New York Times names Kahn executive editor

The following announcement was sent out from The New York Times:

Joseph F. Kahn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning China correspondent who rose to lead the international desk of The New York Times, and then as managing editor helped steer the newspaper into the digital era, has been selected to be The Times’s next executive editor, the top newsroom job.

Mr. Kahn, 57, currently the No. 2-ranking editor at The Times, will take on one of the most powerful positions in American media and the global news business. He is to succeed Dean Baquet, whose eight-year tenure is expected to conclude in June.

The announcement was made on Tuesday by the publisher of The Times, A.G. Sulzberger.

Mr. Kahn has in recent years spearheaded the paper’s efforts to re-engineer its newsroom for the speed and agility required of modern media. He has also led the paper’s international expansion, building out hubs in Europe and Asia.

By 1989, he was writing freelance articles from Beijing for The Morning News. In 1994, he shared in a Pulitzer Prize awarded to The Morning News for international reporting.

By then, Mr. Kahn had been hired by The Wall Street Journal, where he was assigned to Shanghai. After a stint as the editor and publisher of The Far Eastern Economic Review, a now-defunct weekly owned by The Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones, Mr. Kahn jumped to The Times in 1998.

He covered Wall Street and economics before moving back to Shanghai; in 2003, he became the paper’s Beijing bureau chief.

Mr. Kahn returned to New York in 2008 as a deputy foreign editor and was appointed international editor in 2011.