That being said once you've been a whistleblower, even for good reasons, sadly, it is probably harder to find another job in your previous area of expertise...
It's almost like a blank cheque in terms of following your interests. Sure, you need to cover the routine stuff on your beat. But the Times is among the few that can and will still devote enormous resources to go deep on issues that matter. And as the editor, you're basically who gets to decide what matters.
In terms of social standing, her job would probably outrank anyone except CXOs at FAANG, at least in my social group.
Even for salary, it's among the few positions in journalism that is competitive with tech. I seem to remember mid 6-figure salaries being quoted in the past, although there is probably high variety, with some editors and authors being their own sort-of "brand".
The only downside is that you don't get to write code if that happens to be your passion. In that regard, it's similar to transitioning to management in tech. But the Times has been doing quite a lot of data journalism and interactive storytelling and the like. So if you really want to, you could probably come up with ideas that get you back into a text editor at least some of the time.
Anyway, it's well that she sounds cheerful. She seems to have been quite good at what she did in tech, and I hope that she will consider going back to it.
[edit: corrected spelling of "observers"]
She got a job at Stripe after leaving Uber. I expect that she chose to work for the NYT.
Some people will certainly regard you as a red flag (which is good, because you will not want to work for those) but others will hold you in higher regard or even first get to know of you because of what you did and the publicity surrounding that.
Since job interviews are so much about standing out from all other candidates, having done something outstanding seems like an excellent way to increase your chances of getting a job.
You don't have to be liked by many. You just have to really click with a few. Being meh for everyone is when the job search gets really hard.
When you hire a former whistleblower you can simply be the judge of that. Do you think this person acted reasonably when they blew said whistle? If the answer is yes, I can not think of a reason why you would not want an independent, courageous and critical thinker/doer working for you, specially if it's a startup.
At least that is what everyone keeps asking for in their job offers.
Risk and trust. I wholeheartedly support whistleblowers and the principle behind it BUT I also understand why a former whistleblower may get rejected because of that. It's all about risk and trust.
Sure, that person was completely in the right and independent, courageous, etc.. but why should I take on the risk that going forward that person would be enabled to decrease the threshold of what is whistleblowing material or have a change of heart wrt to ethics/politics and then going ahead to disclose something which can cause the company financial harm. An example would be the nowadays popular contracts with the government.
Colleagues may have a trust issue with this person. Considering that people may take something the wrong way or misunderstand a comment, etc.., why would I want to interact with someone who can harm my career or make me famous for the wrong reasons? Ever had a colleague which when entering a room everyone became silent? Yeah, that.
Most writings I came across from former whistleblowers acknowledge the fact that it's often career suicide. It's not right, but it's the hard truth. Which makes whistleblowing more admirable IMHO.
"Twain frequently read drafts of his work aloud to his family, judging its effectiveness by their ..."
There are actually programs, like IDEs, that will catch syntax errors and stylistic errors in writing. Executing the writing program is as simple as having the story read to you via a text-to-speech or human labor. That an end user doesn't appreciate the writing is no different than when a user of a UI finds it unintuitive.
What programs are you thinking of?