Sharif Durhams (he/his)

Sharif Durhams is a deputy managing editor at The Washington Post. He co-led Poynter’s 2019 Leadership Academy for Diversity in Media. He previously was managing editor of North Carolina’s News & Observer and Herald-Sun as well as a homepage editor at The Washington Post and a senior editor for news and alerting for CNN Digital. Durhams created the role of social media editor and digital strategist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where he pioneered the paper’s use of social tools to aid reporting and helped to restructure beats and departments for the digital era. He also worked as a state and local government reporter for The Charlotte Observer, where he covered a presidential campaign and the Duke lacrosse scandal and won a Society of American Business Editors and Writers award for breaking news coverage. Durhams has served as a judge for the National Headliner Awards since 2016. He is president and a lifetime member of NLGJA — the Association of LGBTQ Journalists, an organization he joined in 2000. He’s a member of the Online News Association and the National Association of Black Journalists. Durhams studied journalism and political science at the University of North Carolina, where he was the first African American editor of the student paper, The Daily Tar Heel.