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Leonard Downie, Jr. was named executive editor of The Washington Post on September 1, 1991, after serving as managing editor for seven years.
Downie joined The Post as a summer intern in 1964. He soon became a well-known local investigative reporter in Washington, specializing in crime, courts, housing, and urban affairs. This reporting won him two Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild Front Page awards, the American Bar Association Gavel Award for legal reporting, and the John Hancock Award for excellent business and financial writing.
He worked on the Metropolitan staff as a reporter and editor for 15 years, and ran the staff as assistant managing editor for Metropolitan news from 1974 until 1979. As deputy metropolitan editor, Downie supervised The Post's Watergate coverage. He was named London correspondent in 1979 and returned to Washington in 1982 as National editor. In 1984 he became managing editor. Downie is a director of The Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service.
Born May 1, 1942, Downie grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and received his BA and MA degrees in journalism and political science from Ohio State University. He received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Ohio State in June 1993.
In 1971-1972 he spent a year on leave from The Post on an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, studying urban problems in the United States and Europe.
Downie is the author of four books: Justice Denied (1971); Mortgage on America (1974; The New Muckrakers (1976), a study of investigative reporting; and (with Robert G. Kaiser) The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril (2002). He was also a major contributor to Ten Blocks from the White House: Anatomy of the Washington Riots of 1968, a Washington Post book. In 2003, The News About the News won the Goldsmith Award from the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
He lives in Washington with his wife, Janice. He has four children: Sarah, Joshua, David and Scott. | 