Mike Hoyt is an editor, writer and journalism teacher with deep experience. He is the editor of The Big Roundtable, a home for long-form narrative journalism, a freelance writer and book editor.
He served as executive editor of Columbia Journalism Review, where he wrote and edited articles about journalism and its challenges and opportunities for more than 26 years. For ten of those years — 2001 through 2011, longer than anyone in the magazine’s 52-year history — he was the top editor, responsible for all editorial content in print and online. He built the staff and led the magazine through two redesigns, the creation and full deployment of its website, its 40th and 50th anniversaries and to many journalism prizes. From 2011 to 2013 he led CJR’s United States Project, overseeing two part-time editors and a staff of regional correspondents covering politics and policy.
At Columbia, Hoyt teaches the summer basic reporting course to part-time students and has co-taught that course in the fall with Michael Shapiro for more than a decade. He also co-teaches “City Newsroom,” a 15-week course in the spring and teaches a writing course, “Deadline Reporting: Off the News” in the fall. He guides several students each year on their year-long masters projects.
Before CJR, Hoyt was a freelance magazine writer for multiple publications, a copy editor at Business Week, and a reporter for The Home News, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, his first journalism job, and The Record, in Bergen County, New Jersey, his second. He grew up in Kansas City and is a graduate of Missouri University’s School of Journalism. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, Mary Ellen, a high school teacher in Jersey City and seriously roots for the New York Mets.
Website: thebigroundtable.com