Lydia Polgreen Quotes

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College Elections Identity Journalism Parents

I think facts and truth are essential to journalism but you need to reckon with emotion. You have to deal with how people feel, otherwise you miss the story.

Lydia Polgreen

Thinking, People, Missing

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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I've always been a sort of curious and restless person. I've always wrestled with ambition.

Lydia Polgreen

Ambition, Curious, Restless

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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For us what we're trying to do is find the right balance of creating a space for emotion that leads to a sense of empathy and solidarity rather than a sense of division. In my most grandiose moments I think of HuffPost as a platform that makes solidarity possible, that really thinking about the emotional content of stories is a way to help people who think, or who have been manipulated to think, that they're interests are opposed to one another, that they actually are aligned in a fundamental way and they're actually in the same boat.

Lydia Polgreen

Thinking, Emotional, People

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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The great tabloids were always driven by a sense of outrage, a sense of righteous indignation...and had this sensibility of, like, there are people out there that are trying to screw you - and we're going expose them for it.

Lydia Polgreen

People, Trying, Screw You

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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I think the real sort of decision moment for me was president Donald Trump election night and just realizing that there was something happening in the country and in the world that had a very deep relationship to the nature of the current media landscape and that this opportunity that was in front of me could be a place to try to work on that. To try to fix what was going wrong and, or at least make an attempt.

Lydia Polgreen

Country, Real, Thinking

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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I think everybody's talking about like facts and truth and you know like that 'We're here to fact check' and all of that, that's the base material of journalism. You cannot have journalism without facts and truth. But if facts and truth were what actually you know sort of moved people's lives and moved their decision-making like the election would have had a different outcome.

Lydia Polgreen

Thinking, Different, Election

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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I think, I just always carry this kind of happy sense of being able to come into any situation and know that I don't exactly fit in, but I can make a place for myself.

Lydia Polgreen

Thinking, Kind, Fit

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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To me we're living in this very profoundly non-idealogical time where the real divide is between people who have power and people who either don't have power or feel that they don't have power.

Lydia Polgreen

Real, People

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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My parents were adherents of the Baha'i faith, which is sort of, I can't think of the best way to describe it, but it sort of has the same relationship to Islam that Christianity has to Judaism, and it's a kind of a universalist creed and missionaries aren't paid. You're essentially expected to go out and find a job and do your own thing, and in your spare time spread the faith, and so that was the driving force of us going overseas.

Lydia Polgreen

Thinking, Parent, Islam

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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To me, that's the foundational fact of my identity is that I'm a journalist and so it's hard to imagine putting anything else first.

Lydia Polgreen

Identity, Imagine, Journalist

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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India's notoriously difficult. It's visa routine is notoriously difficult to get a residency permit and all that stuff, so that threw up all kinds of complicated barriers for us. I remember once having to go meet with the foreign ministry official and say 'You know look I have a real problem here. Is this person really important to you?' And I just thought 'My God.' You know my wife and I have been together since college. You know it's 20 years.

Lydia Polgreen

Real, College, Wife

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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To me the sort of like, the ethos, if you will, of like tabloid is like Daily News in the 1970s. It's a news organization that thinks of its mission to speak directly to people who are kind of , the people who are sort of the foundation of the American workforce or were at one time. What I love about this conception of the tabloid is that actually everybody read it.

Lydia Polgreen

Thinking, People, Kind

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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To me the tabloid sensibility, in the best sense of the word, and I think people as like tabloids have receded as a kind of force in media people have started to associate the word "tabloid" with like National Enquirer and stuff like that.

Lydia Polgreen

Thinking, People, Kind

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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I have this very kind of like heterodox idea of what an education is, what underpins identity. I don't think I'm very easily pigeon holed in any of those boxes, so I confront this. I have a staff full of young people who came up in a very different tradition and who feel very fired up about the big identity battles. I listen and I try to navigate them, but I don't find them mapping onto my life in a personal way which is, which is hard.

