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Sewell Chan

Sewell Chan’s staff photo

Sewell Chan was The Texas Tribune’s editor in chief from October 2021 to September 2024. During his three-year tenure 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. During Chan’s tenure the Tribune was acclaimed for its coverage of the Uvalde mass shooting, the impeachment trial of the Texas attorney general, numerous elections and campaigns, natural disasters, and debates over abortion, transgender rights, public education and more. Chan recruited award-winning journalists and diversified the Tribune’s staff; built out its photo team; rebooted the Tribune’s premium politics newsletter, The Blast; and forged new partnerships with the Associated Press and FRONTLINE. He launched the Tribune's regional reporting initiative, providing coverage of areas of Texas that are severely underserved. He helped to manage the transition from the Tribune’s founding CEO, Evan Smith, to its second CEO, Sonal Shah, and to put the Tribune on a more sustainable footing and cultivate the next generation of leadership. Chan left the Tribune in September 2024 to return to his hometown of New York City and serve as executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. Before joining the Tribune, Chan was previously 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 in 2021. 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.

Past Contributions