David Leonhardt

David Leonhardt is an editorial director for New York Times Opinion, overseeing the editing and writing of editorials.

Leonhardt, who has held a range of senior roles in The Times’s newsroom and Opinion department, assumed his current role in March 2025. He joined The Times in 1999 as a business reporter, covering management and the workplace. In 2006, he relaunched the Economic Scene column for the business section, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2011, for his columns on the financial crisis, health care and other subjects. He became The Times’s Washington bureau chief that year, overseeing coverage of policy and politics and reshaping the bureau’s operations to become more digitally focused.

In 2014, he became the founding editor of The Upshot, a section focused on data visualization and explanatory writing. He has also been a staff writer for the Times Magazine, and he won a Gerald Loeb Award for magazine writing for his coverage of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. In 2015, The Times named Leonhardt to oversee the 2020 Group, an internal committee charged with advising management on digital strategy.

He became an Opinion columnist in 2016 and helped create the The Argument podcast as a co-host. In 2020, he returned to the newsroom to launch The Morning newsletter, and he ran it for almost five years, turning it into one of The Times’s largest platforms. In that role, he appeared on The Daily podcast, discussing the Covid pandemic, higher education, immigration and other topics.

Before joining The Times, he worked at Business Week magazine and The Washington Post. He majored in applied mathematics at Yale and is a third-generation native of New York City. He is the author “Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream,” which The Atlantic and the Financial Times named one of the best books of 2023.