Sanjana Priyonti, Junior Editor
Mike Peed (C ’98), a culture-desk news editor at The New York Times, returned to Sewanee on Oct. 16 to speak with students about his career in journalism and the path that led him from the Mountain to one of the world’s leading newsrooms.
Peed, who graduated from Sewanee with a degree in English, shared that his journey to journalism began unexpectedly — with an article about a grilled cheese sandwich. “My first piece for The Washington Post was essentially about how to make a grilled cheese sandwich. ” It was a hard-hitting investigative piece,” he joked, adding that the light-hearted story marked the beginning of his professional writing career.
Before joining The Times in 2011, Peed spent nearly a decade at The New Yorker, where he began as a fact-checker. “It was like my journalism school,” he said. “You learn fairness, accuracy, and structure by taking a complicated story apart and putting it back together.”
At The Times, Peed joined as an editor for the opinions section. Most recently, he served as an editor on the politics desk during the 2024 election cycle, which he described as an “exhilarating and exhausting beat to be on.”
Peed recalled being on duty July 13, 2024, the day president Donald Trump was shot at a campaign rally in Butler, PA. He was monitoring a live broadcast of the rally, as was The Times’ veteran reporter, who was sick and watching from a hotel room. Within seconds, the shooter was killed by a Secret Service sniper. Trump was swarmed by Secret Service agents, bleeding from a wound in his upper right ear. Three rally goers were also wounded, one fatally.
“We didn’t know what had happened,” Peed said. “I made a quick decision to publish a sentence full of caveats — ‘appears to be,’ ‘seems’– because you never want to say more than you know.”
At The Times, he added, “the cavalry comes in when something like that happens.” At least 30 staffers were soon coordinating on Google hangout, assigning calls to the Secret Service and local authorities, and reporters contacting the hospital where Trump had been taken. A young reporter for The Times who was at the rally called the head of the politics desk and dictated a first-person account of witnessing the attempted assassination, which until the early hours of the next morning, the Times’ continued publishing and updating their live feed.
After the 2024 election, the frenetic stream of news continued as Trump took office. Asked about escalating attacks on journalists that followed, Peed said The Times is “committed to reporting aggressively without fear, without favor, bias, and to do that consistently over and over and over again.”.
During most of Israel’s two-year war in Gaza, The Times and other U.S. media did not describe the massive civilian death toll in the Palestinian enclave as genocide, leading to criticism the media had failed to describe what was actually happening. Asked why the term was avoided, Peed said, “The Times doesn’t flinch from reporting what it knows and it wants to step back from the from the terms itself and show it to (the readers)”. Before the UN declaration in September officially calling it a genocide, “it was war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Times also reported that.”
Peed recently transitioned to the culture desk, where his work now focuses on arts and entertainment coverage. Peed noted that no two days are alike in the newsroom. “You can start the day with a plan, but news can break at any moment,” he said. “The pace is lightning fast.”. “The Times never goes to sleep” he said, passing on task from New York to Seoul then to London and back again at New York.
Discussing the newspaper’s standards, Peed emphasized The Times’ commitment to objectivity and independence. “We take accuracy seriously,” he said. “No editor works alone. Every piece goes through multiple rounds of review — legal, standards, and editorial.”
Peed also offered advice for students interested in pursuing journalism. “There’s no straight line in this career,” he said. “If you’re willing to hustle and stay curious, it’s possible.”
He then encouraged The Sewanee Purple to continue asking hard questions and reporting with integrity. “The role of a student newspaper is to explore issues on campus and start conversations,” Peed said. “Even writing a short 400-word article teaches you clarity and precision. That’s a valuable skill.”
Peed credited his time at the University with shaping his approach to inquiry and critical thinking. “Sewanee taught me to think deeply and ask questions, to be sort of comfortable with not knowing the answers,” he said. “That’s what journalism is, too.”