S. Mitra Kalita is the senior vice president for news, opinion and programming for CNN Digital. Kalita leads the national news desk and efforts to creatively share CNN's journalism and storytelling across an ever-exploding array of platforms. Her portfolio also includes the Entertainment team, News & Alerting, and Mobile & Off-Platform teams. She arrived at CNN in 2016. Kalita was previously managing editor for editorial strategy at the Los Angeles Times. During her time there, she helped latimes.com traffic soar to nearly 60 million unique multiplatform visitors monthly, innovated new forms of storytelling and increased audience engagement, including hiring a correspondent to cover "Black Twitter." She launched Education Matters, a vertical covering L.A. schools that connected the Times to new communities via events, new beats, translations and partnerships. She helped direct coverage of a mass shooting in San Bernardino (notably, a multimedia reconstruction of the police pursuit ending in the killers' deaths) that led the Times to win a Pulitzer Prize in breaking news. She also served as the executive editor at large for Quartz, Atlantic Media's global economy site, and was its founding ideas editor, reimagining opinion and commentary for the internet. She also oversaw the launches of Quartz India and Quartz Africa, working closely with sales, product and marketing teams along the way. Kalita worked previously at the Wall Street Journal, where she directed coverage of the Great Recession, launched a local news section for New York City and reported on the housing crisis as a senior writer for Page 1. She was a founding editor and columnist of Mint, a business paper in New Delhi, and has previously worked for the Washington Post, Newsday and the Associated Press. She has won many awards for her journalism and her series on the Indian economy is included in the "Best Business Writing." Kalita is the author of two books related to migration and globalization, including the highly acclaimed "Suburban Sahibs," about how immigrants transformed the American suburb, and "My Two Indias," an economic memoir and study on globalization. She has studied seven languages (English, Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Spanish, French, Mandarin Chinese) and can converse in at least five of them. A former journalism professor at St. John's, UMass-Amherst, and Columbia University, she also previously served as president of the South Asian Journalists Association. She speaks frequently on diversity in media, digital innovation and managing change. She is a graduate of Rutgers College, where she majored in history and journalism, and received her master's degree from Columbia University's Journalis
- Thursday, Oct 15 - [BLANK] is the Future of Journalism from ONA20