Lydia Polgreen

Thinking, People, Battle

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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I have a perhaps naive point of view informed by my own kind of snowflake-in-the-unique-sense rather than the political sense, personal story. I mean I feel like my experiences are so hard to map onto any kind of generalized identity. For example, I'm a black person, but I come from a very particular black experience which is not unlike the experience of the Barack Obama. I have an African mother and a white father and I feel like I have a different experience of being a black person as a result of that identity than someone who is from the descendants of slaves.

Lydia Polgreen

Mother, Father, Mean

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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I was educated in a deeply kind of un-politically-correct way. I went to St. John's College which is this kind of Great Books school which is equally popular with hardcore conservatives who want their kids to read the Great White Men canon and sort of free-thinking liberals like my parents.

Lydia Polgreen

Book, School, Kids

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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I think all of us in the pursuit of more perfect version of the truth and the story need to reckon with what we bring to the story, and I think that I'm confronting that in a very real way everyday. I'm extremely proud of who I am and it's nice to see it celebrated, but if someone were to ask me to list in order the biography, you know journalist comes first.

Lydia Polgreen

Real, Nice, Thinking

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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Jim Rich is many different things but he has a great combination of a kind of old school tabloid reporter and editor's sense for what's a great story, but he's also incredibly passionate about social justice. I think Shaun King called him the most woke editor in American, if that's a compliment.

Lydia Polgreen

Old School, Thinking, Justice

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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Ability to have that sort of feedback loop with your readers to me felt incredibly powerful.

Lydia Polgreen

Powerful, Feedback, Ability

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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When I first signed up for a Twitter account - I was to say it was in 2007, people are going to think it's some weird self promotional thing or it's going, but in time I was called upon to like try to persuade other foreign correspondents and journalists to get on Twitter and see the usefulness of it which is kind of ironic. I think the journalists who are leading the digital charge at the Times have, all have that background as a foreign correspondent, which I think is not accidental.

Lydia Polgreen

Thinking, People, Ironic

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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The New York Times I think really is the gold standard of a certain type of journalism and in some ways it's the most important type of journalism, this chronicle of the biggest and most important stories of our time covered with a level of rigor and seriousness that is really unparalleled.

Lydia Polgreen

Thinking, Important, Gold

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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Once I came out in college I just have always been out and at work with pretty much everybody. My wife and I both working as journalists, because she's a photographer, and often working together, would have to kind of navigate this weird world. When you're trying to develop sources, when you're trying to you know make personal connections with people, you inevitably want to share things about yourself and that can be really tricky.

Lydia Polgreen

College, Wife, People

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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I don't even know what being left wing means anymore. I feel that the left/right spectrum has been so fundamentally scrambled primarily by the politics around globalization - and you saw it in Brexit, you saw it in the French election, you see it in our election, it's happening everywhere.

Lydia Polgreen

Mean, Election, Globalization

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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Ideology to me is fundamentally is an elite pursuit. I mean most people are just not all that interested in single payer vs. government pay ... they're very interested in you know, 'Wait, are there going to be death panels.' But that's all a creation of this like hothouse media and politics environment. So maybe if humanism is an ideology then it's ideological, but I don't see it as being on the traditional left/right spectrum.

Lydia Polgreen

Mean, People, Environment

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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The level of dependence on government among rural populations is actually extraordinary. They suffer even more when that assistance is taken away because they don't have access to the economic dynamism of cities. So if there are ways to tell stories that help people in rural areas see their kind of mutual need for care, that to me is the kind of thing that I want HuffPost to try and do.

Lydia Polgreen

Taken, People, Suffering

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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Latest quotes from interviews

"Jim Rich is many different things but he has a great combination of a kind of old school tabloid reporter and editor's sense for what's a great story, but he's also incredibly passionate about social justice. I think Shaun King called him the most woke editor in American, if that's a compliment."

- Lydia Polgreen,

www.buzzfeed.com, added May 10, 2017

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