The 19th is thrilled to announce that Isabela Espadas Barros Leal and Jennifer Koons are joining us as our newest editors. The editors will work closely with editorial directors to assign, shape, edit and publish stories to fulfill The 19th’s mission of serving women and LGBTQ+ people with timely, high-quality and distinctive journalism across formats and platforms.
Koons has spent more than two decades covering stories at the nexus of peace and conflict. She is invested in journalism that troubles dominant narratives, recenters agency and ambition, and writes into history the people too often excluded from it.
Her recent work has emphasized the women shaping modern diplomacy. She has worked as a foreign correspondent, national security editor and creator of the newsletter Our Women in the World, which features back-channel dispatches from diplomats. The culmination of this work will be two recently finished books: “The Striped-Pants Girls,” a reported history, and “SAFIRA, SAFIRA,” a novel.
Her reporting has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Foreign Policy, among other publications. Her editorial leadership includes serving as news director at Axios and national security editor across several major publications. She is a Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting grantee for her reporting on the impact of regional instability, including forced migration, overpopulation and child marriage during the rise of Boko Haram and other militant and extremist groups in the Sahel. For more than 15 years, she has taught undergraduate and graduate journalism students, including at Northwestern University, its Qatar campus, and Georgetown University.
She received a B.A. in political science from Ohio State University and dual graduate degrees in journalism and law from Northwestern.
Espadas is a dynamic, award-winning editor who loves to be at the center of the story — whatever that story is. She is joining us from The New York Times, where she was a member of the newsroom’s competitive two-year editing residency.
At The Times, Espadas edited work on the flexible editing, live news and business desks, touching copy from nearly every corner of the newsroom. She helped edit daily coverage of the Trump administration as well as live blogs on the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the papal conclave and much more. She was also part of a team that edited weekslong coverage of Elon Musk’s trial against OpenAI and his SpaceX initial public offering.
Before The Times, Espadas spent five years at NBC News, where she started as an intern and worked her way up to various editing roles. On the platforms and social team, she helped curate the NBC News homepage and app through the racial reckoning of 2020 and the pivotal presidential election that followed. She then moved to working with NBC’s teams covering Asian American, Black, Latino and LGBTQ+ communities. She worked closely with four editorial directors on bespoke rollouts for heritage months, election night coverage and daily editorial priorities.
Espadas also has meaningful reporting experience. She traveled to Mexico in 2023 to report on the cultural stigmas that persisted there after the decriminalization of abortion, then followed up with reporting on the consequences of a 19th-century Arizona law that threatened to create an abortion desert on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.
She is thrilled to bring all of these experiences to The 19th. Espadas was born in Brazil and now lives in New York with her partner and a rotating cast of foster dogs.
Please join us in welcoming Isabela and Jennifer as The 19th’s newest editors!
