From a Washington Post story by Paul Farhi headlined “Washington Post managing editor Emilio Garcia-Ruiz named editor in chief of San Francisco Chronicle”:
During Garcia-Ruiz’s tenure, The Post became one of the largest digital-news sites in the world, with monthly traffic regularly exceeding 80 million U.S. visitors and surpassing 100 million during the coronavirus pandemic. Digital-only subscriptions to The Post grew to more than 2.5 million this summer.
Garcia-Ruiz will join the Chronicle, long the San Francisco Bay area’s largest newspaper, next month. He succeeds Audrey Cooper, who left the newspaper this summer after five years leading its newsroom to become editor in chief of WNYC, the public-radio station in New York City.
Like almost all local news operations, the Chronicle has faced cutbacks brought on by declining print readership and advertising, as well as the challenges of maintaining its operations during the pandemic. . . .
Garcia-Ruiz joined The Post in 1987 after graduating from the University of Maryland and briefly covering high school sports for the defunct Prince George’s Journal. He started working nights as a sports copy editor and moved quickly through the ranks to become an assistant editor.
After working as an assistant editor at the Los Angeles Times and Orange County Register, Garcia-Ruiz became sports editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Under his watch in 2000, reporter George Dohrmann won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing academic fraud in the men’s basketball program at the University of Minnesota, one of the few Pulitzers awarded for sports reporting.
He returned to The Post in 2001 as an assistant sports editor, becoming editor of the department two years later. . . .He was named managing editor in May 2013, months before The Post was purchased by Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos.
With an influx of manpower and resources, Garcia-Ruiz helped build The Post’s digital offerings, including an expansion of its video-news team, managing a new audio operation, and helping to introduce new publications, such as The Lily, which specializes in stories for millennial women, and travel site By the Way.
In a note to Post staff, Baron called Garcia-Ruiz “a leader of energy, enthusiasm, empathy and creativity who can provide experienced and astute leadership.”. . .
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Paul Farhi is The Washington Post’s media reporter. He started at The Post in 1988 and has been a financial reporter, a political reporter and a Style reporter.
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