What makes the appointment even more unusual is that Kantor got her first journalism job just four years ago. She’d majored in history at Columbia University then spent a year in Jerusalem working for nongovernmental organizations and another year working for former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani before finally deciding to pursue a career in journalism–just after she started class at Harvard Law School. Leaving law school for a job at an upstart online publication wasn’t easy to explain to friends and family at the time. But they aren’t questioning her career choices anymore. NEWSWEEK’s Jennifer Barrett spoke to Kantor about how she got the job and what her plans are for the Arts & Leisure section.

NEWSWEEK: Your resume–not to mention your age–are pretty atypical for a New York Times editor. How did you get the job?

Jodi Kantor: It started as a casual conversation and then grew into something more serious. All of a sudden there was a live job at the end of it. It didn’t happen that fast, of course. There were stages in between and they vetted me pretty heavily and we spent hours and hours talking about the cultural coverage at the Times, and I showed them a lot of my work at Slate. The New York Times is hiring me based on my work at Slate where I’ve edited most of the culture coverage. I don’t think it’s based on the confused two or three years I spent after graduation wandering around looking for interesting things to do.

When did you decide you wanted to become a journalist?

I was always a journalism groupie and had a really intense reading relationship with a lot of different publications. The New York Times was absolutely number one on the list. Reading it was incredibly formative for me. Journalism was something I secretly wanted to do, but it wasn’t until I went to law school that I realized I needed to try it … I noticed at law school there were a lot of people for whom law seemed a second choice. If you walked around the library, you saw that people had these secret passions they were catering to; they had business plans and novels and screenplays on their laptops. I was the journalistic equivalent. I didn’t want to become a lawyer who had always wanted to become a journalist but had never tried. So I took a leave of absence.

Did you have a hard time breaking into journalism initially?

It’s funny. When I decided to become a journalist one of the things that was frustrating was that a lot of potential employers wanted people who had known that they wanted to be a journalist from a very early age and had been the editor of their high-school newspaper and the editor of their college newspaper. But I think that the best journalists are those who have a wide variety of interests. My feeling is that in your late teens and early 20s, you have a right to be overstimulated and confused and interested in a lot of things. It is really important when you are 24 years old not to have to apologize for not knowing exactly what you want to do with your life.

Have there been any moments when you regretted leaving law school?

No, a week into my tenure at Slate, it was clear I made the right decision. I felt immensely at home and I never wanted to leave.

How did you get that job?

I basically e-mailed my way into the job. I didn’t have a huge number of clips … but I had a very powerful conviction that I could do the job. I remember writing an e-mail to David Plotz [Slate’s Washington editor] about why exactly I wanted to be a journalist. Slate was only two or three years old but I had been reading it every day since the beginning. I did some tryout pieces as well.

What did your parents say at the time? Did they try to talk you out of it?

They were incredibly supportive but it was hard for them. With parents, there is always the what-will-they-say-to-their-friends factor. They understood but it was hard to explain to other people … it was a little bit hard for them to understand why I would leave Harvard, a place that offered so much opportunity. On the other hand, I was going to work for Microsoft, which had a certain kind of legitimacy.

So what do your parents say now?

They are over the moon. My big fear was that they would take out a big ad in the newspaper when this was announced. But they haven’t.

Slate’s approach to cultural coverage seems very different from that of the Times now. How will the Arts & Leisure section change with you there?

The Times cultural coverage is an institution and no one wants to compromise the tremendous assets and relationship with our readers we already have. But [executive editor] Howell [Raines] really feels that it’s time to experiment and try a couple new things in terms of the culture coverage. It would be premature to talk about specific stories or features but I think you’ll see us trying different formats. The way people experience music is very different from the way people experience architecture. Instead of taking a one-size-fits-all approach, it is important to come up with formats that reflect the ways that people experience all these different mediums.

If you pick up the Arts & Leisure section now, you can read about everything from Broadway shows in Russia to indie operas in Brooklyn. There’s a feeling that if the Times doesn’t cover that, who will?

There is a myth that the Times is the only publication that covers serious performance, but I don’t think that’s true. In fact, we have competitors and we need to think about doing it better than our competitors–from the New Yorker to Time Out New York. You have a special burden when you are writing about the arts because your subject is all about creativity and narrative skill and wit and style and deep meaning, so you have to incorporate all those elements in your coverage, whether it’s straight reporting or criticism or something in between. You have to be a little showbiz about it, and I don’t mean that in a cheap or superficial way. On the one hand you are certainly not going to be competing with your subject, but you shouldn’t pale beside it either.

How would you describe the Arts & Leisure readers?

It’s a mass audience. It’s a huge and diverse crowd but I think they are fans and are passionate about what they see. The goal is to help them think about what they want to see and to help them understand it and to pick out the most interesting questions being posed in the world of the arts, and to fill them in on the background to give them a deeper understanding of what it is they are experiencing.

What should cultural coverage encompass?

As far as I’m concerned everything is fair game for Arts & Leisure. There should be no question about what should and shouldn’t be covered. One thing I’ve learned at Slate is that it’s very important to tap into people’s obsessions … there are a couple topics each year that people have an almost insatiable appetite to read about.

What topics would qualify from 2002? The Osbournes?

They are very interesting. The conventional wisdom has become “They are just like every other family.” They have become the modern equivalent of the Addams Family. They seem completely goth and weird and yet–ha ha–the joke is, they have a lot of the same arguments that other families have. I’m not sure that is necessarily the case, but it’s an amazing trick they have pulled off. Also, Eminem–the debate continues to rage and the success of “8 Mile” has only added more fuel to the discussion.

And now?

The discussion about what to do at Ground Zero is just huge. It’s a political story, an urban-planning story, an architecture story. I’d say that is No. 1.