News Flash!

By David Menconi

Sara Yasin ’09 has ascended to the upper ranks of daily newspaper journalism, becoming a managing editor at the 141-year-old Los Angeles Times. But she took an unusual path there, starting with her time at NC State, where she majored in textile management and international studies.

Yasin was active on campus, a Caldwell Fellow who served in the Student Senate and Muslim Student Association. Still, the closest she came to journalism was working on the staff of the Agromeck. “Student government was more appealing than journalism,” she says, “because it seemed more impactful.” But the classmate who told her, “I think you’re a journalist whether you realize it or not” turned out to be right.

After graduate school at the London School of Economics, Yasin became a writer, editor and social media specialist at a series of online outlets. In 2015, she landed at BuzzFeed News, which started in 2006 as a purveyor of light pop-culture news. But BuzzFeed became meatier during her time there. She was managing editor when BuzzFeed won its first Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for a series on mass detention of Muslims in China.

This spring, Yasin, 35, was hired by the Times, where she oversees daily news operations as well as the photo, data and graphics departments. Moving from BuzzFeed to a more traditional publication is unusual but not unprecedented. But the way Yasin looks at it, journalism is journalism whether it’s on pixels or paper, at BuzzFeed or the Times.

It sounds corny to say this, but local journalism really is our best shot at preserving democracy.

“A mistake that a lot of legacy outlets have made was to fritter away the trust of their audience in order to chase [online readers],” Yasin says. “It sounds corny to say this, but local journalism really is our best shot at preserving democracy. Papers are having turmoil and facing issues. It’s important to include new audiences, understand the Internet, adapt and be innovative. But you can’t lose sight of your audience and core mission.”