetus to resurrect The Emancipator.

EEO Statement:

Boston Globe Media is an equal employment opportunity employer, and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, age, disability, national origin, citizenship or any other protected characteristic. Boston Globe Media is committed to diversity in its most inclusive sense.