ournalism and the media play an indispensable role in democracies – especially in times of crisis. How can journalists keep the public informed about the world around them in the midst of a lock-down and with social distancing in place? How can they gather information for their reporting and opinion pieces? And, how does one ensure that alternative facts do not masquerade as opinion? Joining us to discuss the challenges facing the media in Europe and the United States during the pandemic are two editorial page editors.
Join us on Tuesday, July 14 at 11:00 am ET for a conversation with with Sewell Chan (2014 ACG Young Leader), Editorial Page Editor for the Los Angeles Times, and Anna Sauerbrey (2018 ACG Kellen Fellow), Opinion Page Editor for Der Tagesspiegel and monthly contributor to the New York Times.
Sewell Chan oversees the editorial board and the Op-Ed and Sunday Opinion pages of the Los Angeles Times. He was named to the position in April 2020. He previously served as a deputy managing editor, overseeing foreign and national news coverage; the front page; the Data and Graphics Department; the multiplatform copy desks; newsletters; and the editorial library. He also supervised the home page and audience engagement teams and helped reorganize them into an integrated News Desk.
Before joining The Times in September 2018, he worked for 14 years at the New York Times, where he was a metro reporter, Washington correspondent, deputy Op-Ed editor and international news editor. He began his career in July 2000 as a reporter at the Washington Post, reporting on local government, education and social services.
A native New Yorker, he grew up in an immigrant family and was the first in his family to finish college. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in social studies and received a master’s degree in politics from Oxford, where he studied on a British Marshall scholarship.
Anna Sauerbrey heads the opinion pages of Der Tagesspiegel and Tagesspiegel Causa, her newspaper’s online magazine for debate. She writes essays and comment for her own newspaper and a monthly column on German politics and culture for the New York Times. The development of Tagesspiegel Causa was supported by Google’s Digital News initiative.
She studied middle and modern history, political science and journalism in Mainz and Bordeaux. From 2005 to 2009, she was a research assistant at the History Department of the University of Mainz. She worked as an intern at the F.A.Z. and ZDF, among others, and was a freelancer for the Mainzer Rhein-Zeitung for several years. In 2009, Ms. Sauerbrey completed a traineeship at the Berliner Tagesspiegel and became a staff member of its opinion editorial department. In 2013, she was an Arthur F. Burns Fellow at the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 2018, she was awarded an Anna-Marie and Stephen M. Kellen Fellowship for Berlin-based Journalists. She conducted research on the role religion plays in American politics.
