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Jeff Cohen (Houston, TX) joined the Houston Chronicle in June 2002 as executive vice president and editor. Cohen is the 10th editor of the Chronicle, which was founded in 1901. His initiatives in Houston have included enhancements of each section of the newspaper as well as redesign of the print, online and Spanish editions. He has directed the Chronicle’s coverage of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, a scandal in the police department’s DNA lab that resulted in the release from prison of a falsely accused man and sports events ranging from Super Bowl XXXVIII to the Olympics to the World Series.
Cohen came to the Chronicle from its sister newspaper, the Times Union in Albany, N.Y. The state’s editors named the Times Union the best New York newspaper in its circulation class for three of his last four years in Albany. He had previously worked at Hearst’s corporate headquarters in New York in New Media. Cohen joined the Hearst Corporation’s San Antonio Light in 1976. As a sportswriter at the Light, he covered the National Basketball Association. He won many awards in sports feature writing, including one for best story in Texas for an investigative series on cockfighting. Cohen became the managing editor of the Light in 1989.
Cohen grew up in Houston, so his appointment as editor of the Chronicle represented a homecoming for the Bellaire High School graduate. He received his journalism degree from The University of Texas at Austin.
Cohen was a fellow in the Multicultural Management Program at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and was elected class president. He was a fellow at the Newspaper Management Center at Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. He served as a Pulitzer Prize juror in 1999, 2000 and 2006.