Edith Chapin is the Executive Editor of NPR News. In this role, which she assumed in 2015, Chapin oversees all desks and reporters, and helps set the agenda for the entire News division.
Previously, Chapin was the senior supervising editor of NPR’s International Desk. She managed a team of correspondents based outside the United States committed to bringing listeners dynamic stories of the world’s people, politics, economy, and culture.
Prior to joining NPR in 2012, Chapin spent 25 years at CNN and worked her way up from intern, to bureau chief to vice president. Most recently, Chapin was the Vice President and Deputy Bureau Chief of CNN’s Washington, D.C. bureau, where her strategic editorial and management responsibility included oversight of the 2009 presidential transition coverage and daily coverage of the White House and Capitol Hill.
For two years, beginning in August 2005, Chapin was CNN’s New York Bureau chief and prior to that was CNN’s Midwest Regional Bureau Chief based in Chicago for 18 months.
As CNN’s deputy bureau chief and managing editor in New York from 1997-2004, Chapin directed the network’s editorial coverage during a crucial time in the city’s recent history, which included the 2003 blackout; the new millennium; and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Chapin was the first to alert the network that a plane had hit the World Trade Center on 9/11.
Chapin’s journalism career took her to London in 1992 for five years as CNN’s field producer and assignment manager where she produced news stories in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. She went to Baghdad one month before the first Gulf War and was in the first team of reporters allowed back into the country in the war’s aftermath.
During her time oversees, Chapin worked in Syria; Jordan; South Africa, to cover Nelson Mandela’s election; reported on the genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia; and the United States’ invasion of Panama. Her first field assignment literally got her wet behind the ears: Hurricane Gilbert, a category five hurricane that hit Mexico.
Chapin’s work has been recognized with the journalism industry’s highest honors including a 2005 George Foster Peabody Award for coverage of Hurricane Katrina, a 2005 Alfred I. DuPont Columbia University Award for CNN’s coverage of tsunami disaster in South Asia, and a 1997 Cable ACE award for extended breaking news coverage of Rwanda and Zaire.
Chapin contributed to Covering Catastrophe (Bonus Books, 2002), a book recounting the events of 9/11 in an oral history format. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations sits on the board of The Masters School.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.