Journalists, Columnists and Reporters

A journalist collects, writes, and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.

A reporter is a type of journalist who researches, writes, and reports information to present in sources, conduct interviews, engage in research, and make reports.

The term journalist may include various types of editors, editorial writers, columnists, and visual journalists, such as photojournalists (journalists who use the medium of photography).

A columnist is a writer or editor of a newspaper or magazine column.

A column in this instance is a regular feature or series of articles in a newspaper, magazine, or similar, usually having a readily identifiable heading and the byline of the writer or editor, that reports or comments upon a particular field of interest such as politics, theatre, food or etiquette, or which may contain letters from readers, answers to readers' queries, etc. Includes

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Famous Journalists and Reporters

A

• Joseph Addison (1672 – 1719) was an English essayist, poet, playwright and politician. He was the eldest son of reverend Lancelot Addison. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend, Richard Steele, with whom he founded The Spectator magazine.
• Samira al-Fayed (Khashoggi) (1935-1986) was a Saudi Arabian influential, progressive author of several books as well as the owner and editor-in chief of Alsharkiah magazine.

B

• Thomas Barnes (11 September 1785 - 7 May 1841) was a British journalist, essayist, and editor. He is best known for his work with The Times which he edited from 1817 until his death in 1841. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Barnes_(journalist)
• Carl Bernstein (1944) is an American investigative journalist and author. While working with Bob Woodward at The Washington Post, the two did the majority of the most important news reporting on the Watergate scandal.
• Wolf Isaac Blitzer (born 1948) is an American journalist and television news anchor who has been a CNN reporter since 1990. He is the senior anchor of all CNN programs currently in production. Blitzer is currently the host of The Situation Room, CNN Newsroom and CNN's lead political anchor. He was the host of the Sunday talk show Late Edition until it was discontinued on January 11, 2009. Blitzer previously hosted Wolf Blitzer Reports, which was replaced by The Situation Room.
• Nellie Bly (1864 – 1922) was the pen name of American journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochrane. She remains notable for a record-breaking trip around the world in emulation of Jules Verne's character Phileas Fogg, and an exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from within. In addition to her writing, she was also an industrialist and charity worker.
• Gloria Anne Borger (born 1952) is an American political pundit, journalist and columnist. Borger was previously a contributing editor and columnist for US News and World Report magazine and is now Chief Political Analyst at CNN.
• Margaret Bourke-White (1904 – 1971) was an American photographer and documentary photographer. She is best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry, the first female war correspondent (and the first woman permitted to work in combat zones) and the first female photographer for Henry Luce's Life magazine, where her photograph appeared on the first cover.
• Benjamin Crowninshield "Ben" Bradlee (born 1921) is a vice president at-large of The Washington Post. As executive editor of the Post from 1968 to 1991, he became a national figure during the presidency of Richard Nixon, when he challenged the federal government over the right to publish the Pentagon Papers and oversaw the publication of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's stories documenting the Watergate scandal.
• Henri Bourassa (1868-1952): Bourassa founded the Montréal daily "Le Devoir" in 1910 as an outlet for his anti-imperialist Ligue nationaliste and to fight for the rights of French Canadians within Confederation. In its maiden edition, Bourassa explained the name ("the duty" in English) and mission of the newspaper thus: "To ensure the triumph of ideas over appetites, of the public good over partisan interests, there is but one means: awake in the people, and above all in the ruling classes, a sense of public duty in all its forms: religious duty, national duty, civic duty."
• Mathew B. Brady (ca. 1822 – 1896) was one of the most celebrated 19th century American photographers, best known for his portraits of celebrities and his documentation of the American Civil War. He is credited with being the father of photojournalism.
• Madeleine Bunting is an English journalist and writer who is an Associate Editor and columnist on The Guardian.

