New LA Times’ Managing Editor is a Rutgers Alumna
S. Mitra Kalita, journalist and author, joins venerable newspaper at a time of great challenge
'Digital happens to be the future of the L.A. Times (and pretty much every other company on the planet), but my conversations with journalists there have really been about ideas and storytelling.'– S. Mitra Kalita
Despite journalism’s downward trends in recent tumultuous decades, despite the multitude of displaced reporters and shuttered newsrooms, S. Mitra Kalita is not ready to write her industry’s obituary.
That’s the last thing on her agenda as the Rutgers graduate dives into her new position as managing editor for editorial strategy with the venerable Los Angeles Times.
The cross-country move represents the most recent leg of a professional journey that has propelled Kalita from the helm of The Daily Targum, Rutgers’ student newspaper, to stints at the Washington Post, Newsday, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press.
For this daughter of immigrants from Assam, India, it’s all about the narrative, and always has been.
“I’m a story person, and that’s what gets me up every morning – the opportunity to survey a landscape and see what people are talking about,” she says.
That story, in whatever form, will keep journalism from disappearing as both a craft and as a public service, the veteran journalist insists.
“Digital happens to be the future of the L.A. Times (and pretty much every other company on the planet), but my conversations with journalists there have really been about ideas and storytelling,” Kalita recently told Capital, a publication covering people and institutions that shape New York.
“I’d say our future rests more on the strength of that than on an overt digital strategy somehow divorced from the news of the day, the conversations of the moment and the ideas we need to bring to the public’s attention.”
There was plenty to talk about on campus back in the fall of 1994, when Kalita, then a first-year history major, reported her first story for The Daily Targum: a lecture about domestic partner benefits for Rutgers faculty and staff.
She recalls bearing witness to years of upheaval at the university: Gay rights were an emerging imperative, the university was grappling with an ambitious restructuring and students were demanding a more diversified teaching corps. Protests over race relations at the university were common.
“You name it and it was kind of thrown at us to cover, and I’m just so grateful to have had a really serious newspaper experience at a fairly young age,” Kalita says.
The West Windsor Plainsboro High School graduate would go on to become the first minority editor-in-chief of The Targum, a distinction she mentions with pride. “It was important to me that Targum start to look like the student body,” Kalita recalls. “Actually, it’s still an issue in our whole industry, and in higher education as well.”
Kalita has long had one foot in the digital world and the other in the world of so-called legacy media.
Before signing on for the L.A. Times gig, she most recently served as executive editor for Quartz, an online business-news site created in 2012 by Atlantic Media. She also was the publication’s founding ideas editor, which meant developing a unique take on the day’s events, whether via tweet, cartoon, graphic or narrative form.
Kalita was part of the team that in 2007 launched Mint, a print and online business daily in New Delhi in collaboration with the Hindustan Times and the Wall Street Journal. Its format is heavy on infographics to tell the important stories of the day.
In its relatively brief lifespan, Mint has become India’s second-largest circulated business newspaper.
After graduating from Rutgers in 1998 with a bachelor of arts in history and journalism, Kalita earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia in 2000. While juggling a multiphase career, she has also found time to dabble in seven languages, write three books dealing with migration and globalization, and raise two children: Naya, 10, and Riya, 3.
In 2005, Rutgers University Press published Suburban Sahibs, a work of nonfiction in which Kalita traces the journey of three families from India to Edison, N.J., illustrating how immigration has altered the American suburb and how life in the suburbs has altered the immigrant.
Former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley called the work “beautifully written – a book to be enjoyed by all.”
Kalita and her husband Nitin Mukul, a visual artist and animator, live in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens.
Or at least they will until the move to California, where Kalita will become the L.A. Times’ managing editor for editorial strategy, charged with finding a way to tell her beloved stories while turning a profit for one of the oldest, most well-respected newspapers in the country.
Although she’s been reluctant to lay out specific plans until she’s actually installed in the newsroom, Kalita has already begun strategizing ways to attract new readers, beef up how news is presented and assure that the paper’s products – across all its platforms – are journalistically excellent and commercially viable.
“I’m a journalist, not a business development consultant,” Kalita says, “but one thing I do know is that we need to figure out how to monetize the news and at the same time make sure the projects are editorially driven.”
Media contact: Ken Branson, kbranson@ucm.rutgers.edu; 848-932-0580; cell 908-797-2590