Bryan Monroe is the new vice president and editorial director of EBONY and JET magazines. He left Knight Ridder, where he was assistant vice president of news (and the second highest-ranking news executive) to join the executive editorial team of EBONY and JET. He is also president of the National Association of Black Journalists.

He led Knight Ridder’s efforts during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, helping the staff of the newspaper in Biloxi, Miss., publish continuously throughout the deadly storm and aftermath. His and the team’s efforts have since been awarded with the 2006 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service. Bryan has also been nominated for the Award of Valor from the National Association of Minority Media Executives (NAMME) for work during the coverage of the storm.

In 2003, Bryan completed a year at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow, the oldest and most prestigious fellowship in American journalism.

Before joining the Mercury News in 1991, Bryan was assistant project director for Knight Ridder’s 25/43 Project, a newspaper R&D initiative which created a daily living laboratory for experimentation into the future of newspapers; this “Boca Project” later served as a model for future thinking for newspapers around the globe.

He has worked as director of photography and design at the Myrtle Beach (SC) Sun News and as a photographer at The Seattle Times, the Roanoke (VA) Times & World News and United Press International. He was the first African-American editor of the University of Washington DAILY, a student publication there with a circulation well over 20,000. Monroe has a B.A. in communications from the University of Washington in Seattle.

Bryan has won numerous regional, national and international journalism awards and has lectured all over the world, from Cape Town, South Africa to Sydney, Australia. He has been recognized by Presstime magazine as one of the “20 Under 40” – the 20 top American journalists under 40 years old — and was named by MediaWeek magazine as one of the nation’s “Media Elite.”

He recently led Knight Ridder’s efforts to cover Hurricane Katrina in South Mississippi in 2005 and was first on the scene the day the storm hit to help the KR paper in Biloxi, Miss., publish, never missing a day. He was also part of the team that helped the Grand Forks Herald win the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, for coverage of the flood that devastated that rural community.

In 2003, San Francisco’s CityFlight magazine named him one of the “10 Most Influential African Americans in the Bay Area.” He also appeared in Jet magazine in November, 2005. He is a graduate of Community Leadership San Jose Silicon Valley, is a member of the San Jose Leadership Council and is a member of 100 Black Men of Silicon Valley, Inc., a mentoring and leadership group of African American civic leaders.

Before being elected president of NABJ, the nation’s largest journalism organization of color serving over 4,000 members, he served as a two-term vice president/print for the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ). Bryan is also vice president of Unity: Journalists of Color.

He was a picture editor and coordinator for the photo book and museum exhibit, “Songs of My People” (Little, Brown/Time Warner), and was associate producer on “Tom Dowd & The Language of Music,” a documentary film that debuted at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and won numerous awards. Bryan is married and has two children.

Brian’s Profile at the American Society of Newspaper Editors