Maya Neria’s friends like to joke that she texts them too much. Every time they see that iconic, serif-adorned T appear in their notifications, they know that Neria had a hand in sending it. As the lead of a technology team that supports the newsroom in sending breaking news alerts, extreme weather updates and sometimes just great reads to enrich subscribers’ days, Neria plays as important a role in keeping readers informed as the newsroom itself.
Some might even say more important, especially as we spend more and more of our time glued to our phones. Without that T at the top of their screens, linking to articles in The Times, the paper’s subscribers might wait hours or even days to know that Puff Daddy got arrested, or that President Biden pardoned his son, or that the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot in Midtown Manhattan on a Wednesday morning in December. Thanks to Neria and her team, readers know as soon as the newsroom can produce a story—stunningly fast.
That breakneck pace can be exhausting, but Neria said the mission of ensuring people have real-time access to reliable news makes it all worthwhile. She told the class about a time when she had to take her computer to a party during the 2022 midterm elections so she could scurry off to a corner in the room and work if she had to. And had to she did.
With so much going on every day, Neria has to make hard calls on what and how many alerts to send. “More is not necessarily more,” she said. “Our job is to figure out how to be more efficient.” This is necessary to build trust with readers, she added, because “when people are getting 20 messages a day, they feel like their time is not being respected.”
Neria studied neuroscience, philosophy and African studies at Middlebury College, where she developed an interest in “why humans do what they do,” she told the class. After she graduated in 2015, Neria worked briefly as a researcher at a hedge fund in New York, and then moved to Nairobi, Kenya, for a job at a startup that trains and finds jobs for African software developers. In 2020, she returned to New York, where she was raised just north of the city. She joined The New York Times in November that year, one week after the election was called for Joe Biden. Her pace hasn’t slowed since.
Neria said she and her team think of themselves as having three bosses: those in charge of the business side of The Times, the newsroom and its editorial priorities, and last but not least, the readers. “Sometimes there’s tension between those three,” she said. The business side wants a predictable amount of engagement and growth. The newsroom wants to see important stories get high readership. And readers want all kinds of things—some want more arts coverage, some want more product reviews and some want to know who just got caught cheating in a major marathon.
“It can be a zero-sum game,” she said. With hundreds of stories to choose from every day, Neria and her team have to balance myriad and often conflicting priorities. She holds weekly meetings with key editors to discuss needs, problems and strategy. They talk about what can be improved, how to resolve hiccups in their processes and what they can do better. Every day, they have to decide whether something deserves an email, an alert or both, and who should receive those alerts.
And yet, as much as Neria loves keeping in touch with her friends, she also knows that news fatigue is very real. Her goal for 2025: “Figure out how to send fewer messages.”
