Kate Ortega is a member of the Student Press Law Center’s Board of Directors. Meet the rest of the Board.
Kate Ortega is director of newsroom operations at Business Insider, where among her other duties she is building out a risk-management structure for the 250-person newsroom. Before joining BI in late 2024, she spent nearly 25 years at The Wall Street Journal, including six years as assistant managing editor for operations, responsible for working with non-news departments across the company — including security, IT, HR, legal, and finance — to ensure newsroom needs were met. She transitioned the news staff to work from home ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic and returned them to the office afterward, and assisted in the evacuation of local colleagues from Kabul as the U.S. military pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021.
Ortega is a member of the board at Pro News Coaches, a nonprofit connecting local newsrooms around the country with Wall Street Journal alumni for pro bono coaching, editing and advising. She is a graduate of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, where she spent four years on the staff of the independent student newspaper, The Post.