Opinion editor is familiar face to readers
Falkenberg is appointed Chronicle vice president, chief of editorial page
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Lisa Falkenberg has been appointed vice president and editor of opinion for the Houston Chronicle, Publisher John McKeon and Executive Editor Nancy Barnes announced Friday.
Falkenberg, who will take over opinion for online and print on June 4, succeeds Jeff Cohen, who retired earlier this year.
“Falkenberg is a master of her craft, blending deep reporting with a strong, original voice as she calls out injustice in our community and in our state, and thoughtfully outlines her views for change,” McKeon and Barnes wrote in a statement.
“The best editorial leadership in the country often begins with deep original reporting, which informs powerful opinion,” they wrote. “Falkenberg is supremely qualified to lead that charge at the Houston Chronicle.”
Falkenberg will no longer write a metro column but will write a periodic column for the opinion section.
Evan Mintz, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in editorial writing along with Joe Holley last year, will serve as deputy opinion editor. Mintz stepped in to run the editorial pages after Cohen’s retirement.
Harold Jackson, editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer since 2007, will also join the Chronicle’s editorial board in the next month in a role still to be determined, Barnes said. Jackson won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 1991 and was a finalist in 1994.
A native of Seguin west of Houston, Falkenberg has been a metro columnist for the Chronicle since 2007 after working as a reporter and writer throughout the state. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, she joined The Associated Press’ Dallas bureau in 2001 and eventually became a regional writer covering Dallas and East Texas.
She covered the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003 and the deadly BP refinery explosion in Texas City in 2005, and anchored national congressional and Senate races.
In 2004, she was named Texas AP Writer of the Year. She joined the Chronicle’s Austin bureau that year as a state correspondent, covering legislative politics and hurricanes Katrina and Rita before being named a columnist.
She was a Pulitzer finalist in 2014. In 2015, she received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. That same year she received the American Society of News Editors’ Mike Royko Award for Commentary/Column Writing.
Mintz, a member of the Chronicle’s editorial board, was a finalist in 2017 with Holley for editorial writing about gun laws, gun culture and gun tragedies. He first joined the Chronicle as a freelance writer after leaving the Harris County District Attorney’s Office in 2011 and became full-time in 2012.
A licensed attorney in Texas, he attended Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City and served as an editorial board editor of the Cardozo Jurist. He received a bachelor’s degree from Rice University.
Jackson started as a reporter at the Birmingham Post-Herald in 1975 and has won numerous awards, including Journalist of the Year from the National Association of Black Journalists and the Trailblazer Award from the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists.
Jackson has also won awards from the AP, United Press International, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association and the Alabama Press Association.