AP names 2 directors for newsroom talent

Late last year, we set out to hire a Director of News Talent, a top-notch journalist to lead internal staff development programs and external recruitment in the News Department. We had an outstanding pool of candidates who put forward exceptional ideas about how to bolster these efforts – so many good ideas that we realized we needed not one, but two, directors of news talent.
So I’m thrilled to announce that Karen Mahabir, a veteran AP journalist, will take on the role of Director of News Talent for Development, focusing on growth and mentorship opportunities for our current staff, including the resumption of a Future Leaders program. Karen will work closely with Corinne Chin, a talented video journalist and leading advocate for diversity and inclusion in media, who joins the AP from The Seattle Times as our Director of News Talent for Recruitment, a new role aimed at bringing new, diverse journalists to the AP. Together, Karen and Corinne will focus on AP’s most important asset: our people.

Karen brings to her new role broad experience and deep relationships across the AP. She joined the AP in 2005 as a Mexico City-based editor on the Latin America desk and later worked as a reporter, breaking news supervisor and acting news editor in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic bureau. She’s most recently served as AP’s fact check and misinformation editor, putting her at the center of some of our most sensitive news decisions. She’s also become a leading voice in the journalism industry on misinformation and news verification, frequently representing the AP in external discussions on these topics. Karen has also been integral to AP’s efforts to bolster our response to online harassment, including the creation of the SAFE program, and serves on the social standards committee. She’ll continue to help guide those efforts in this new role. Karen is on the board of the South Asian Journalists Association and was a participant in a previous iteration of AP’s Future Leaders program, giving her first-hand experience in how to grow and modernize that effort. Karen will remain based in New York and will report to me. She starts her new position on Feb. 14.

Corinne comes to the AP from The Seattle Times, where she’s worked since 2014 as a senior video journalist, producing Emmy Award-winning coverage of race, gender, immigration and other social issues. She also founded and led the Times’ Diversity and Inclusion Task Force, which works closely with newsroom leadership to improve policies to promote institutional change across coverage, recruitment and retention. Corinne offers free coaching to women and non-binary journalists via digitalwomenleaders.com. She is a co-director of the Asian American Journalists Association's affinity group Women and Non-Binary Voices, and she is a past president of AAJA Seattle. This is something of a homecoming for Corinne, who worked as an AP intern in Nairobi. She’s also worked as a senior video producer at CNN. Corinne, who will report to Karen, starts on March 14 and will be based in Chicago. Karen and Corinne are eager to start discussions with News staffers around the world and you’ll be hearing from them both soon. In the meantime, please join me in congratulating them on their new roles. Best,
Julie