Hello! My name is Rebecca Harrington.
I’m an adaptive, energetic, and forward-thinking newsroom leader with extensive experience inspiring large teams to produce engaging, impactful journalism.
I spent almost 9 years at Business Insider. As an executive editor in the News division, I was overseeing up to 60 journalists across several teams, covering breaking news, politics, military & defense, digital culture, science, sports, and Voices of Color. We published live blogs, investigations, features, special projects, analyses, and SEO explainers that garnered hundreds of millions of pageviews. While I would still top-edit the biggest and most sensitive stories, I was spending most of my time behind the scenes — managing, communicating the vision of the newsroom, setting and measuring goals, hiring, producing and delivering trainings, setting and maintaining budgets, and aligning people’s personal strengths with the team’s needs and shifting resources.
I love managing people and coaching them to find their path to excellence. I completed Poynter’s workshop, “Build a Stronger Team by Being a Better Coach,” in 2021, and it revolutionized the way I provide constructive feedback, set goals, and drive teams to success. I’m passionate about refining processes and making people’s jobs frictionless so they can focus more on doing impactful journalism. My content specialty is finding the angles that make readers care about the news they need to read, and getting those stories out to as many people as possible.
Journalism for me began as an undergraduate student, when I was the science and technology reporter at the Minnesota Daily. Some of the major themes I covered included notable research discoveries, diversity in STEM fields, access to technology, public perceptions of science, and dwindling research funding. I worked on daily deadlines writing two to four stories and one or two blogs per week. I was then the City Editor from 2013-14, managing four to six reporters covering science, technology, health, environment, business, housing, courts, crime, local and state government, and neighborhoods. We published four papers a week with a circulation of 16,500, which made us the third-biggest paper in Minnesota at the time.
I worked at the Star Tribune as a student reporter on assignment on the health desk in spring 2014. There, I wrote stories on topics including healthcare disparities, sexual assault, pesticide protests, and HPV vaccines.
I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities with a B.A. in Professional Journalism and a B.S. in Biology in May 2014. By December 2015, I’d received my Master’s degree from New York University’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP).
During the summer of 2014, I was the science writing intern at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. There, I wrote stories ranging from high energy physics to systems biology. I also helped facilitate a communication workshop for science students interning at the Lab.
In spring 2015, I was the Online Editorial Intern for Scientific American, where I wrote stories, identified pieces to publish from our syndication partners, and assisted with daily editorial duties. I was also the Editor in Chief of Scienceline, SHERP’s student-run online magazine, from 2014-15. As Editor in Chief, I was the final editor and publisher of every story, managed 10 reporters and editors, and led a website redesign.
In summer 2015, I was an intern at Popular Science, straddling the print and online sides of the publication to tell science stories in the most fun and interesting ways possible.
I started as an editorial intern at Tech Insider in August 2015, and became a reporter in February 2016. In July 2016, I moved to the news team at Business Insider, to run the front page and cover international breaking news as a reporter and then an editor. I worked nights, then ran weekends, then transitioned to overseeing the teams that run nights and weekends. I took on more responsibilities and teams over the years, rising to deputy executive editor by 2021.
At BI, I designed and led newsroom trainings on managerial coaching, breaking news, what makes a great story, asking for comment, framing, and aggregation. I also authored coverage guides on the best, most ethical ways to cover crime and shootings. I worked with the product team on making BI’s proprietary CMS better, and with syndication partners such as MSN, Yahoo, and Apple News, to extend BI’s reach beyond the hundreds of millions on-site readers.
I love the power of journalism to share new ways of thinking to nudge our world to get a little better every day. And I want to help make my colleagues’ lives easier so they love what they do, too.
Want to connect? Please contact me:
Rebecca Harrington 