Timothy J. McNulty

Public Editor, Chicago Tribune
Chicago, Illinois

Timothy J. (Tim) McNulty became the Chicago Tribune public editor in March 2006. Prior to his appointment, he had served since 1991 as the newspaper’s associate managing editor for foreign news, overseeing the Tribune’s foreign desk operations, its 11 correspondents stationed abroad, the bureau in Baghdad and numerous freelance writers. He also helped coordinate the Tribune’s diplomatic and military affairs coverage with the newspaper’s Washington bureau.

Previously, McNulty was the Tribune’s foreign editor, and before that served as national editor, responsible for national correspondents in five bureaus. For nearly two years he edited the Tribune’s Tempo section and its staff of critics, columnists and feature writers.

Before returning to Chicago as an editor, McNulty was National Affairs Correspondent covering news around the country and special reporting projects in the Tribune’s Washington Bureau. As the newspaper’s White House Correspondent, he won the 1992 White House Correspondents Association award for journalistic excellence for a series on the impact of live television on executive decision-making and diplomacy.

Prior to his five-year White House assignment, McNulty wrote about social policy and cultural change in American society. He was the national reporter for the Tribune’s 1985 series on the emergence of an urban underclass, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award. McNulty also was a foreign correspondent for six years, based in the Middle East and China. In 1979, he was one of eight American correspondents allowed to live in Beijing for the first time in nearly 30 years.

McNulty has won the Tribune’s Beck Award three times, for his contribution to reporting on Tiananmen Square in 1989; his coverage of the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982; and for distinguished reporting on the suicides of more than 900 cult followers in Guyana, in 1978.

McNulty holds a bachelor’s degree from Wayne State University and a master’s degree from Georgetown University.