C

• Robert Capa (born Friedmann Endre Ernő; 1913 – 1954) was a Hungarian war photographer and photojournalist who covered five different wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War. He documented the course of World War II in London, North Africa, Italy, the Battle of Normandy on Omaha Beach and the liberation of Paris.
• Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965) - headed to South Africa as a newspaper correspondent for the Morning Post in 1899 to cover the Boer War between British and Dutch settlers.
• Anderson Hays Cooper (born 1967) is an American journalist, author, and television personality. He is the primary anchor of the CNN news show Anderson Cooper 360°. The program is normally broadcast live from a New York City studio; however, Cooper often broadcasts live on location for breaking news stories.
• Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr. (1916 – 2009) was an American broadcast journalist, best known as anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years (1962–1981). During the heyday of CBS News in the 1960s and 1970s, he was often cited as "the most trusted man in America" after being so named in an opinion poll. He reported many events from 1937 to 1981, including bombings in World War II; the Nuremberg trials; combat in the Vietnam War; Watergate; the Iran Hostage Crisis; and the murders of President John F. Kennedy, civil rights pioneer Martin Luther King, Jr., and Beatles musician John Lennon.

D

• Dorothy Day, Obl.O.S.B. (1897 – 1980) was an American journalist, social activist, and devout Catholic convert; she advocated the Catholic economic theory of distributism.
• John Thadeus Delane (11 October 1817 – 22 November 1879), editor of The Times (London), was born in London.
• Daniel Defoe (ca. 1660 – 1731), born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, pamphleteer and spy. He was the first English journalist to achieve national importance - a pioneer of economic journalism.
• Maureen Bridgid Dowd (born 1952) is an American columnist for The New York Times and best-selling author. During the 1970s and the early 1980s, she worked for Time magazine and the Washington Star, where she covered news as well as sports and wrote feature articles. Dowd joined the Times in 1983 as a metropolitan reporter and eventually became an Op-Ed writer for the newspaper in 1995. She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for her series of columns on the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Clinton administration.
• Dominick John Dunne (1925-2009) was an American writer and investigative journalist, whose subjects frequently hinged on the ways in which high society interacts with the judicial system.
• Alice Allison Dunnigan (1906–1983) was an African-American journalist, civil rights activist and author. She was the first African-American female correspondent to receive White House credentials, and the first black female member of the Senate and House of Representatives press galleries.

E

F

• Benjamin Franklin had many interests. In addition to being the inventor and founding father he was also a journalist. The Pennsylvania Gazette began in the 1730s, and Franklin used it to help get his ideas out there and influence the populace leading up to the American Revolution.
• Margaret Fuller born Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1810 – 1850), was an American journalist, critic, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. She was the first full-time American female book reviewer in journalism. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the United States.

G

• Katharine Meyer Graham (1917 – 2001) was an American publisher. She led her family's newspaper, The Washington Post, for more than two decades, overseeing its most famous period, the Watergate coverage that eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Her memoir, Personal History, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998.

