When people ask me what is most distinctive about being a senior technology leader at a newspaper, I usually skip past the obvious answers (legacy systems, fast deadlines, the rhythm of breaking news) and go straight to the org chart. The structural answer matters more than any of the operational ones, and it pairs with the cultural work of running good meetings that I have written about elsewhere. At the Times, I report to two people. Marc Frons, our CIO, sits on one side of that report. Jill Abramson, our Executive Editor, sits on the other. Above both of them, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. as Publisher carries responsibility for the institution as a whole. That single structural fact shapes almost everything else about the job.

This is not a quirk of my role. I am convinced it is the correct structure for technology leadership at a serious news organization. The longer I do this work, the clearer it is that the dual report is a feature, not a bug.

Two reporting lines, two missions

The business side and the editorial side of a newspaper are not just different departments. They are different cultures with different success metrics, different vocabularies, and in many ways different theories of what a newspaper is for.

On the business side, the CEO is responsible for the long-term health of the company. The metrics are the ones you would expect: digital subscriptions, advertising revenue, audience growth, the trajectory of the metered paywall, the cost structure of the operation. The conversation is about how to fund the journalism for the next decade. The CIO, who I report to, is the senior technology leader for that side of the house, and the technology spine of the company runs through that role.

On the editorial side, the Executive Editor and the masthead are responsible for what we publish. The metrics there are about the quality, speed, breadth, and impact of the journalism itself. Did we get the story first? Did we get it right? Did we serve readers and sources with the seriousness they deserve? Did we produce work that nobody else could have produced?

Both of these missions are essential, and they are interlocking. Without the business, there is no journalism. Without the journalism, there is no business. But the two sides keep separate accounts, separate decision rights, and (this is the part that matters most) a deliberate wall between them. The wall is not bureaucratic theater. It exists because reader trust depends on it. The newsroom has to be able to publish a story that hurts an advertiser, or that displeases a powerful interest, without anyone in advertising having a say. And the business side has to be able to make commercial decisions without the newsroom dictating them.

That wall is healthy. But technology runs through both sides, and so does the senior technologist.

Why one report would be wrong

It is tempting, from a tidy management perspective, to put the technology function entirely on one side or the other. Pick a parent. Resolve the ambiguity. Most companies in most industries are organized this way, and it works fine for them.

It would not work here.

If the senior technology leader reports only into the business side, the newsroom will reasonably worry that its tools, its priorities, and its independence are being shaped by commercial concerns it does not control. Coverage software, content management, source protection, the architecture of how journalists do their daily work, all of it would be set by someone whose primary accountability is to revenue. That is not a stable arrangement. The newsroom would route around it. Shadow tools would appear. Trust would erode in slow, hard-to-detect ways.

If the senior technology leader reports only into the editorial side, you flip the problem. The CEO and the business team need a credible technology partner who is accountable to them on the things they are responsible for: the paywall, advertising systems, subscriber lifecycle, the financial backbone of the company. They cannot do their jobs if the technology function treats their priorities as second class.

Reporting to both sides is uncomfortable. But it is the only structure that respects what the wall is actually for.

What the dual report looks like in practice

Most days, the two missions point in the same direction. A faster site benefits readers and benefits advertisers. A better mobile experience helps the journalism reach more people and helps the digital subscription funnel. A more reliable publishing system serves the newsroom and protects revenue. The vast majority of technology work at a paper is in this overlap. You do not have to choose, because both sides genuinely want the same thing.

The interesting moments are the ones where the missions pull apart. There are not as many of these as outsiders imagine, but they are real, and they are where the dual report earns its keep.

A few patterns I have noticed:

The first pattern is a question of sequencing. Both sides want a thing, but they want it in different orders. Editorial wants the new article page treatment first. Business wants the new subscription flow first. Engineering capacity is finite. Someone has to broker the order, and that conversation is healthier when the broker is accountable to both, not delegated to either.

The second pattern is a question of scope. The newsroom wants a tool that does X. The business side notices that the same tool, with a small extension, could also do Y. The right answer is sometimes the extension and sometimes a hard no, because the extension would compromise X. Knowing which is which requires sitting with both sets of stakeholders long enough to understand what they actually mean, not what they literally said.

The third pattern is the one people most associate with the wall. A piece of advertising technology, or a personalization system, or a data integration, would help the commercial side meaningfully. But it touches editorial product in a way that creates the appearance, or the reality, of advertiser influence over coverage. The right move there is almost always to find a different solution. The dual report makes that conversation possible without anyone needing to cross the wall to have it.

Translation, not arbitration

The technology leader’s job, in this structure, is translation more than arbitration.

The business side is not against journalism. The newsroom is not against revenue. Both sides understand that they share a building and a future. But they speak different languages, optimize for different time horizons, and live with different pressures. When something looks like a conflict, it is usually a translation problem. The newsroom is asking for a thing in editorial vocabulary; the business side is hearing it in commercial vocabulary, or vice versa, and the words map badly.

Sitting at both tables, week after week, you start to hear the same idea expressed two different ways. You can sometimes carry the editorial concern back to the business side in a form that makes the tradeoff legible to them, and the commercial concern back to the newsroom in a form that does not feel like an intrusion. That is most of the work.

Picking sides is the failure mode. A technology function that becomes a wing of the business side loses the newsroom. A technology function that becomes a wing of the newsroom loses the publisher. Either way, you lose the ability to be useful to the institution as a whole.

The dual report is uncomfortable by design. The discomfort is the point. It is the structural reminder that you serve the journalism and the company that funds it, and that those are two distinct accountabilities you do not get to collapse into one.

For me, that is the most distinctive thing about doing this job at a newspaper. And the longer I do it, the less I want it any other way.