Joel Simon

Joel Simon is the founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. For 15 years between 2006 and 2021, he served as the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). He traveled the world defending the rights of journalists, effectively saving lives and getting innumerable people out of harm’s way.

Simon helped establish CPJ’s Emergencies Department, which provides safety information and direct support for journalists under threat, including placement for at-risk journalists at leading journalism schools. For the last year, Simon has been a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a senior visiting fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute, also at Columbia.

Simon is the author of four books, including most recently The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free, co-authored with Robert Mahoney. He writes on press freedom issues for The New Yorker and produces a regular column for Columbia Journalism Review.