H

• Nathan Hale (1784 – 1863) was an American journalist and newspaper publisher who introduced regular editorial comment as a newspaper feature.
• Charles Hale (1831-1882) son of journalist Nathan Hale, was a journalist and literary writer. He founded the short lived "To-Day: a Boston Literary Journal" in 1852
• Dominick Roy Harrod (1941-2013) was a journalist and broadcaster. He was the BBC's economic correspondent in the 1970s and 1980s
• William Randolph Hearst (1863 – 1951) was an American newspaper publisher who built the nation’s largest newspaper chain and whose methods profoundly influenced American journalism. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887 after being given control of The San Francisco Examiner by his father who owned the paper. Moving to New York City, he acquired The New York Journal and engaged in a bitter circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer's New York World that led to the creation of yellow journalism—sensationalized stories of dubious veracity. Acquiring more newspapers, Hearst created a chain that numbered nearly 30 papers in major American cities at its peak. He later expanded to magazines, creating the largest newspaper and magazine business in the world.
• Seymour (Sy) Myron Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and is a "five-time Polk winner and recipient of the 2004 George Orwell Award." (Private Profile on GENi)
• Alexander Britton "Brit" Hume (born 1943) is a conservative political commentator and television journalist. For twenty three years he was a correspondent for ABC News, including as Chief White House Correspondent. He then spent ten years as the Washington, D.C., managing editor of the Fox News Channel and the anchor of Special Report with Brit Hume. Since 2008, he has been the senior political analyst for Fox News and a regular public-affairs panelist for the television program Fox News Sunday.
• Chris Hedges (born 1956) is an American journalist, activist, author, Presbyterian minister and humanitarian. Hedges is also known as the best-selling author of several books including War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002)—a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction—Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009), Death of the Liberal Class (2010) and his most recent New York Times best seller, written with the cartoonist Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012).
• Hedges is currently a columnist for the progressive news and commentary website Truthdig, a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City, and a contributing author for OpEdNews. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for the Christian Science Monitor, NPR, the Dallas Morning News, and the New York Times, where he was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years (1990–2005).

I

J

K

• Arthur Koestler, CBE (1905 – 1983) was a Hungarian-British author and journalist.
• Edward James Martin "Ted" Koppel (born 1940) is a British American broadcast journalist, best known as the anchor for Nightline from the program's inception in 1980 until his retirement in late 2005. After leaving Nightline, Koppel worked as managing editor for the Discovery Channel before resigning in 2008. Koppel is currently a senior news analyst for National Public Radio and contributing analyst to BBC World News America, and contributes to the new NBC News primetime news magazine Rock Center with Brian Williams.

L

• James Lardner (1914-1938) was a journalist who enlisted in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight against Franco's rebel forces in Spain.
• James Charles "Jim" Lehrer (born 1934) is an American journalist and the executive editor and former news anchor for PBS NewsHour on PBS, known for his role as a frequent debate moderator during elections. Lehrer is an author of non-fiction and fiction, drawing from his experiences and interests in history and politics.
• Elijah Parish Lovejoy (November 9, 1802 – November 7, 1837) was an American Presbyterian minister, journalist, newspaper editor and abolitionist. He was murdered by pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois, during their attack on his warehouse to destroy his press and abolitionist materials.

M

• Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken (1880 – 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, critic of American life and culture, and scholar of American English. Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the twentieth century. Many of his books remain in print.
• Judith Miller (born 1948) is an American journalist, formerly of the New York Times Washington bureau. Her coverage of Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) program both before and after the 2003 invasion were later discovered to have been based on faulty information, particularly those stories that were based on sourcing from the now-disgraced Ahmed Chalabi.[1][2] A number of stories she wrote while working for The New York Times were deemed to be inaccurate by her employer.
• Johann Heinrich Müller (1702-1782) aka Johann Miller: Central figure in German language newspaper publishing in the lead-up to the American Revolution of 1776 (lastly) Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote {Philadelphia} > associated with Benjamin Franklin
• Edward R. Murrow Egbert Roscoe Murrow (1908 – 1965) was an American broadcast journalist who first came to prominence with a series of radio news broadcasts during World War II. They were followed by millions of listeners in the United States.

N

• Robert David Sanders "Bob" Novak' (1931 – 2009) was an American syndicated columnist, journalist, television personality, author, and conservative political commentator. After working for two newspapers before serving for the U.S. Army in the Korean War, he became a reporter for the Associated Press and then for The Wall Street Journal.
• "Bill Nye, pseudonym of Edgar Wilson Nye" (1850 - 1896) Contributed to the Denver Tribune and Cheyenne Sun. His humorous squibs and tales in the Laramie Boomerang, which he helped found in 1881, were widely read and reprinted. Collected, they form the substance of numerous published volumes, from Bill Nye and Boomerang (1881) to Bill Nye’s History of the U.S. (1894). Later Nye returned to Wisconsin and for several years wrote for the New York World. In 1886 he lectured with James Whitcomb Riley, the combination of Nye’s wit and Riley’s sentiment proving extremely popular. Writing in his own person, rather than in the guise of a foolish character, Nye reveals his own kindly but droll nature.

