Executive Editor, The New York Times
National Judge

Dean Baquet is the executive editor of The New York Times. He was the paper's managing editor from 2011 to 2014, and Washington bureau chief from 2007. That year he returned to The Times after seven years as editor and managing editor of the Los Angeles Times. Under his leadership, the Los Angeles Times earned 13 Pulitzer Prizes, the most successful run in its 138-year history. Baquet became a Livingston Awards judge in 2005.

Previously, Baquet was national editor of The New York Times, having started there in 1990 as a metropolitan reporter. Like many reporters, Baquet did not initially want to become an editor when the prospect was raised by then executive editor Joseph Lelyveld. "I hated it for the first year, but then started to like it," Baquet said. His style of leadership became famous. Ken Auletta wrote in The New Yorker that while newsrooms are notorious for competition and backbiting, the national desk at The Times suddenly became an exception. He quoted one staffer saying. "It was the happiest place...where editors joked and reporters liked to drop by, rather than slink past. And it was because of Dean."

His early career included stints as chief investigative reporter and associate metropolitan editor at the Chicago Tribune, where he won a Pulitzer Prize with two other reporters documenting corruption in the Chicago City Council. He had started out covering police at New Orleans’ now-defunct States-Item, then moved to The Times-Picayune. He attended St. Augustine High School and his family ran Eddie’s, a Creole restaurant in the city’s Seventh Ward.

Baquet has received the Peter Lisagor Award for Investigative Reporting, 1988; the Chicago Tribune’s William H. Jones Award for Investigative Reporting, 1987, 1988 and 1989, and numerous local and regional awards.

Baquet studied English at Columbia University. He and his wife, Dylan have one son, Ari.