Why a former New York Times editor launched her own women-focused magazine
Francesca Donner grew frustrated by the lack of female voices at the mainstream media outlets she worked for.
Francesca Donner never planned to be a reporter. She never chased scoops, never imagined herself on a breaking-news desk, and never felt the tug that pulls so many young journalists toward seeing their own bylines in a newspaper. From the very beginning, she was something else entirely: an editor. And not just an editor by job title or newsroom hierarchy, but by instinct—someone who cannot help seeing narrative threads, structural flaws, and missed opportunities in other people’s writing.
“It’s the thing I can’t turn off,” she said. Even as a child, she recalled sitting in an all-girls classroom in England, listening to a teacher read aloud from a classmate’s homework assignment. The story included a small, intimate detail—the father briefly poking his face around a rustling newspaper at the breakfast table—and for some reason, the moment lit up her brain. “She had so captured this emotion at breakfast… this family dynamic,” Donner said. “I didn’t realize at that age I was going to become an editor, but when I look back on it, the assemblage of those words was so profound to me.”
That instinct carried her through a career at some of the most powerful news institutions in the world. Donner rose through editing roles at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, carving out niches that allowed her to champion women’s voices within male-dominated newsrooms. But in 2024, she stepped off the traditional media path to launch something original: The Persistent, an online publication written entirely by women.
Part magazine, part community space, The Persistent is Donner’s attempt to fill what she believes is a gaping hole in mainstream journalism. “In order for me to sort of swing the pendulum back as best I can,” she said, “my goal is to amplify [women’s voices] really heavily and make sure that women are the center of the story.”
A year into the experiment, she thinks she’s onto something.
A Natural Editor—And a Natural Skeptic of the Newsroom Ladder
Most journalists begin as reporters. They cut their teeth on small beats, get comfortable with deadlines, and gradually move toward editing roles as their careers mature. But Donner questions whether that trajectory actually makes sense.
“The reporter-to-editor pipeline is not necessarily a really productive one,” she said. “Some people are just editors and they can’t turn it off. And some people are writers and reporters and they can’t turn it off.” Good reporters aren’t always good writers, she pointed out, and good writers aren’t always strong editors. “One doesn’t progress out of something one is really, really good at.”