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Jon Meacham was named editor of Newsweek in October 2006. He oversees the day-to-day editorial operations of Newsweek and Newsweek.com, and works with chairman and editor-in-chief Richard Smith on the long-range editorial direction of the magazine.
As managing editor from November 1998 until October 2006, Meacham supervised Newsweek's coverage of politics, international affairs and breaking news, and has written cover stories on politics, religion, guns in America, race and the death of Ronald Reagan. In 2001 he was key in the editing of the magazine's coverage of the September 11 attacks, and oversaw both domestic and international reporting. Newsweek's coverage of was honored with a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2002. In 2003, Newsweek won the award again, this time for coverage of President Bush and the war in Iraq.
After arriving at Newsweek in January 1995, Meacham became National Affairs editor in June of that year; in that role, he supervised coverage of politics and breaking news. In 1998 he edited Newsweek's groundbreaking coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment of the president, which was honored with a 1999 National Magazine Award for Reporting.
Meacham's book American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation was published by Random House on April 11, 2006, and it has become both a New York Times and Washington Post bestseller. Meacham's Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, a chronicle of the wartime relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill, was published by Random House on October 21, 2003, and became a New York Times bestseller. Franklin and Winston was named a Los Angeles Times book of the year and won The Churchill Centre's 2005 Emery Reves Award for the best book of the year on Winston Churchill and the William Colby Military Writers' Symposium's Book of the Year Award.
Meacham has also written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The Washington Post Book World. In 2001 he edited Voices in Our Blood: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement, a literary anthology of the most important non-fiction accounts of the twentieth-century battle against Jim Crow. Before joining Newsweek, Meacham was an editor for two years at The Washington Monthly. He began his journalism career as a reporter with The Chattanooga Times from 1991 to 1992.
Born in Chattanooga in 1969, Meacham holds a BA in English Literature from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He now serves on the university's governing Board of Regents. Meacham is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a communicant of St. Thomas Episcopal Church Fifth Avenue, where he serves on the Vestry of the 180-year-old parish. He is a member of the Vestry of Trinity Church Wall Street and, in 2005, was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University. Meacham and his wife, Keith, the director of development at Harlem Day Charter School, live in New York City with their two children. | 