Five months after returning as editor of The Boston Globe, Brian McGrory has announced changes that will reshape the top of the masthead.
Cristina Silva, currently the managing editor for local news, will become managing editor for operations and standards, “focused on the future of this newsroom rather than daily journalism.” She’ll be replaced by Cynthia Needham, currently deputy managing editor for innovation and strategy, who McGrory called “an uncommonly strong editor with a fresh eye for what makes a great story.”
Finally, Jason Tuohey, a longtime Globe digital editor who’s currently editor-in-chief at the Encyclopedia Britannica, will return to the paper as managing editor for digital strategy. Tuohey is also an audience engagement consultant with Boston University’s local-news program. McGrory wrote that Tuohey “is coming back to a newsroom that is brimming with digital leaders who are among the best in the industry.”
McGrory’s full memo, sent to the staff earlier this afternoon and forwarded to me by a trusted source, follows.
Hey all,
I wanted to share some key changes in newsroom leadership with you.
First, I’ve asked Cristina Silva to commit herself to a new portfolio, focused on the future of this newsroom rather than daily journalism, and she has accepted this new challenge. As managing editor for operations and standards, Cristy will focus on so many of the forces that, with due thought and attention, have outsized potential to propel our work forward. Think artificial intelligence, first and foremost, and how we make the best use of it, in the best ways, with a human journalist always at the wheel. Think partnerships with other news organizations and the broader world, meaning the kinds of collaborations that can drive our work and magnify our impact. Think philanthropy and the pursuit of grant dollars that can make our already sizable newsroom even stronger with the right investments in the right places. Think resource allocation, which, yes, may be a fancy word for budgeting, but done well will help us determine whether we’re putting the right firepower in the places that will have the greatest impact for the organization and our readers. There’s no question that Cristy can and will do all of this well, given her fierce devotion to this organization and her smart approach to our work for the past two-and-a-half years. And I’d like Cristy’s eyes on particularly sensitive stories, making sure we are adhering to our community mission.
I’ve also asked Cristy to spend some time on the kinds of community events that have been one of her signatures, and to help build a powerful pool of prospective Globe staffers who will make an immediate difference when they walk into our newsroom.
Second, I’ve asked Jason Tuohey to return to the Globe as the managing editor for digital strategy, and he’ll begin on Tuesday, May 26. There’s no more direct way to say it: Jason is the single best digital news mind I’ve met in all my years in this business. That alone is a good thing. What’s better is Jason’s pragmatism, his ability to think big, but make it work for all of us on a daily, actually hourly basis. Jason was the secret sauce in helping this organization amass the digital subscriber rolls that we have, and he will come back renewed and improved after a couple of years away. As important, he is coming back to a newsroom that is brimming with digital leaders who are among the best in the industry.
Jason has not only seen the evolution of our digital strategy over a couple of decades, he’s been a central part of it. He was one of the early journalists who made boston.com the monster traffic site that it was in the early 2000s. As editor of the brand new bostonglobe.com, our first digital subscription play, in 2011, Jason was nothing short of vital in making us one of the best in the industry. As managing editor for digital at the Globe from the end of 2019 to 2023, he put together a heady team of some of the best talent in journalism and propelled the Globe into being one of the most envied organizations in the industry. He has spent the last couple of years in senior leadership roles at Yahoo News and, most recently, Britannica, where he’s been the editor-in-chief of an organization that attracts a staggering web readership.
Third, Cynthia Needham will become the managing editor for news, effective next week. When I took the role I have now, I inherited a search for a new ME that had already been launched by a national recruiter. That search yielded many impressive candidates. I weighed each of them against all others, and also against Cynthia, who hadn’t yet put her hand up for the job. I couldn’t find one better, and there’s a reason for that: Cynthia is an uncommonly strong editor with a fresh eye for what makes a great story.
As many of you know, Cynthia was a founding editor of our Express Desk when we launched it in 2017, and immediately worked with her powerful team to turn it into a readership juggernaut the likes of which exceeded all of our hopes. She and her team were not only on the news, but on the pulse, with a superb awareness of what our readers wanted, when they wanted it.
Across many years, Cynthia has responded when called, always in superb fashion. When we needed someone to enliven our business coverage, she gamely went to the business desk as an editor, barely pointing out that she knew virtually nothing about the subject. When we needed someone to launch our Rhode Island initiative, it was Cynthia. When we needed someone to take a prominent role in the reinvention, Cynthia. In the past few years, she’s been called on to run our intellectual property initiative, to create strategy, and to pursue innovation all around the room, always with a certain panache. Most recently, Cynthia has impressively guided a loose collection of departments through some key transitions.