O

• George P Oslin (1899 - 1996)

P

• Ethel Lois Payne (August 14, 1911 – May 28, 1991) was an African-American journalist. Known as the "First Lady of the Black Press", she was a columnist, lecturer, and freelance writer. She combined advocacy with journalism as she reported on the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s. She became the first female African-American commentator employed by a national network when CBS hired her in 1972. In addition to her reporting of American domestic politics, she also covered international stories.
• Leonard Pitts Jr. (born 1957) is an American commentator, journalist and novelist. He is a nationally-syndicated columnist and winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.
• Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911) was born Pulitzer József. He was a Hungarian-American Jewish newspaper publisher of the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the New York World. Pulitzer introduced the techniques of "new journalism" to the newspapers he acquired in the 1880s. Today, he is best known for posthumously establishing the Pulitzer Prizes.
• Ernest Taylor Pyle (1900 – 1945) was an American journalist who was known for his columns as a roving correspondent from 1935 for the Scripps Howard newspaper chain, especially during World War II, when he reported both from Europe and the Pacific, until his death in combat on a Pacific island. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944.

Q

• Anna Marie Quindlen (born 1952) is an American author, journalist, and opinion columnist whose New York Times column, Public and Private, won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992. She began her journalism career in 1974 as a reporter for the New York Post. Between 1977 and 1994 she held several posts at The New York Times

R

• Daniel Irvin "Dan" Rather, Jr. (born 1931) is an American journalist and the former news anchor for the CBS Evening News. He is now managing editor and anchor of the television news magazine Dan Rather Reports on the cable channel AXS TV. Rather was anchor of the CBS Evening News for 24 years, from March 9, 1981, to March 9, 2005. He also contributed to CBS's 60 Minutes. Rather became embroiled in controversy about a disputed news report involving President George W. Bush's Vietnam-era service in the National Guard and subsequently left CBS Evening News in 2005, and he left the network altogether after 43 years in 2006
• Grantland Rice (1880 – J1954) was an early 20th-century American sportswriter known for his elegant prose. His writing was published in newspapers around the country and broadcast on the radio.
• Jacob August Riis (1849 – 1914) was a Danish American social reformer, "muckraking" journalist and social documentary photographer. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography.
• Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Roberts (née Boggs; born 1943), best known as Cokie Roberts, is an American journalist and author. She is a contributing senior news analyst for National Public Radio as well as a regular roundtable analyst for the current This Week With George Stephanopoulos. Roberts also works as a political commentator for ABC News, serving as an on-air analyst for the network.
• Charles Peete "Charlie" Rose, Jr. (born January 5, 1942) is an American television talk show host and journalist.
• Timothy John "Tim" Russert (1950 – 2008) was an American television journalist and lawyer who appeared for more than 16 years as the longest-serving moderator of NBC's Meet the Press. He was a senior vice president at NBC News, Washington bureau chief and also hosted an eponymous CNBC/MSNBC weekend interview program.
• Frederick Bushnell "Jack" Ryder (1871 – 1936) was an American football player and coach and sportswriter.

