Margaret Sullivan

Margaret Sullivan (MSJ80) is a member of the Medill Hall of Achievement.

Sullivan is the media columnist for The Washington Post. Before joining The Post, she was the New York Times public editor, and previously the chief editor of the Buffalo News, her hometown paper.

She began work as an intern at The Buffalo News in the summer of 1980 and was hired as a reporter that fall. She covered various news beats, wrote a metro column, helped run the city desk, and edited the features section. In 1998, she was named managing editor and in 1999, she became the paper’s first female editor and only the sixth person to edit the paper in its 120-year history.

As public editor, Sullivan’s focus has been on local enterprise reporting and on diversifying the newsroom staff to better reflect the paper’s community. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the American Editor, and Columbia Journalism Review.

She was a member of the Pulitzer Prize board from 2011 to 2012, and was twice elected as a director of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, where she led the First Amendment committee.