Like many women in media who spend hours hunched over stories, tracing the news and pursuing stories, the New York Times’ assistant managing editor Rebecca Corbett is powered by snacks.
Corbett is an under-the-radar type of editor, a rarity at a time when journalists are made to feel hyper aware of their personal brands. But her name was pulled into a national conversation when Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published one of the year’s most important books: She Said, an account of how the three—yes, three of them—published the sexual harassment allegations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, and in turn, helped spark the current #MeToo movement. Corbett is sprinkled throughout the pages, a reminder that it always takes a village, that we are always standing on the shoulders of giants. In the acknowledgements, Kantor and Twohey write, “Rebecca Corbett, our editor at the Times, is our true north.”
But back to the snacks. More than halfway through the book, Kantor and Twohey recount Corbett’s intense work ethic: “She never seemed to stop working—because many of her projects were secret, and it was hard to gauge how much she was really fielding—and at times appeared to survive on black tea and dark-chocolate-covered almonds.”
Sitting on a yellow velvet couch in the Times office a few months after the book’s publication, I ask Corbett if she always attaches a snack to a specific project. (In her current role, she helps oversee the investigations team at the paper.) It’s true, she says, that until this fall, there was a Dean & DeLuca near the Times office that supplied her dark chocolate habit. But more recently, she was spending her time working on a data-driven investigation that examined the 11,000+ tweets President Trump has sent since taking office. For that, she relied on little cups of M&Ms from the Times snack station. “They’re not high enough chocolate content for me, but in desperation…” she explains. “I was very agitated during that period because we had very tight deadlines, and it all came down to the last few days.”
Kantor and Twohey’s tireless descriptor is true. As the book reports, Corbett worked until 7 A.M. the night before the Weinstein piece officially published. It’s not like she could go home between shifts; Corbett commutes from Baltimore and usually stays at hotels for her few days in New York every week. She spends most of her workday talking to reporters and going to meetings, leaving little time to be alone with a big story. And she needs to be completely immersed, something that usually can’t happen until she begins editing at 6 or 7 P.M., when most people are on their way home. When journalists speak about Corbett, it’s often reverential. Kantor and Twohey describe her as “sixtysomething, skeptical, scrupulous, and allergic to flashiness or exaggeration.” But a lack of press begs the question: Who is the woman who guided some of the decade’s most seismic investigations?
Her career started in Maine, where she worked at a local newspaper in her college town. After growing up outside Philadelphia, she attended Colby College with intentions of going to medical school, but her love of writing led to an English major and brief plans to become a documentary filmmaker. That newspaper job made her fall in love with life in a newsroom, where journalism gave you an excuse to be nosy, to ask things you normally couldn’t ask, to go places you normally couldn’t go.
From there, she moved onto a paper in Connecticut and later Baltimore, where she joined The Baltimore Sun. “The Sun is the place I grew up, both as a journalist and as a person,” she says. Corbett stayed for more than 20 years, editing two Pulitzer Prize-winning projects. “At that time, The Sun was this paper with these outsized ambitions… It always punched above its weight.” In the years since she left, the paper was moved under Tribune Publishing, and its staff has shrunk. “It’s been really, really hurt by downsizing, [by] layoffs, and there’s far fewer people with experience and local knowledge. It’s hard to keep up, and it’s a big city with a lot of consequential news.”
During her time at The Sun, Corbett proved her ability to spot and foster talented reporters. She mentored a college stringer named David Simon, better known for his later work writing and creating The Wire, which President Obama once called “one of the greatest—not just television shows but pieces of art—in the last couple of decades.” Corbett says it was pretty clear that Simon was something special. “He thought big, and he thought ambitiously. Sometimes I had to say, ‘no,’ and ‘hurry up,’ but he thought in terms of narratives, he thought of the sociology… That was remarkable in someone as young as he was, and it was just remarkable altogether.” Corbett made a cameo toward the end of the series and was part of the inspiration for the character of Gus, a city editor who’s an amalgam of a few people from The Sun.
When Corbett finally made her way to the Times in 2004, she’d already turned down two previous offers from the paper; once right before Dean Baquet, the paper’s current executive editor, went to the Los Angeles Times in 2000, and once during the Howell Raines editorship. Ultimately compelled by the Times’ commitment to ambitious work, she came on as an enterprise editor and worked out of the Washington D.C. bureau. In her first year, Corbett was asked to edit what became the investigation into the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping. (At the time, then-President George Bush told the Times that they’d have blood on their hands if they went through with publishing the piece.) As Corbett explains, the blowback to that project helped lead to Edward Snowden, which in turn lead to Cambridge Analytica, which has now influenced the current conversation about how the tech industry handles data and privacy.
In 2013, She Said reports, Corbett was appointed to the Times masthead, and it became 50 percent female for the first time. Back when she worked at the D.C. bureau, they used to joke—though it wasn’t really a joke—that you could fit all the women into the ladies room at once. Now, staffing has changed, and she says the Times newsroom as a whole is filled with far more women, though Corbett doesn’t think a woman would necessarily report a story differently than a man. “But I think having more women and more minorities and people with different backgrounds, people who grew up in North Dakota and not New York City, creates a broader sense of story.”
Two years ago, she edited the Weinstein investigation and helped guide Kantor and Twohey’s reporting. When asked about the cultural shift that occurred almost immediately after the piece came out, she said, “I think that the real bottom line is that women were fed up, that women around the world in various cultures all had some experience of this and wanted to speak out about it and felt that this was an opening.” But one of the most striking outcomes, to her, came from the companies who had their own wake-up call. Bill O’Reilly was forced out shortly after the Times published sexual harassment allegations against him, while Weinstein was fired three days after their investigation. “[O’Reilly] wasn’t fired because Fox News was shocked and surprised to learn of these settlements. What happened is that advertisers revolted and advertisers of luxury goods, who had women as consumers, thought, ‘This isn’t going to look so good.’”
This kind of work, the kind that can change the course of history, requires a mix of cheerleading, coaching, and interrogating on Corbett’s part. (At The Sun, there were times she would babysit for a reporter’s children when they suddenly had to work on a Saturday.) An investigative story, she explains, has to be persuasive. There has to be proof, and it has to be able to stand up to questions. Her job is to challenge the report, to make sure her writers are coming to the correct conclusions. “Some of the worst journalism mistakes are not when reporters write stories and not any fact is wrong, but they’re adding two and two and getting five. To me, the scariest thing as an editor is not what you see in a story, but what you don’t see.”
Kantor and Twohey’s book provides a careful explanation of their reporting process and insight into what it’s like to work alongside an editor of Corbett’s caliber. But with such a behind-the-scenes job, she admits it can be difficult to know how it all comes together for other editors. “Usually you hear about editors’ work from reporters, and I don’t know whether they’re giving a totally fair and balanced description,” she says. “I do think there is a bit of mystery to it.”