Charo Henríquez is a digital media executive based in Washington, D.C. She has extensive experience working at the intersection of journalism and technology, as well as coaching and mentoring journalists. She is an advocate for women, people of color, the intersection of the two and other underrepresented communities in media leadership.
She currently works at The New York Times as Deputy Washington Editor overseeing editirial strategy and operations. Prior to that, she was editor of Newsroom Development and Support and is part of the newsroom’s leadership team
Charo started at the Times in 2017, as Sr. Editor of Digital Storytelling and Training and also worked as Deputy Editor of Digital Transition Strategy on the organization’s Digital Transition team.
In 2024 Charo became the President of Online News Association’s Executive Board of Directors, where she has served since 2018. She is also a member of the Advisory Council Board to the Spanish-language Journalism Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School one of Journalism at the City University of New York. She is a fellow in 2021’s class of the Sulzberger Executive Leadership Program at Columbia University.
Charo has been faculty for the ONA/Poynter Leadership Academy for Women in Digital Media in 2016 and ONA’s Women’s Leadership Accelerator in 2017-2023, where she has coached and mentored some of the most accomplished women moving up the ranks in digital journalism and technology organizations in the United States and internationally.
Before her work at The New York Times, Charo was the Digital Executive Editor for People en Español at Time, Inc. Prior to that, she worked at GFR Media, in her native Puerto Rico. During her tenure at GFR Media she led digital product efforts in the newsroom as their Innovation Editor. While at GFR she also held the positions of Associate Business Director and digital editor for El Nuevo Día and Primera Hora.
Charo specializes in leading innovation and developing strategic and operational plans for newsrooms with a human-centric design/product thinking approach. She has been a speaker at ONA, NAHJ, Grupo de Diarios de América and the Interamerican Press Society events, among others.
Charo holds a dual Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Broadcasting from the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in San Juan and a Juris Doctor from the University of Puerto Rico.
Charo’s vision for the future of digital journalism
Media organizations have traditionally been led by the same type of journalist. Attending the right school and securing the right internship led to the beat reporting job, which led to the posting overseas, which led to the editor role, which led to the top job.
Access to those right schools, internships, jobs, or sponsorship once you arrive has been generally limited to those who can afford it or those who manage to break through despite the barrier to entry. Any jobs outside of writing and editing stories for traditional media have been perceived as secondary to capital-J journalism.
These linear trajectories and narrow definitions of what a journalist is or does, what skills or experiences are valued, and whose perspectives are worthy of top leadership opportunities are rooted in tradition, but they’re not the only or best path forward.
More than two decades into the introduction of news on the internet, many organizations are still talking about moving towards “digital-first” operations and audience-centric approaches. Some journalists that began their careers in the late 1990s and onwards have been doing this work and know this is not new.
We have built up a digital skillset that has itself evolved. Our paths, when linear, could go from social media intern to community manager to audience development editor. We developed richer visual ideas and storytelling languages. We had to look under the hood and learn about project management, product development, and usability. We trained ourselves on data, metadata, analytics, and how listening and incorporating audiences in our reports could make the journalism better. We had to be scrappy, learn on the fly, and create the jobs we were about to take, right as we were taking them. But the leadership opportunities haven’t always been there, especially for people from underrepresented communities in those fields.
The future of journalism is rooted in the same core values that we know, but the skill set needed to manage how our newsrooms will be shaped and our journalists managed has to be approached from a different perspective.
As diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts tackle not only hiring but retention and career development opportunities in media, it’s important for newsrooms to really look at their leadership composition and see who isn’t at the decision-making table. It’s time to reflect on the opportunities not afforded to people who have been moving journalism forward and realize that we didn’t build pipelines for present and future leaders who think about our industry and craft in a multi-disciplinary sense. We are here. We are ready.
* Originally published on: https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/12/a-new-path-to-leadership/