Jim Simon

Jim is a veteran journalist and passionate advocate for local news.

He is currently an adjunct lecturer at the University of Washington, where he frequently teaches the News Lab class and has taught previous classes on covering politics, immigrant and refugee communities and health care issues.

Jim was managing editor from 2017-2020 of Honolulu Civil Beat, a nonprofit, online news site that specializes in watchdog and in-depth reporting of Hawaii and the Pacific. Civil Beat won the general excellence award for small news sites in 2019 by the Online News Association.

He is also the former managing editor at the Seattle Times, where he worked more than three decades as a reporter and editor. As a senior editor, he helped lead reporting teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2010 and 2015. He was the paper’s chief political reporter, senior environmental reporter, Sunday magazine writer and head of the Olympia bureau. He has won national reporting awards for his investigative coverage of the environment and the state’s mental health system.

Prior to joining The Times, he was a United Press International reporter in the Philippines. He also has extensive experience as a teacher and trainer in Indonesia and East Timor.

He is currently a board member of the Washington Coalition for Open Government and a former president of the Associated Press Media Editors (APME) board. Simon has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley.