New York Media Matters – and Leaders: Christy Tanner '99 and Carroll Bogert

In this episode of Capital for Good, we speak with two extraordinary media leaders — Christy Tanner '99, the president and CEO of New York Public Radio, an iconic and 100-year-old center for local and global media, and Carroll Bogert, the CEO of The City Reporter, the independent newsroom founded in 2019 to cover breaking news, investigative, and service journalism in New York City. In this wide-ranging conversation, we hear from these industry veterans about their early callings as reporters, their respective careers as pioneers — one using journalism to hold power to account, one forging new business models in the face of technological transformation — and their thoughts about the challenges, and opportunities, of the current moment in New York and around the world.

We start with Tanner and Bogert's gravitational pulls to journalism and the formative experiences as reporters that would shape their careers in media. Tanner explains how as a young girl, inspired by the likes of Nancy Drew and Nellie Bly, the ability to "ask questions, investigate things, find out what's going on," and the creative process of writing "captured my imagination." Her first jobs at the AP and in local newsrooms in South Carolina and Tennessee taught her how investigative reporting could have tangible impact, prompting changes in government policies. For Bogert, a member of the generation of idealists who grew up on "Woodward and Bernstein and All the President's Men," journalism was "something noble… and world changing:" a way to "uncover abuse at the top and change history." As a foreign correspondent for Newsweek, she would chronicle the Tiananmen Square crackdown and the fall of the Soviet Union.

As the industry evolved, so too did their respective paths. Bogert would go on to leadership roles at Human Rights Watch and as the founding president of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering criminal justice in the United States. "The though line," she says, is that "challenging the abuse of power is the essential role of journalism. Power requires constant vigilance because it will trend towards abuse if it's not watched." Tanner, whose experiences included hosting a kind of proto-podcast in the mid-1990s, saw early on that "the internet was going to change media forever." Back in New York, she had a "front row seat to the invention of streaming as we know it" — newspapers, magazines, television, audio — and would become a leader in the digital transformat