Sewell Chan

Reporter/Bureau Chief
The New York Times

Sewell Chan has been a reporter for the New York Times since 2004. He is the bureau chief of City Room, the newspaper’s local news blog. He previously covered public transportation and City Hall, and helped cover the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He was part of the team of Times journalists who were awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for coverage of the scandal that prompted Eliot Spitzer to resign as governor of New York.

From 2000 to 2004, he was a staff writer at the Washington Post, where he wrote about local government, social services and public education and served, for three months, as a foreign correspondent covering the war in Iraq. He has also written for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Wall Street Journal.

His work in journalism has been recognized by the New York Press Club, the Journalism Center on Children and Families at the University of Maryland, and the Carter Center in Atlanta, among other organizations.

Chan is a member of the board of incorporators of Harvard Magazine and serves on the advisory board of Next American City, a magazine about urban affairs.

A native of New York City, he graduated in 1998 with a degree in social studies, magna cum laude, from Harvard University. He received a master's degree in politics from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, in 2000.