Sewell Chan

Sewell Chan is senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy.

Previously, Chan served in 2024-25 as editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and as an adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School.

During Chan’s tenure as editor in chief of The Texas Tribune, from 2021 to 2024, the Tribune won a National Magazine Award and a Collier Prize for State Government Accountability and was a Pulitzer finalist — all for the first time. It also won five national Edward R. Murrow Awards, two for overall excellence.

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.