Dean Baquet

Dean Baquet
Born	(1956-09-21) September 21, 1956 New Orleans, Louisiana
Occupation	Executive Editor, The New York Times
Notable credit(s)	The New York Times, Los Angeles Times

Dean P. Baquet (born September 21, 1956 in New Orleans, Louisiana) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and the executive editor of The New York Times. He is the first Black American to serve as executive editor, the highest-ranking position in the paper's newsroom. Baquet won the Pulitzer Prize for leading a team of Chicago Tribune reporters who exposed corruption on the Chicago city council.

Early life and education

Baquet is the son of well-known New Orleans restaurateur Edward Baquet, and a member of a prominent New Orleans Creole family.

Baquet graduated from St. Augustine High School in 1974. He then studied English at Columbia University from 1974 to 1978, but dropped out to pursue journalism.

Career

After college, Baquet reported for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans and the Chicago Tribune before joining The New York Times in April 1990 as a metropolitan desk reporter. In May 1992 he became special projects editor for the business desk and in January 1994 he held the same title but operated out of the executive editor's office. In 2000, he joined the Los Angeles Times as managing editor and in 2005 became the newspaper's editor. He was fired after he publicly opposed plans to cut newsroom jobs.

In 2007, Baquet rejoined The New York Times, where he held positions as Washington bureau chief, national editor, assistant managing editor, and managing editor. Baquet was appointed to the managing editor position in September 2011, and promoted to executive editor on May 14, 2014, succeeding Jill Abramson.

Baquet is a member of the board of directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Notable stories

Baquet was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in March 1988 after he led a team of three Chicago Tribune reporters documenting corruption in the Chicago City Council. He was a finalist for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in the same category. At the Los Angeles Times, Baquet edited a story published a few days before the 2003 California recall election that initiated the Gropegate controversy, raising concerns about gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger's sexual misconduct.

In 2006, ABC News reported that Baquet had killed a story about NSA wiretaps of Americans. Commenting on Baquet's role in suppressing the NSA story, constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald said of Baquet "...Dean Baquet does have a really disturbing history of practicing this form of journalism that is incredibly subservient to the American national security state, and if his past record and his past actions and statements are anything to go by, I think it signals that the New York Times is going to continue to descend downward into this sort of journalism that is very neutered and far too close to the very political factions that it's supposed to exercise oversight over."

In January, 2015, in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo shooting , Dean Baquet called Marc Cooper, a journalism professor and blogger at the University of Southern California, "an asshole" on Facebook. Cooper had criticised the New York Times for not publishing the cartoons of Muhammad, in the context of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy.

Personal life

According to Baquet's colleagues, he prefers to be known as a Creole, as opposed to African-American. His brother Terry has stated, "Creole in New Orleans is black. We're descendants of Haitians. We're black; Creole is not a race."

Awards

• Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 1988 for a piece on corruption in the Chicago City Council.
• Peter Lisagor Award for investigative reporting, 1988
• William H. Jones Award (Chicago Tribune) for Investigative Reporting, 1987, 1988 and 1989