Profile:
S. Mitra Kalita
 By Francine Tardo RC’96
S.
at the age of 11. Upset about her family’s decision to move from Puerto Rico to New Jersey, she created the inaugural issue of “The
Kalita Times” protesting the move.
“I felt like my parents weren’t listening to me. I didn’t want to move and have to go and make new friends and meet new people to have lunch with—but then, I ended up joining the newspaper club.”
Kalita, now vice president for programming at CNN Digital, has seen
the media landscape change drastically in a career which has spanned numerous major media outlets including Newsday, The Washington Post, Quartz, Wall St. Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. Through her various assignments, Kalita has always embraced the approach of not being afraid to try something different.
“At some points, you just accept that you don’t know, you try and see what happens. You have to have faith in your journalism conventions,” said Kalita.
At Rutgers, Kalita double majored in journalism/mass media and history and naturally became involved with the Daily Targum, which she said provided a helpful foundation for the future.
“What we did at the Targum was so real. We were doing real reporting, writing, and editing. We were meeting real deadlines,” she said.
Kalita got a taste of media leadership with the Daily Targum; she served as its editor-in-chief from 1997–1998. She then worked diligently at internships at the Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Sun, Patriot Ledger, and Wall Street Journal Classroom Edition before landing at the Trenton, New Jersey, bureau of the Associated Press in 1998.
Kalita has been able to shape the direction of several news outlets in the new media landscape, serving as executive editor (at large) for Quartz, Atlantic Media’s global economy site, and was its founding ideas editor. She also oversaw the launches of Quartz India and Quartz Africa and was also a founding editor of Mint, a business paper in New Delhi, India.
Before moving to CNN, she was managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, where she helped latimes.com traffic soar to nearly 60 million unique views monthly, innovated new forms of storytelling and audience engagement,
and connected the Times to new communities through events, new beats, translations, and partnerships.
Kalita, along with a team of hundreds at the Times won a Pulitzer Prize in the category of Breaking News Reporting for their coverage of the San Bernardino, California, terror attack that occurred on December 2, 2015. Fourteen people were killed and 22 injured when a married couple opened fire during a holiday party at the Inland Regional Center. She called it a case of “all worlds colliding” in both the global and national communities.
Successful reporting today relies on leveraging the world of social media where the audience has a true voice in what and how a story is portrayed, according to Kalita.
“Audiences are demanding the types of journalism that they want and even directing what is covered... and I welcome that,” said Kalita. “On Twitter, for example, you’re exposed to a great deal of sincere dialogue and good questions. I use a lot of social media because it’s so important to me to understand our audience.”
“[Social media] is how journalism is evolving, and if we fail to use these tools, we are failing as journalists,” she said.
As an author of several books, Kalita says there are two people she would like the chance to interview some day: Pope Francis—since she is “interested in how the people are drawn to him”— and former president Barack Obama.
“He was president at a time where technology took over and he understood the ‘viral’ moment,” she said. “He looked and remained authentic and that’s hard to do. I’m not sure we’ll ever see that again.” 5
 Mitra Kalita (RC’98)
experienced her first taste
of the world of journalism
 8
1766 MAGAZINE SUMMER 2017