Vox Announces New Hires and Promotions


Vox

Natalie Jennings and Tanya Pai take on new senior roles, Marina Bolotnikova joins Vox’s Future Perfect Vertical.

Swati Sharma, editor-in-chief of Vox, announced the promotions of Natalie Jennings to managing editor and Tanya Pai to the newly created role of director of newsroom standards and ethics. Vox’s Future Perfect vertical also welcomes Marina Bolotnikova as a new staff editor.

“Tanya has long been a thoughtful voice in our newsroom whose guidance we all regularly seek out on questions related to ethics and standards. We’re thrilled about this new role for her,” said Sharma. “Natalie has developed a keen eye for seeing problems before they arise, doesn’t shy away from tackling the tough questions, and has already made her mark here in less than a year. We look forward to having her expand her role to ensure our staff as a whole is best positioned to help our audience understand the important news moments.

“Vox’s Future Perfect vertical continues to grow and tackle big questions about the best ways to make change. We’re thrilled to bring on Marina so she can lend her diverse expertise to support our team.”

Previously, Jennings served as Vox’s politics editor, where she directed its ambitious midterms coverage. She joined Vox earlier this year from the Washington Post, where she covered three presidential campaigns and three administrations across multiple platforms, including as a deputy White House and Congress editor and editor of the Fix, the Post’s political analysis blog. In her new role, she’ll work alongside managing editor Nisha Chittal to oversee the editorial directors and daily coverage.

In addition to managing Vox’s style and standards team, as director of newsroom standards and ethics, Pai will be responsible for the implementation and continued cultivation of Vox’s policies and best practices for ethics and standards in our journalism. This includes fact-checking, copy editing, corrections, sourcing, disclosures, and more, across text, audio, video, and off-platform. She will also continue to serve as the editorial lead for Language Please, a living resource for all journalists and storytellers seeking to thoughtfully cover social, cultural, and identity-related topics. Pai has been with Vox since 2015.

In her new role as staff editor, Bolotnikova will be tasked with expanding freelance output, as well providing editorial support for Future Perfect’s staff editors and writers. She has written broadly about ideas, culture, and politics, with a special focus on animal welfare and factory farming. Her work has appeared in Vox, as well as the Guardian, the Intercept, and the New York Times.

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The Republican response to this weekend's massive No Kings demonstrations showed they're ready to crown President Donald Trump as absolute ruler, an analyst wrote Monday.

The president dismissed the protests, which drew an estimated 7 million people at 2,600 events nationwide, as "very small, very ineffective," posted AI-generated video of himself dumping feces on attendees' heads and threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act.

But Salon's Sophia Tesfaye argued the GOP response was even more revealing.

"The right’s response to No Kings wasn’t just politically telling. It was conceptually damning," Tesfaye wrote. "If a protest warns that someone is behaving like a king, and the accused responds by laughing, wearing a crown and declaring 'You’re just mad I’m winning' — you have your answer."

Vice President JD Vance shared a doctored video of Trump placing a crown on his head while Democratic leaders bowed, and the White House official account shared his post. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) claimed the protesters "hate America" and wanted to "dismantle capitalism" and "erase our founding principles.”

"He may not be a king by law," Tesfaye wrote. "But in posture, and in the eyes of his defenders, Donald Trump already wears the crown. So he wants to define criticism as disloyalty. Mike Johnson wants to define protest as hate. Fox News wants to define mass mobilization as marginal. And yet none of it is working."

Millions protested Saturday against the president and his policies, but Tesfaye said the Republican reaction shows why those demonstrations are necessary to preserve democracy.

"The important questions now aren’t whether Trump will continue to act like a king," Tesfaye wrote. "They are whether the right can continue to pretend he isn’t — and if the press will let Republicans claim they haven’t seen Trump’s absurd reaction before he abuses his power to exact revenge."