Leonard Downie, Jr. was named executive editor of The Washington Post on Sept. 1, 1991, after serving as managing editor for seven years. Downie joined The 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. He worked on the 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 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. Born May 1, 1942, Downie grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and received his BA and MA degrees in journalism and political science from Ohio State University. He received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Ohio State in June 1993. In 1971-72 he spent a year on leave from The Post on an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, studying urban problems in the United States and Europe. Downie is the author of four books: Justice Denied (1971), Mortgage on America (1974), The New Muckrakers (1976), a study of investigative reporting; and (with Robert G. Kaiser) The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril (2002). He was also a major contributor to Ten Blocks from the White House: Anatomy of the Washington Riots of 1968, a Washington Post book. In 2003, The News About the News won the Goldsmith Award from the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He lives in Washington with his wife, Janice. He has four children: Sarah, Joshua, David and Scott.

Philip Bennett is managing editor of The Washington Post. From 1999 through 2004 he was assistant managing editor for foreign news at The Post. During his tenure, The Post’s international coverage was recognized with numerous awards, including two Pulitzer prizes for international reporting, most recently for coverage of the war in Iraq. Bennett joined The Post in 1997 as a deputy national editor for coverage of national security, defense and foreign policy. He came to the paper from the Boston Globe, where he was a reporter on the metro staff, a foreign correspondent covering Latin America and later the Globe’s foreign editor. He has written about Latin America for a variety of magazines. He started in journalism as a reporter for The Lima Times in Peru. Bennett grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and has a degree in history from Harvard College.

Milton Coleman is deputy managing editor of The Washington Post. He joined the newspaper in 1976 as a reporter on the Metro staff, where he covered politics and government in Montgomery County and the District. In 1980, he became city editor and moved in 1983 to the National news staff, where his covered minorities and immigration, the 1984 presidential campaign, state and local governments and Congress. In 1986, he was named assistant managing editor for metropolitan news, and for the next decade directed The Post’s local coverage. In July 1996, he was promoted to his current position, from which he runs the newsroom personnel office, has been the principal architect of the newspaper’s strategy and development of zoned editions and has helped to lead efforts to improve coverage of Latinos, including news in Spanish and the purchase of the Spanish-language weekly El Tiempo Latino in May 2004. Coleman began his journalism career as a reporter for the Milwaukee Courier, a black weekly, and worked as a reporter or editor at the African World newspaper in Greensboro, N.C., the All-African News Service, and WHUR-FM news in Washington, D.C., Community News Service of New York and the Minneapolis Star. Born in Milwaukee, he received a bachelor of fine arts degree in music history and literature from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which in 1998 named him as a Distinguished Alumnus. In 1971, he was a Southern Education Foundation Fellow, and in 1974 a fellow in the Michele Clark Summer Program for Minority Journalists at the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University. He has served as a jury chairman for the Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, as a judge for the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards, the Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Awards, the Associated Press Sports Editors, National Association of Black Journalists and Asian American Journalist Association awards, and as a judge and chairman of the judging committee for the Seldon Ring Award for Investigative Reporting. He is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Minority Media Executives, the Inter-American Press Association and a member of the board of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, where he is chairman of its diversity committee. He also has served as coordinator of the Friends of Herb Denton committee, which each year selects a recipient for an $90,000 college scholarship in memory of the former Washington Post editor and foreign correspondent. Coleman was a Boy Scout leader for more than 20 years, serving at various times as scoutmaster of Troop 1650 in Southeast Washington and of Troop 544 in Northwest Washington. He is a recipient of the District Award of Merit and the Silver Beaver Award, the highest award given to volunteer leaders. In 1994, he was one of five Scout leaders in the nation given the Spirit of Scouting Award by the National Council of Boy Scouts of America for outstanding contributions to Scouting in America’s inner cities.