Sewell Chan is a news editor, writer, and innovator. He joined CCLP as a Senior Fellow in April 2025, focusing on the fight for press freedom, in the US and abroad. 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. 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, where he wrote about city government, juvenile justice, mental health and social services and also helped cover 9/11 and the Iraq War. Chan has also written for The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Wall Street Journal and Nieman Reports. Born in 1977 in New York City, Sewell is the son of Chinese immigrants and grew up in Queens. The first in his family to graduate from college, he received an A.B. in social studies, magna cum laude, from Harvard in 1998. Through a British Marshall Scholarship, Chan then studied at Oxford, receiving his M.Phil. in politics in 2000. Chan is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and PEN America. He serves on the boards of the Pulitzer Prizes, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Henry Luce Foundation, Freedom House, and Harvard Magazine and on the national judging panel of the Livingston Awards. He lives in New York.