Sewell Chan on Friday said he was fired as the executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review after staffers complained about several recent “pointed interactions.”
One of those interactions, Chan said in a statement shared with TheWrap and posted on X, was with a writer who was “passionately devoted to the cause of the Gaza protests” who had covered the “recent detention of a Palestinian graduate for an online publication he had just written about, positively” for CJR.
“I told him there was a significant ethical problem with writing for an outlet he had just covered,” Chan said.
The other recent interactions that spurred his firing, Chan said, included a conversation with a reporter working on a “sensitive #MeToo investigation” against a “prominent investigative reporter.” Chan said he reluctantly gave her more time to work on the story, which remains unpublished, after urging her to “move expeditiously” towards publishing it. The third “pointed” interaction was with a staffer who refused to come into the office or write at least one story per week, Chan said; that writer received several months’ paid leave to look for a new job from Columbia, he said.
Chan said Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia’s journalism school, confronted him about recent staff complaints about those interactions on Monday.
“While I disagreed with these complaints, I offered to meet with the staff members involved and requested a coach who could help me navigate a charged higher education environment. Instead I was fired,” Chan said.
“These are normal workplace interactions and I did exactly what I was hired to do, which was to provide rigorous, fair, careful editorial oversight and raise the metabolism and impact of a publication that’s supposed to monitor the media,” the former editor maintained.
CJR declined to comment to TheWrap earlier on Friday.
Chan’s exit from CJR comes only eight months after he started as the outlet’s executive editor. He joined CJR after being the editor in chief of the Texas Tribune from 2021 to 2024; prior to that, he worked for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Washington Post.
A report from Breaker Media on Friday afternoon painted Chan as an ineffective and divisive boss. The report, based on interviews with more than a dozen people, said he was an “absentee editor” who did not provide clear leadership.
Chan pushed back on the claims he was a bad boss, saying in his statement this was the “first time in a 25-year career that I’ve ever been subjected to discipline in a job — much less terminated from one.”
He added: “I am speaking up because the accusations made against me cut against my long track record of mentoring, nurturing and empowering early-career journalists. In a precarious and declining news industry that has lost economic, political, social and even moral capital, the only thing I have as a journalist is my reputation. I intend to defend it.”
