I’ve been a journalist focused on the public interest for 30 years. Right now, I’m a senior fellow (having just stepped down after 12 years as editor in chief) at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a magazine focused on existential threats to humanity, e.g. nuclear weapons, climate change, and a whole host of other technology-related dangers, from pandemics to artificial intelligence. I’ve also been a correspondent for the Columbia Journalism Review. In my last full-time gig, I was the head editor of Miller-McCune, a nonprofit national public affairs magazine (now known as Pacific Standard).
In previous journalistic incarnations I was the editor of High Country News, a nationally acclaimed and genuinely wonderful little magazine that reports on the politics, environment and culture of the American West; the editor of SF Weekly and Phoenix New Times, so-called alternative newsweeklies that were really weekly magazines specializing in narrative journalism; and an investigative reporter at the Houston Post, for which I also covered the Persian Gulf War from Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
I have a master’s from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, if you’re the kind of person who puts stock in Ivy League degrees. Not that there’s anything wrong with those kind of people.
Oh yeah, awards. Have we got awards.
My writing has won an Investigative Reporters and Editors certificate and the John Bartlow Martin Awards for Public Interest Magazine Journalism (Northwestern/Medill), among many others. Writers working under my direction have been honored in the George Polk Awards; the IRE Awards; the John Bartlow Martin Awards; the Scripps Howard National Journalism Awards (investigative category); the University of Missouri Lifestyle Journalism Awards; the National Society of Newspaper Columnists Awards; the Gerald Loeb Awards (business journalism; Anderson School/UCLA); the Gavel Award (legal affairs; ABA); the Livingston Awards (for young journalists); the Casey Journalism Center Awards (children and family issues); and the Benjamin Fine Award (education reporting).
If I live another decade, I am almost certain to win the National Journalism Award for Excellence in National Journalism Awards.