Margaret Sullivan

Margaret Sullivan is a weekly columnist for The Guardian and will become the executive director for the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia Journalism School, Columbia University, on January 1, 2024. 

In her role at The Guardian, Sullivan writes on media, politics, and culture. She also served as the 2023 Jack and Pamela Egan Visiting Professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and Dewitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy.

Prior to her time at Duke University, she wrote extensively on journalism ethics and press freedom as a columnist for The Washington Post. Her work there, and as the public editor of The New York Times from 2012 to 2016, focused on the intersection of politics, democracy, and media. She also is the former executive editor of her hometown daily newspaper, The Buffalo News, where she began as a summer intern. 

Sullivan was recognized by journalism educators around the nation as the winner of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s First Amendment Award, and, in 2020, she won Penn State University’s Bart Richards Award for outstanding media criticism. A former member of the Pulitzer Prize Board, she was elected this year to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

In addition to her work in journalism, Sullivan has published two books, including Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy (2020, Columbia Global Reports) and Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life (2022, St. Martin’s Press). Both were acclaimed.