Alabama Not Just Football: 30 Amazing People Who Were Built By Bama
Howell Raines
Howell Raines is a Birmingham native with a master’s degree in English and an honorary doctorate from the University of Alabama. He began his journalistic career reporting for the Birmingham Post-Herald and for WBRC-TV in Birmingham. He moved to the Birmingham News and then became political editor of the Atlanta Constitution. In 1976, he became political editor at the St. Petersburg Times.
In 1978, Raines joined the New York Times as a national correspondent based in Atlanta. He rose to Atlanta bureau chief and in 1981 became a national political correspondent. By 1982 he was a White House correspondent for the Times. He continued on the managerial track as the deputy editor in Washington D.C., then as bureau chief in London and in Washington D.C.
In 1993 he moved to New York to work as editorial editor at the Times.
In 2001 he became executive editor, a position he held until 2003. He became executive editor less than a week before the September 11 attacks, and his newspaper’s response to the event became a major part of his legacy. Over 300 reporters and nearly 50 freelance and staff photographers were deployed by the Times to cover the city. Over 1.7 million copies of the September 12, 2001 edition of the New York Times were printed containing over 82 thousand words on the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
From 2003 to 2008, he continued writing freelance and writing books. In 2008, Raines became a media columnist and contributing editor for the Conde Nast Portfolio.