Joel Simon

Joel Simon

Joel Simon is the director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Prior to this role, Simon served as the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists from 2006 through 2021. Simon was also a senior visiting fellow at the Knight Institute from 2022-2023, where he focused on the increasingly harsh treatment of U.S. journalists by police. 

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. He 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.

Simon started his career in the 1990s as a journalist covering the Guatemalan conflict. He also reported from El Salvador, Cuba, and for a full decade, Mexico, where he covered the Zapatista uprising and the assassination of the presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio. His first book, from 1998, Endangered Mexico: An Environment on the Edge, was named one of the 100 best books of the year by the LA Times.