Margaret Sullivan Will Lead the Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia Journalism School

Margaret Sullivan will become the executive director for the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at  Columbia Journalism School in New York City. She will take office in January.

Columbia Journalism School established the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security and its faculty chair with a $10 million gift from Craig Newmark Philanthropies. The goal of the center is to advance journalism ethics education and industry practices in the digital age.

Sullivan is a weekly columnist for the Guardian US. She writes on media, politics and culture. She has benn serving 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, Sullivan 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 has published two books Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy (Columbia Global Reports, 2020) and Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) From an Ink-Stained Life (St. Martin’s Press, 2022).

Sullivan is a graduate of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She earned a master’s degree at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.