Jim Simon is a veteran editor, reporter and newsroom leader, with extensive experience as a teacher and trainer in the U.S. and Southeast Asia.

He is currently an adjunct lecturer at the University of Washington, where he has taught the COMM 362 News Lab class four times since 2021. He previously created and taught (or co-taught) UW journalism classes on covering politics, immigrant and refugee communities and health care issues. He has also taught introductory news writing at Seattle University. 

Simon was managing editor from 2017-2020 of Honolulu Civil Beat, a nonprofit, online news site that specializes in watchdog and in-depth reporting of Hawaii and the Pacific. Civil Beat won the general excellence award for small news sites in 2019 by the Online News Association. 

He is a former managing editor at the Seattle Times, where he worked more than three decades as a reporter and editor. As a senior editor, he helped lead reporting teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2010 and 2015. He was the paper’s chief political reporter, senior environmental reporter, Sunday magazine writer and head of the Olympia bureau. He has won national reporting awards for his investigative coverage of the environment and the state’s mental health system.

Prior to joining The Times, he was a United Press International reporter in the Philippines during the last years of the Marcos regime. 

As a Knight International Journalism Fellow, he taught in-depth reporting at Padjadjaran University in Indonesia and was an in-house consultant for a newspaper in newly independent East Timor. He has led several other training programs in Indonesia.  

He is currently a board member of KUOW public radio and the Washington Coalition for Open Government. He is also former president of the Associated Press Media Editors (APME).

Simon has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley.