As senior vice president for content business strategy, Julia Turner works closely with colleagues on the business side, aligning editorial and financial goals and leading efforts to refine and expand plans for a wide range of projects. Turner moved into her new role in March 2023.
Previously, she was deputy managing editor for entertainment and strategy, running The Times’ coverage of culture and the entertainment industry. She also worked with newsroom leadership to develop and implement editorial strategy for the paper and oversaw Sports.
During Turner’s years leading the Entertainment staff, the team significantly expanded the size of its digital audience and the range of culture it covers. It also aggressively pursued investigations, among them the stories that led to the industry boycott of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. and Golden Globes. In addition, members of the Entertainment staff won or were finalists for Pulitzer Prizes three times during her tenure.
Before joining the newsroom in November 2018, Turner was the editor in chief of Slate. During her four years in that role, she expanded the online magazine’s audience, its podcast network, and its membership program, and the journalism Slate published earned numerous accolades, among them a Polk Award for “Sixteen Shots,” Jamie Kalven’s investigation into the killing of Laquan McDonald by Chicago police and a National Magazine Award for “Slow Burn,” Slate’s history podcast.
Turner first joined Slate in 2003, and also served as deputy editor, as culture editor, and as a reporter and critic covering television, media and design during her time there. For more than a decade, she’s also been one of the co-hosts of the Slate Culture Gabfest podcast.
Born in Boston, Turner is the daughter of two journalists who met working at the Boston Globe. She graduated from Brown, where she studied history, and got her start at Time Inc., where she worked first in magazine development and then at Sports Illustrated Women.
