Rene Sanchez

Rene Sanchez is the Editor and Vice President of News for The Times-Picayune, The Advocate and NOLA.com. He has led the newsrooms in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette since April 2022.

Prior to returning to his home state of Louisiana, he served for eight years as the Editor of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. During his tenure as the Star Tribune’s Editor, the newsroom won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News in 2021 and has been named a Pulitzer finalist twice in Local News and once in Investigative Reporting. Sanchez also supervised an investigative project on child deaths in home day cares in Minnesota that won the Pulitzer Prize for Local News in 2013. As Editor he expanded the newsroom’s coverage locally and statewide and launched new print sections and digital news products. For the past six years, the Star Tribune’s print and digital design as well as photography work has finished Top 5 in the world in the Society of News Design’s annual international competition. Sanchez previously served for five years as the Star Tribune’s Managing Editor. He has overseen the Metro, Business, Features, and Sports departments as well as the newsroom’s investigative work.

Before joining the Star Tribune, Sanchez spent 17 years as a reporter for The Washington Post, covering local and national news. In his last six years at the Washington Post, from 1998 to 2004, he was based in Los Angeles and reported on news and issues in California and across the West. A native of New Orleans, and a graduate of Loyola University, Sanchez began his journalism career at the Times-Picayune.