Photo Courtesy of the New York Times.
Covering the World
Ephrat Livni (’93) discusses the importance—and frustrations—of writing the first draft of international history at the New York Times
In 2024, with war in Gaza raging, leadership at the New York Times had a problem: News was breaking around the clock, and Times’ reporters based in the region needed to sleep at some point. Fortuitously, Ephrat Livni, at the time a Washington, D.C.-based correspondent with the Times’ DealBook newsletter, was perfectly situated to monitor and report on developments in Israel and Gaza when the local reporters had gone to bed. Livni (’93) is a lawyer and a proven reporter, born abroad into a multicultural family, culturally Jewish with a master’s in Islamic studies, fluent in Hebrew and French. She had taught English in Japan and worked as a French interpreter in New York, written for ABC News and Quartz, served with the Peace Corps in Senegal, and worked as a public defender in Florida. Livni, who in May 2025 stepped into the newly created role of breaking news reporter on the the Times’ international desk, sees a through-line connecting each stop in her career.
“They’re all the job of an interpreter,” Livni says. “You’re telling other people’s stories. You do that as a lawyer, as a language interpreter, you do it as a reporter. In all of them, you’re trying to understand the story from a different perspective.”
Born in Israel to an Israeli father and French mother, Livni moved to Brookline, Mass., with her family so her father could study nuclear chemistry. Her mother, Aline Livni, taught French at Boston University for many years. Livni says she never doubted she would attend BU, and she always knew she wanted to be a journalist—with a global bent.
“I grew up with a lot of input from the world, and then I also went out and sought a lot more input,” she says. “I don’t presume to understand everyone, but because of the fact that I grew up with multiple cultures, even inside my house, I understand fundamentally that people do not see the world the same way—that we see things from the perspectives that we’ve been exposed to.”
COMtalk spoke with Livni about the challenges and importance of international reporting. The night before the interview, she had been working late to update a story on a humanitarian flotilla making its way toward Gaza to deliver aid and protest the war—only to be intercepted less than 50 miles offshore and detained by the Israeli government.
Q&A
With Ephrat Livni
COMTalk: What sources are you monitoring to be sure you’re getting accurate and up-to-date information as news is breaking, such as the Gaza flotilla story?
Ephrat Livni: With something like the flotilla, it is very much a social media event. There are a ton of people posting about it, and even people on the boats posting about it, but the official flotilla account is considered reliable. We can quote from that; that’s the organizers speaking. And we knew, because it was going to be a Jewish holiday, that theoretically, only the Israeli Foreign Ministry was going to be making statements. Those were the things to monitor. But the [Times’] newsroom is huge, and so there are people putting information in from all over the place. There’s a researcher in Jerusalem who got a statement right on the eve of Yom Kippur from the UN ambassador to Israel, things like that. Then, I can pick that up from him. I’m not doing everything by myself. Information is coming in from everywhere. We then do additional reporting and add to the story as the story unfolds. I was later able to speak to a lawyers group representing detained flotilla participants, lawmakers in the US concerned about American detainees, parents of flotilla participants, flotilla participants and more.
COMTalk: What’s been hard about the job so far?
Ephrat Livni: The interactive feedback is surprisingly aggressive. There’s just a ton, and it almost does not matter the subject matter. I think it’s the way that people are used to engaging on social media.
There’s some misunderstanding of the difference between an opinion writer and a news writer. People are continually demanding that I take a stand on things when my job is not at all to take a stand on things. That part’s really hard, because when we work crazy hours, we put in all our heart, and then much of the response is a sort of assault.
With the war, people feel very, very strongly about it, and they have very strong opinions about what is true, what is not true—very strong for people who appear to have less information at their hands than I do. It’s very rare to get a nice message, which is fine. The story is an ugly story, like any war. I think what’s more surprising is that a similar level of aggression comes whether you write about starvation or champagne.
COMTalk: Do you do anything to forget about the news every once in a while?
Ephrat Livni: I walk the dog, but forgetting about the news is not really part of being a reporter. When I wake up, I’m like, ‘oh, man, what happened.’ To exert some control over the connection to the internet, I might walk the dog without my phone, but inevitably, I’ll come back and there is something that I have to check. It’s a huge privilege to write for the New York Times, and I’m in a point in my life where I can give myself to the job.
COMTalk: In a media environment where every individual and organization can put their own messaging out via Instagram or X, why does the world need the New York Times?
Ephrat Livni: A lot of people think there’s bias, there’s a mandate to write a certain way [at the Times]. There’s not. There are rules of reporting that we follow. The reason that you go to a [newspaper] is because our full-time job is to read and understand information and convey it in various forms that are accessible.
If you go to the flotilla Instagram page, there’s a lot of stuff, but I don’t know if you can make sense of it if you aren’t following the story all the time. And if you only look at the account of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, you’re going to say, ‘Oh, [flotilla participants] are sponsored by Hamas.’ Those are different viewpoints, and somebody has to triangulate.
If I read only the Truth Social [posts] of Donald Trump, it may not have any context, it may not be factually correct. Certainly, it’s important because of who said it. And yes, I am subscribed to Donald Trump’s Truth Social for that reason, because I do need to see what he says. But the reason to read a newspaper is because people are saying and doing a lot of things, and the rate at which things are happening is so fast that you need somebody to stop and collect it and sift through it and try to measure it.
I don’t claim we do it perfectly, but I do think we do something that’s incredibly important.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
