Sewell Chan

Sewell Chan is executive editor of Columbia Journalism Review. Previously, Chan was editor in chief of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom based in Austin, from 2021 to 2024. During his tenure the Tribune won the National Magazine Award and the Collier Prize for State Government Accountability and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, all for the first time.

From 2018 to 2021, Chan was a deputy managing editor and then the editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times, where he oversaw coverage that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Chan worked at the New York Times from 2004 to 2018 as a metro reporter, Washington correspondent, deputy Op-Ed editor and international news editor. He began his career as a local reporter at the Washington Post in 2000.

A child of immigrants, Chan was the first in his family to graduate from college. He has a degree in social studies from Harvard and a master’s in political science from Oxford, where he studied on a British Marshall scholarship.

Chan is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and PEN America. He serves on the boards of the Henry Luce Foundation, Freedom House, and Harvard Magazine, as well as on the national judging panel of the Livingston Awards.