Columbia Journalism School announced today that Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, and the moderator of “Washington Week with The Atlantic” on PBS, is the recipient of the 2025 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism.
For more than 35 years, Goldberg has worked as a journalist of remarkable range, ability and influence. His reporting and analysis of foreign affairs, national security and domestic politics have garnered respect from readers and leaders alike. At a challenging time for journalism business models, he has led The Atlantic to both journalistic and business successes: three Pulitzer Prizes, three National Magazine Awards for General Excellence and profitability, growing the magazine’s audience to over one million subscribers.
He joined The Atlantic in 2007 as a national correspondent, and in 2016 he was named editor in chief. Before joining the magazine, Goldberg served as the Middle East correspondent and then the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker. Earlier in his career, he was a writer for New York and The New York Times Magazine, where he wrote 15 cover stories. His work for these outlets led the editor of Foreign Policy to call Goldberg “one of the most incisive, respected foreign policy journalists around.”
Goldberg has a proven instinct for knowing where the news is, and for having the courage to pursue stories that others won’t. Earlier this year, he demonstrated his reportorial rigor in an unusual scoop known as Signalgate.
Goldberg was inadvertently included in a high-level group chat on the Signal platform by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz that broke protocol by disseminating classified attack plans of an assault on the Houthis in Yemen. When he wrote about it, without revealing the confidential details, Trump Administration officials attacked his journalism. He remained steadfast, and published more details about the content of the Signal chat.
Other career highlights range from extensive original reporting on Hezbollah, living in a Taliban madrasa in Pakistan, spending a week with Fidel Castro in Havana, reporting on a murder in a hunting preserve in Zambia, interviewing President Obama five times over the course of his presidency, and a piece disclosing that President Trump denigrated fallen US military servicemen as “suckers and losers.”
Over the last 30 years, Goldberg has interviewed, either for magazine features, newspaper articles, or at live events, almost every major political newsmaker of the era: Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Warren Buffett, Benjamin Netanyahu, King Abdullah of Jordan, Mark Milley, John Kelly, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, David Cameron, Mohammed Bin Salman, along with major mafia figures and the Dalai Lama.
Goldberg started his career as a police reporter at The Washington Post. He has worked as a TV critic, a consumer reporter and an advice columnist. He does not write only heavy pieces. He has been a humor columnist for The Jerusalem Post, and an advice columnist for The Atlantic. He has also written rollicking accounts of going to a Bruce Springsteen concert with superfan Chris Christie; shooting pistols with Tom Clancy; and about the fictional mobsters on “The Sopranos” and the real ones in the Gotti family.
Goldberg is the author of two books, Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror, and On Heroism: McCain, Milley, Mattis and the Cowardice of Donald Trump. He became the moderator of PBS’ “Washington Week with The Atlantic” in 2023.
A former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, he has also served as a public-policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his journalism, including the National Magazine Award for Reporting, the Daniel Pearl Award for Reporting and the Overseas Press Club’s Award for human-rights reporting.
“At a time when the institutions and ideals of both journalism and democracy in Americans are as besieged as they’ve ever been, there has been no better and braver champion and exemplar of those ideals than Jeffrey Goldberg,” said Scott Stossel, The Atlantic’s National Editor.
“Jeffrey Goldberg’s extraordinary work as reporter, author and editor stand out as an inspiration to us all,” said Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb. “His talent and courage shine – whether in reporting from conflict zones or leading a publication of record that holds the powerful to account.”
The John Chancellor Award is presented each year to a journalist for their cumulative accomplishments. The prize honors the legacy of pioneering television correspondent and longtime NBC News Anchor John Chancellor, best remembered for his distinguished reporting on civil rights, politics and election campaigns.
