Rajiv Chandrasekaran used to be the Washington Post’s Baghdad bureau chief. That’s some major street cred right there. He has just been named as the Post’s “Continuous News Editor,” a job that gives him editorial control over what breaking news makes it to the Post’s website. He is the newspaper’s first Asian American assistant managing editor. Who else but the Washington Post reports:
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a Washington Post reporter who started as a summer intern 11 years ago and subsequently covered local and financial news and served as the newspaper’s Baghdad bureau chief, has been named assistant managing editor for continuous news, the paper announced yesterday.In his new job, Chandrasekaran, 32, of Washington, will head the department responsible for feeding breaking news to The Post’s Web site. The announcement was made by Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. and Managing Editor Philip Bennett.
“Ever since he started as a summer intern, he has been one of the most energetic, smart and hard-driving journalists in the newsroom,” Downie said. During the selection process, Chandrasekaran “demonstrated real vision about the future relationship between the newspaper and its Internet site,” Downie said.
Chandrasekaran became the newspaper’s Middle East correspondent in 2002 and moved to Baghdad on the eve of the U.S. invasion in March 2003.
Rajiv was actually outspoken in his criticism of what he judged were missteps by the administration in rebuilding Iraq. He was interviewed by NPR for this great article in the Post from last year. The best part of this is that Chandrasekaran is young enough that he probably sees the symbiotic relationship that blogs and newspapers can have and will seek to foster that relationship.
Chandrasekaran, who says he reads the paper exclusively online, said he spent “the better part of the day in a daze” when he received the news.“I’m looking forward to working with my colleagues at The Post to create all sorts of new and compelling content for the Internet,” he said. Among his priorities, he said, will be to increase interactivity with readers, use more video packaging and boost the number of blogs, or Web logs, on The Post’s site.
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p>This is welcome news for us. In case you didn’t notice, the Post is already starting to link to blogs which discuss a particular article, directly next to the article. Take for example a link to us in the M.I.A. article we blogged about. I knew that writing about her was good for something. 
For an IA to reach this level of responsibility at the WaPo at such a young age is no mean achievement.
But, in the interests looking at this from another viewpoint, there has been some criticism of Chandrasekaran’s writing. A marine who crossed paths with Chandrasekaran posted his own observations. What stands out was this instance:
“Before major combat operations were over, Chandrasekaran was already quoting Iraqis proclaiming the American operation a failure. Reading his dispatches from April 2003, you can already see his meta-narrative take shape: basically, that the Americans are clumsy fools who donÂ’t know what theyÂ’re doing, and Iraqis hate them. This meta-narrative informs his coverage and the coverage of the reporters he supervises, who rotate in and out of Iraq.
How do I know this? Because my fellow Marines and I witnessed it with our own eyes. Chandrasekaran showed up in the city of Al Kut last April, talked to a few of our officers, and toured the city for a few hours. He then got back into his air-conditioned car and drove back to Baghdad to write about the local unrest.
“The Untouchable ‘Mayor’ of Kut,” his article’s headline blared the next day. It described a local, Iranian-backed troublemaker named Abbas Fadhil, who was squatting in the provincial government headquarters. He had gathered a mob of people with nothing better to do, told them to camp out in the headquarters compound, and there they sat, defying the Marines of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade.”
More can be found here