Sharing Global Stories

May 5, 2026

Jen Thomas '07 talks about how her time at MCLA prepared her to be an audience editor for The New York Times.

Eighth-grader Jen Thomas sat in her middle school's library in Fall River, Mass.—close to the Rhode Island border—minding her own business, when a substitute teacher changed her life. 

The sub was helping organize the school's newspaper, and he realized they needed a story about the chorus, band, and orchestra's recent field trip to Water Wizz, the oldest waterpark in Massachusetts.

"Do you want to write an article about the school field trip?" he asked Jen.

She said sure. After Jen shared her story, the substitute said she was a talented writer and asked if she'd ever thought about being a journalist.

She hadn't—but that quickly changed.

"From that day onward, I knew I wanted to be a journalist," Jen said. "I dreamed of being a foreign correspondent. I romanticized the vision of exploring the world and writing these amazing narratives from distant locations."

Jen is living about as close to that dream as possible. In February, she, her husband, and their three dogs moved to Seoul, South Korea, where she is the audience editor for The New York Times. She's not writing the narratives she envisioned, but she is using her news judgment and cutting-edge digital tools to ensure the writing and reporting her colleagues do gets in front of audiences all over the world.

"It's got to be findable," Jen said. "That's what my job is, to make sure that the journalism our reporters have worked so hard on gets seen."

To do that, she relies on lessons learned at MCLA. 

When Jen was in high school, she took every journalism class her high school offered and was active on the school's newspaper. As a Commonwealth Honors Scholar, she knew she wanted to attend a state college in Massachusetts and was quickly drawn to MCLA.

"I felt that I had a disadvantage in my public school and I didn't know a lot of things," Jen said. "I felt like I was really behind, and so I wanted to learn everything about everything. I didn't have a lot of experience in history, geography, or math, so I was excited about a liberal arts education that would give me a stronger foundation."

When Jen learned about MCLA’s student newspaper, The Beacon, she was hooked.

"I did a site visit and I loved the professors in the program," Jen said. "I loved that you could work on a newspaper, like a real, print newspaper. So yeah, I was sold."

Jen joined the paper as a design editor her freshman year, helping The Beacon adopt a new design program she used in high school. She made her way through almost every role she could during her time at MCLA. She spent time as editor-in-chief and ultimately served as a teaching assistant for the publication during her senior year.

But journalism wasn't her only focus.

"I really enjoyed all of the opportunities to grow my knowledge base," said Jen, who double-majored in philosophy. "I was becoming someone who could contribute across the board in a lot of different ways, and it made me very adaptable. MCLA made me a much more well-rounded person."

Jen also received the James A. Hardman, Jr. Scholarship, awarded each year to a student interested in pursuing a journalism career.

That was definitely Jen's interest. 

During her senior year, she served as a reporter for iBerkshires.com in North Adams, less than a mile from the MCLA campus. She joined the staff full-time before leaving Massachusetts to pursue a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University. 

She returned in 2009 to join GateHouse Media New England, where she was a reporter at the Watertown TAB & Press and an assistant editor for the Cambridge Chronicle. 

Then her global journey began. 

Jen spent nearly seven years in the Middle East, where she worked at Abu Dhabi Media, first as a national reporter, then as senior editor, homepage editor, and social media coordinator. 

During that time, she made a trip to Paris. While there, Jen met a woman who was trying to travel to 30 countries before she turned 30 years old. Intrigued, Jen, who was 27 at the time, decided to pursue a similar goal. 

"I spent a lot of time trying to get that bucket list done," Jen said. She succeeded, and to date, she's been to 43 countries.

After Abu Dhabi Media, Jen returned to the U.S., where she spent seven years at the San Francisco Chronicle as a digital producer, social media editor, and audience editor.

She loved her time in San Francisco, but she missed living abroad. She didn't want to leave, though, unless she could find an audience editor role at a more established paper—something she figured would be impossible to find.

That's when The New York Times contacted her. And just like that interaction with the substitute teacher in Fall River, one opportunity turned into a life-changing experience.

"I didn't think the stars were going to align," Jen said. "When The New York Times reached out to me, I was like, 'How did you know my deepest desires?' It was too good of an opportunity to pass up."