What I cover
I cover leadership issues for The Chronicle. That means I focus on boards, presidents and the folks who run institutions. I’m interested in stories about how they make decisions and the impact of those choices. This gives me wide latitude to write about all sorts of topics, but all through the lens of leadership. For example, if I’m writing about a college’s financial difficulties, I want to know about the key moments when leaders went one way or the other when faced with a choice and how that led to the current situation. I’m not all about doom and gloom though, I’m just as interested in leaders who are helping their institutions thrive.
My background
I came up in my career as a newspaper reporter. I started as a small-town sports reporter in rural Illinois and then did a tour of Michigan newspapers covering a variety of beats, before I landed in Ann Arbor, MI about 20 years ago. I started there a K-12 reporter, but switched over to covering higher education. For 13 years, I worked at the Detroit Free Press, covering higher education across the state, including Michigan State University during the Larry Nassar scandal and the University of Michigan. I’ve twice been named an Education Writers Association Fellow and in 2018 won the EWA’s Ronald Moskowitz prize as the best education beat reporter in the country. I also was Spencer Fellow in Education Reporting at Columbia University in 2020-21, where I studied small liberal arts colleges. I currently live in Michigan.
Connect
Contact David at David.Jesse@chronicle.com or follow him on Twitter: @reporterdavidj. He can also be reached on BlueSky at @reporterdavidj.bsky.social or on LinkedIn.