S

• Charles Prestwich Scott (1846 – 1932) was a British journalist, publisher and politician. Born in Bath, Somerset, he was the editor of the Manchester Guardian (now the Guardian) from 1872 until 1929 and its owner from 1907 until his death.
• George Seldes (1890-19950] was an American American investigative journalist and media critic who wrote extensively about press freedom. Shunned by mainstream press and red-baited by the US Government as well as the FBI, Seldes was successfully minimized by commercially driven press interests. His extensive writings and no-nonsense approach to reporting the news stands in contrast to standardly accepted norms of commentary which he believed were driven by the advertising dollar.
• John Simpson CBE (1944) is an English foreign correspondent. He is world affairs editor of BBC News.[2] He has spent all his working life at the BBC. He has reported from more than 120 countries, including thirty war zones, and has interviewed many world leaders. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Simpson_(journalist)
• William Thomas Stead 1849 – 1912) was an English newspaper editor who was a pioneer of investigative journalism. He published a series of hugely influential campaigns whilst editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, and is best known for his 1885 series of articles, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, written in support of a bill to raise the age of consent from 13 to 16, dubbed the "Stead Act." He died in the sinking of the Titanic.
• Sir Richard Steele (1672 – 1729) was an Irish writer and politician, remembered as co-founder, with his friend Joseph Addison, of the magazine The Spectator. he set up The Tatler in 1709 as a publication of the news and gossip heard in London coffeehouses.
• Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936) muckraker wikipedia
• Leland Stowe (1899 - 1994) was a Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist noted for being one of the first to recognise the expansionist character of the German Nazi regime.
• Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet and cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.

T

• Helen Thomas 1920 – July 20, 2013) was an American author and news service reporter, member of the White House press corps and opinion columnist. She worked for the United Press and post-1958 successor United Press International (UPI) for 57 years, first as a correspondent, and later as White House bureau manager. She was a columnist for Hearst Newspapers from 2000 to 2010, writing on national affairs and the White House.
• Hunter S. Thompson (1937 – 2005) was an American journalist and author who was heavily involved in the new journalism movement. He was a proponent of “Gonzo journalism“, in which reporters actually become involved in action of the story, participating in the events, rather than just watching and reporting. He committed suicide in 2005, but his influence on journalism and literary tradition will not fade away.
• Mark Twain born Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 – 1910), Well known as a writer of novels, shorts stories, and sketches, Clemens also worked a good part of his life as a journalist. He learned the printer’s trade at a young age, and after a brief stint as a Mississippi steamboat pilot and service in the Confederate army, he headed west and became a reporter for papers in Nevada and California. Clemens’s accounts of adventures in the Sandwich Islands and the Holy Land as a travel correspondent were also published in newspapers as a series of travel letters. Clemens was surprised to discover on his return that the letters had made him famous from coast to coast.

U

V

W

• Barbara Jill Walters (born September 25, 1929) is an American broadcast journalist, author, and television personality. She has hosted morning television shows Today and The View, the television news magazine 20/20, co-anchored the ABC Evening News, and is a contributor to ABC News.
• John Wilkes (1725 – 26 1797) was an English radical, journalist, and politician.
• Walter Winchell (1897 – 1972) was an American newspaper and radio gossip commentator
• Patrick Wintour (born 1 November 1954) is a British journalist, political editor of The Guardian.
• Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. (born March 2, 1931) is an American author and journalist, best known for his association and influence over the New Journalism literary movement in which literary techniques are used in objective, even-handed journalism. Beginning his career as a reporter he soon became one of the most culturally significant figures of the sixties.
• Robert Upshur “Bob” Woodward (born 1943) is an American investigative journalist and non-fiction author. He has worked for The Washington Post since 1971 as a reporter, and is now an associate editor of the Post. While a young reporter for The Washington Post in 1972, Woodward was teamed up with Carl Bernstein (above); the two did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal.
• Alexander Humphreys Woollcott (January 19, 1887 – January 23, 1943) was an American critic and commentator for The New Yorker magazine and a member of the Algonquin Round Table.

X-Y-Z

• John Peter Zenger (1697 - 1746) was a German American printer, publisher, editor and journalist in New York City. Zenger printed The New York Weekly Journal. He wrote unflattering things about the British government, and in 1735 was arrested and tried for libel. He was found not guilty, as what he wrote was based on fact. His case not only helped influence the American Revolution, but established one of the litmus tests for libel.

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