Latest Lydia Polgreen Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• I think we need to reckon in a very serious way with the emotional content of news and the way that people perceive facts and their perception of their situation and to me I think the tabloid is like fundamentally an emotional form of journalism and that kind of emotional valence is what distinguishes it from the broad sheet.

  Lydia Polgreen

  Emotional, Thinking, People

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• We've traditionally thought of media on this traditional left/right spectrum and most media's kind of clustered in the center and I think people have traditionally thought of HuffPost as being this kind of liberal, progressive voice and that's, you know I think they're are good reasons for thinking that. I mean it started after George W. Bush was reelected and was an answer to the Drudge Report.

  Lydia Polgreen

  Mean, Thinking, People

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Two of the last four executive editors at the New York Times were Johannesburg bureau chiefs at some point, Bill Keller and Joe Lelyveld. This is a very prestigious post and I was like I don't know 28 years old, which at the Times is very young, I had the temerity to put my hand up for that job. I don't think I slept a single night of those six weeks that I spent in Johannesburg. It was an unbelievable experience, and I think I did okay.

  Lydia Polgreen

  Night, Thinking, Week

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

• 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