• by Sara Guaglione , November 12, 2020

Gabriel Escobar has been selected as the editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, after serving as an editor and vice president since 2017.

Escobar spent 16 years at The Washington Post — he joined The Inquirer in 2007 as metropolitan editor. 

After leaving in 2011 to spend a year at the Dallas Morning News, he returned to Philadelphia as a deputy managing editor. He will now lead a staff of 210 reporters, photojournalists, editors, designers and producers.

Escobar succeeds executive editor Stan Wischnowski, who resigned in June after an op-ed headline angered staff and led to many bunking off work in protest. Wischnoksi was named executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in September.

A column with the headline “Buildings Matter, Too” highlighted the destruction of buildings amid nationwide protests following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police, riffing on the “Black Lives Matter” movement.

Wischnowski and other top editors at The Philadelphia Inquirer apologized to readers and staff at the time, calling the headline “deeply offensive."

Escobar and managing editor Patrick Kerkstra have led the newsroom in Wischnowski’s absence.

“Newsrooms evolve. Perhaps too slowly for some, but they do evolve, and I think we are in one of those critical moments when serious questions are being asked: What we do, what we’ve done, what we should be doing, and how we should be doing it. We have the responsibility to confront them and answer them,” Escobar told the Inquirer in an interview.

The economic effects of the pandemic have hit newspapers hard. The 191-year-old newspaper, owned by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism, was not spared. The company has suffered from a decline in revenue and dozens of employees were let go.

Last month,The Philadelphia Inquirer announced it would sell its printing plant, costing an estimated 500 staffers their jobs.

Separately, Curbed, which recently relaunched as part of New York Magazine, also has a new editor: Sukjong Hong. Hong will be pivotal in bringing together existing teams at New York and Curbed to cover the environment, real estate market and design worlds. She previously worked as managing editor of The Architect’s Newspaper.