Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Srinija Srinivasan or Ninj or Ninja is Vice President and  editor-in-chief at Yahoo! Inc.

Ninja and her team are responsible for the content that we read everyday on Yahoo’s website.  “Shepherding the voice of Yahoo,” is how Ninja describes the work she and  her team do on a 24/7 basis every day of the year.

Ninj’s editorial team reads, sifts, organizes, categorizes a diverse amount of content on an ongoing basis. Besides the content that appears on Yahoo! Ninja is also deeply involved in issues like privacy, child safety and accessibility over mobile phones, where the ground rules are very different she points out.

An early and important strategic decision that Jerry Yang and David Filo, co-founders of Yahoo!  made was to have an editorial head. The co-founders recruited their Stanford colleague to help categorize the growing content on Yahoo’s website. Originally Ninja’s  title was that of an ontologist, but her role has expanded significantly over the years as Yahoo has expanded its portfolio of products and services.

I caught up with Ninja a few days ago at Yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale to find out about her role in creating the voice of Yahoo! that encompasses privacy, data policy, free speech issues and editorial decisions about Yahoo’s overall content. How do they handle controversial topics? How do they categorize and label content? Privacy issues in China? Tune in to find out what Ninja has to say on these topics.

Ninja grew up in Lawrence, Kansas where her father taught Mathematics at the University of Kentucky. Ninja moved to the San Francisco bay area to study at Stanford University where she got her undergraduate degree in Symbolic Sciences. Ninja speaks and writes fluent Japanese.

This is the first of a 2-part conversation with Ninja. Here is a link to Part-2 of the interview with Ninja.

This interview was originally recorded in early 2009 and was first published on Mint.