Roger Hodge Named Acting Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept

Intercept Deputy Editor Roger Hodge has been named acting editor-in-chief of the investigative news site, effective August 1, 2022. He will fill the role previously held by Betsy Reed, who was named editor of The Guardian U.S. on Thursday. Nausicaa Renner, The Intercept’s Washington editor, will assume the role of deputy editor, reporting to Hodge.

Hodge will oversee The Intercept’s newsroom operations in both New York and Washington.

“Betsy Reed has made The Intercept into one of the world’s premier investigative newsrooms, and it has been my great privilege to work alongside her for the last seven years,” said Hodge. “There’s no replacing her, but the upside is that we still have a kick-ass team of journalists.”

Since joining The Intercept in 2015 as national editor, Hodge has overseen numerous major investigations. He was promoted to deputy editor in 2017 and has since led the organization’s criminal justice, environmental, climate, and toxics reporting. More recently, he has spearheaded The Intercept’s technology and Covid origins coverage. Hodge’s work has been critical to The Intercept’s most ambitious and impactful reporting series, including The Drone Papers, The Teflon Toxin, Bad Chemistry, Code of Silence, and The Iran Cables.

Formerly, Hodge was editor-in-chief of the Oxford American and Harper’s Magazine. His writings have appeared in many publications, including Texas Monthly, the London Review of Books, the New Republic, Popular Science, and Harper’s Magazine. Hodge is also the author of two books, “Texas Blood” and “The Mendacity of Hope.”

Nausicaa Renner has been The Intercept’s Washington editor since March 2021. She was previously senior politics editor at The Intercept, the digital editor at Columbia Journalism Review and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and a senior editor at n+1.

Betsy Reed joined The Intercept as editor-in-chief in January 2015. She and her team shaped The Intercept into a leading investigative journalism organization responsible for breaking some of the most consequential stories in all of its areas of coverage, while launching a membership program that has since grown into one of the largest in U.S. independent media.

Under Reed’s leadership, The Intercept grew into an award-winning news organization dedicated to holding the powerful accountable through adversarial journalism and in-depth investigations on politics, war, surveillance, corruption, the environment, technology, criminal justice, the media, and more. Among the accolades The Intercept has received over the last few years are the George Polk Award, multiple National Magazine Awards and nominations, a Hillman Prize, the Innocence Network Journalism Award, and an Edward R. Murrow Award. The Intercept was a Pulitzer Prize finalist last year for the podcast “Somebody,” and the animated short “A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” received an Emmy nomination.

“Saying goodbye to my Intercept colleagues is hard, but knowing that I am leaving the newsroom in such good hands, so full of talent and potential, makes it a little easier,” Reed said. “The Intercept plays a very special role in our media ecosystem, and I’m sure it will reach new heights under Roger and Nausicaa’s leadership.”