As one of the leaders in the newsroom, Marc Lacey helps manage the coverage and direction of our news report. The Times has become a big, sprawling place where we produce more than 100 pieces of journalism every single day in all sorts of forms, and we want all of those to be excellent. Lacey has worked at The Times for more than 25 years, having served as an assistant managing editor, National editor, weekend editor, deputy Foreign editor and a correspondent covering Congress, the White House; the State Department; East and Central Africa; Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean; and the U.S.-Mexico border.

As National editor, from 2016 to 2021, he helped lead dozens of correspondents across the country, covering the Trump presidency, the coronavirus pandemic and the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd. In 2019, he represented The Times in a live televised debate with CNN that featured a dozen Democratic presidential candidates.

Lacey joined The Times in 1999 as a White House correspondent, covering the final years of the Clinton administration and the beginning of the presidency of George W. Bush.

Before that, he worked at The Los Angeles Times and Buffalo News and was a summer intern at The Washington Post. In Los Angeles, he was part of teams that covered the Los Angeles riots in 1992 and the Northridge earthquake in 1994, both of which won Pulitzer Prizes for spot news reporting.

Lacey was born in Queens, N.Y., and grew up in Mandeville, Jamaica, and upstate New York. He graduated from Cornell, where he got his start in journalism working at the Cornell Daily Sun and where he was editor in chief.

Lacey briefed National Press Foundation fellows in September 2025: Marc Lacey on the New York Times: ‘We’re Never Going to Cower.’