There will be natural questions about which departments are answering to which managing editor, and we will sort through that in the days and weeks ahead. I strongly prefer a system that isn’t quite so hierarchical. Said another way, I like strong managing editors working closely together, and I like to be involved with department heads.
Please take a moment to congratulate Cristina, Jason, and Cynthia on their roles. There is a lot of work, and a lot of good, ahead.
Brian
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All well and good, all this “innovation and strategy” and “audience engagement” and “digital strategy” talk, but let’s back up a bit to “the future of this newsroom rather than daily journalism” line. How ‘bout a focus on that daily journalism, I think they call it the old-fashioned “shoe leather” kind of dogged reporting, that adheres to the first principle of the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists which simply, directly states, “Seek Truth and Report It.”
Truth includes such issues as:
• Journalists’ awareness of the longtime “hasbara strategy” employed by Israel to control its narrative, and not just in the newspapers (see Bari Weiss’ dismantling of CBS News). When a respected Globe reporter was asked if he knew about it, his reply was, “No, what does it mean?”
• Globe Editorial Board Editor James Dao’s wretched, execrable, Oct. 7, 2025 piece, two years after the Oct. 7th uprising titled “Israel’s Fractured Soul,” which apart from lousy journalism also violated about a dozen of the precepts of the Code of Ethics. Not the only example of his stewardship.
• When will the Globe and other newspapers and broadcast media in this country desist with the one-dimensional channeling of Martin Luther King, Jr. to civil rights with rote reference only to his August 28, 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, and instead keep before the nation King’s other message delivered nearly four years later, on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was killed, in which he said, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.” That is as pertinent now as it was 59 years ago.
• For all its deftness and alacrity and “fingers on the pulse” awareness of things going on as a news organization, where was the Globe in launching its Spotlight Team to look behind the scenes of the harassment and doxxing given the student protesters in support of Palestine in the Fall of 2023; of the brazen, illegal apprehension and detention of Rümeysa Öztürk; of the contrived “Special Commission on Combatting (sic) Antisemitism” created by legislative sleight of hand to deliver a preordained result, which included adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of “anti-Semitism,” roundly criticized by well over 100 international scholars of genocides and the Holocaust for numerous deficiencies, not the least of which being jeopardizing freedom of speech and academic inquiry into Israel and Judaism, and potentially putting at risk people’s livelihoods. If the names Bill Ackman, Miriam Adelson, Campus Watch, Maccabee Task Force, Canary Project mean little or nothing to you, time for reappraisal of your job in journalism. Then again, maybe not given its state of affairs.
• The “country” not long ago passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which put it over the $1+ trillion per year threshold in “defense” spending. It is partially funded by $900 billion in cuts over ten years to Medicaid, the rest by heaping upon the staggering, and growing, $32 trillion in national debt, the service of which consumes an increasing amount of the Federal budget. Simultaneously, the Society of Civil Engineers in its 2025 annual “Infrastructure” report card gave the “Transit” category, which includes public transit systems such as the MBTA, a grade of “D”. Almost daily there is some significant equipment failure with the “T”. Can anyone at the Globe connect the dots?
A note on the craze over matters digital. Last fall, having reviewed what I pay for a subscription to the Globe and comparing that to the truly insightful journalism I get largely on Substack from Chris Hedges, Ryan Grimm and Jeremy Scahill at Drop Site News, Ken Klippenstein, Caitlin Johnstone, among others, I figured I’m far better off supporting sites like those rather than the Globe. So I decided to cancel. They don’t let you do that with a simple online click in your account, you actually have to speak with someone before they release you.
So I spoke with someone in subscriptions, and when asked why I was discontinuing, I gave my reasons which pretty much cited what I said before. I was thanked, and told that my subscription would end in a couple of weeks, at the end of the monthly subscription period. E-mails offers came in to resubscribe at a significantly reduced rate, but I still wasn’t interested. Finally a day or two before the end of the month, I get a call from the Globe subscription offer. I was told I could resubscribe for [blank amount]. I asked her to repeat that, which she did, [blank amount]. I then repeated to her to make sure I understood correctly, gave the [blank amount], and it was confirmed to me. I said, okay, and my subscription was continued.
I am now getting the Globe essentially for free. This is what the focus on going, being digital means. The Globe is willing to give itself away for free in order to claim it has “x” numbers of digital subscribers, including those who hold little regard for its brand of journalism. I probably go to the Globe site three times a week.
Let me know what that says of the state of the Fourth Estate in this state.