Mike Hoyt - 2008 Fellow

MIKE HOYT
Executive Editor
Columbia Journalism Review

Mike Hoyt grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, and attended the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. He graduated in 1970 with a degree in English. He returned in 1972 to attend Missouri’s School of Journalism, earning a second undergraduate degree in 1974.

His first daily newspaper was The Home News, then based in New Brunswick, New Jersey, from 1974 to 1977. He next worked for The Record, based in Hackensack, New Jersey, from 1977 to 1980. At both newspapers he moved from local reporting to broader feature and investigative work, and won prizes, including the New York Deadline Club’s James Wright Brown award in 1978.

In 1980 he launched a freelance career and also began working for Business Week magazine on the copy desk. He wrote for a number of magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, Newsday, The Nation, The Village Voice, Working Mother, Mother Jones, and, among others, the Columbia Journalism Review.

He was hired by Columbia Journalism Review in 1985 as an Associate Editor and promoted to Senior Editor in 1994. He has written and edited numerous articles about the press and its many challenges at CJR. In July 2000, he became the magazine’s Executive Editor, responsible for its editorial content in print and on the Web. He has led three upgrades of the magazine’s Web site and in 2004 launched CJR’s political journalism site, CampaignDesk.org., which later became CJR Daily.

He also serves as an adjunct professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, helping to teach a basic reporting class in the fall and a magazine production class in the spring semester.

Hoyt lives in Teaneck, New Jersey, with his wife, Mary Ellen Schoonmaker. They have three children.