Yesterday I had the great honor and privilege of attending a colleague’s 70th birthday party. You may not have heard his name before, but Kinsey Wilson has been at the center of shaping journalism with a movie-worthy career that started at the bottom as a crime reporter in Chicago, and has taken him to the highest echelons at NPR, the New York Times, and, most recently, we’ve been lucky to have him at Automattic.
Kinsey brings a journalistic curiosity and passion for finding truth, paired with a deep optimism and creativity for seeing around the corner for how technology can transform how we consume and produce media.
While his Wikipedia page or biography provides appetizers to some of what he’s done, Kinsey has led such a rich and beautiful life that any attempt to summarize it ends up being criminally reductive. The best you can hope for is to give a taste of his person through vignettes.
A beautiful snippet from the montage of accolades at his birthday was how Kinsey was someone you’d follow into battle. I’ve learned so much from seeing the empathy, candor, and integrity he brings to every team he leads, which engenders an incredible loyalty I’ve rarely seen in my career. When he left NPR, 62 colleagues made an “Infinite Kinsey” website of accolades.
That sort of thing is rare, and it’s been an honor and a privilege to work alongside him to democratize publishing.
One of those colleagues, Elise Hu, introduced us while he was at the New York Times and while my intention when I first met him was to get more WordPress at the Times, my imagination was sparked by thinking of how he could bring his experience to help shape WordPress and Automattic, hence my pivot into recruiting him.
Kinsey’s impact on journalism (and podcasting!) at NPR and New York Times is easy to understand, but less well-known is how he came into Automattic and got deep into understanding WordPress and seeing it as a platform that could enable the newsrooms and journalists to accomplish their mission in a more efficient way with the project he leads, Newspack.
He’s a fierce steward of the Fourth Estate.
Newspack and its team’s close relationship to customers invents solutions on top of WordPress that delight its users and percolate and influence everything we do at Automattic. They’re one of the teams that sets the bar for others in the company.
To Kinsey, I’ll leave you with a quote from one of my other inspirations, Charlie Munger, who at the tender age of 99 shared a wish with a visitor, “Oh, to be 86 again.”
I’ll try not to be too tech-bro optimist and say that 70 is the new 40, but I look forward to seeing the ripples that you have on the future of publishing for many years to come.
