John Temple

John Temple (MSJ84) is a member of the Medill Hall of Achievement.

Temple is the director of the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Before joining the IRP, Temple was president of audience and products at First Look Media from 2014 to 2015. Prior to that, he was a senior fellow in the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships program at Stanford University. He has also served as managing editor of The Washington Post and editor and general manager of Honolulu Civil Beat, a news service launched by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

He formerly was editor, president and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News until printing its final edition on Feb. 27, 2009. He was named editor in 1998, during Denver’s newspaper war, and was appointed president and publisher in 2001, after the paper entered a joint operating agreement with The Denver Post. Under his leadership, the News won four Pulitzer Prizes and numerous other awards for journalistic excellence. Temple wrote a weekly column, largely focusing on journalism issues, and also has a blog at RockyMountainNews.com.

Temple joined the News in 1992 as metro editor. He was named managing editor in 1995. Before joining the News, he was managing editor of The Albuquerque Tribune. He started at the Tribune as a reporter in 1984, right out of Medill. After serving as the Tribune’s state capitol bureau chief in Santa Fe, he left the paper in 1987 to become a reporter at The Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper.