Sara Toth

She/Her

Editor, The Chautauquan Daily and Lecture Associate

Education — Programming
Strategic Communications — Marketing and Communications

About Sara

At Chautauqua Institution, Sara works in the Department of Education and in the Department of Marketing, Communications & Enterprise. During Chautauqua’s Summer Assembly season, she serves as editor of The Chautauquan Daily, a newspaper first established in 1876 as the official newspaper and archival paper of record of the Institution, publishing six days a week during the season. There, she oversees a team of 24 college student interns who write, edit, photograph and design the Daily for the Chautauqua readership. She joined the year-round, full-time staff at the Institution in 2014 as assistant editor of the Daily, then managing editor, before becoming the newspaper’s 18th editor in 2018. She has since shepherded dozens of young journalists through the Daily program, and pivoted to an all-digital, all-remote coverage model during the summer of 2020 — the first and only year in the newspaper’s history without a printed product. In the Department of Education, she serves as lecture associate, assisting in researching, planning and programming the Chautauqua Lecture Series with the Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Jordan Steves. From conceiving of theme narratives, to vetting and curating speaker suggestions and then inviting and announcing lecturers, Sara fully participates as both assistant and partner in every step of the process. In addition to that work, she assists where needed with Chautauqua Literary Arts — particularly in the coordination, execution, and communication of the Institution’s flagship literary award, The Chautauqua Prize — and established and formerly co-coordinated the annual Battle of the Books for Chautauqua County fifth-graders. Sara attended Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, where she graduated with a degree in English Literature. While at Gannon, she was a student intern at the Daily for three summers. After graduating, she worked for nearly four years as a community and education reporter for a group of newspapers in the Baltimore Sun Media Group, where her reporting earned several awards from the MDDC (Maryland, Delaware, District of Columbia) Press Association.

Personal Interests

Sara is an avid reader, an adequate yet spirited gardener, and an enthusiastic cook and baker.