Photo Courtesy of Hiroko Masuike & The New York Times

The New York Times recently published a story that highlights Hillcrest graduate Steve Kenny’s nightly emails. Because they are sent five nights a week, the emails served as a way for The New York Times to recap the year.

“Strangely enough, in a year that yielded one blaring headline after the next, there is no single headline to encompass what we have just lived through,” the piece says. “Instead, there are notes, sent late, and there are vivid photographs.”

Kenny, who is a senior editor for nights at The New York Times, sends emails recapping the night’s news to journalists across the globe. His emails prepare The New York Times day teams for anything they may have missed while they slept.

Before starting at The New York Times as a copyeditor, the Hillcrest graduate served as the managing editor for the Hillcrest Hurricane, which is still published to this day. He then attended Northwestern University before coming back to Dallas, where he worked at The Dallas Morning News. In an interview with the Preston Hollow Advocate, Kenny attributed some of his success to his Hillcrest journalism teacher, Julia Jeffress.

“If I had not stumbled upon her, I don’t know what I would be doing now. I doubt very seriously I’d be in New York at the New York Times. I don’t even know if I’d be a journalist,” Kenny says in the 2017 interview. “She saw something in me and really encouraged me when I had doubts about myself. She died in 1986 of cancer, and I stayed close until she died.”

Kenny’s nightly emails for The New York Times almost always begin with “Good morning, all” and show the breadth of the The New York Times, crediting editors and reporters involved in the stories.

When asked about what attracted him to journalism, Kenny states, “The ability to tell stories and to have other people read them. There’s a book about the New York Times called “The Kingdom and the Power.” It’s by the writer Gay Talese. I read this book when I was 20, and he referred to journalists as “shy egomaniacs.” I think it’s a perfect term, because you want people to read your stuff, but you’re too shy to run up and get attention by yourself. So you hide behind your journalism badge, your journalism notebook. You can ask questions and go places you never would’ve gone if you weren’t a journalist.”

Read some his emails and take a peek at the 2020 recap here.