Leonard Downie, Jr.

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Leonard "Len" Downie, Jr. (born May 1, 1942), the executive editor of The Washington Post. He was named executive editor September 1, 1991, after serving as managing editor for seven years. Downie assumed the title upon the retirement of long serving executive editor Ben Bradlee. During Downie's tenure as executive editor, The Washington Post has won 25 Pulitzer Prizes.^[1]

1 Personal
2 Career
3 Bibliography
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Personal

Downie grew up in and around Cleveland, Ohio. He received his BA and MA degrees in journalism and political science from Ohio State University. In June 1993, he received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Ohio State, in conjunction with his address during the university's commencement exercises. Downie lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Janice. He is the father of four grown children.

[edit] Career

Downie first joined the Washington 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. In 1971 he was awarded a two-year Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship, studying urban problems in the United States and Europe[1].

Before this, Downie worked on the Post's 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 much of 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.

According to Bob Woodward's 2005 book The Secret Man, Downie was one of the few people to know the true identity of Watergate scandal informant Deep Throat before it was revealed to be Mark Felt.

[edit] Bibliography

Downie is the author of four books:

Justice Denied, (1971)
Mortgage on America, (1974)
The New Muckrakers, (1976) a study of investigative reporting; and
The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril, (2002), with Robert G. Kaiser