Mark Russell, BJ ’84, is the editor of the Orlando Sentinel. He joined the central Florida newsroom in 2004 and served as managing editor and print news editor before taking the top newsroom job in October 2010.

Previously Russell was at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, the largest newspaper in Ohio. He joined The Plain Dealer in 1987 and worked as reporter, assistant city editor, business editor and assistant managing editor/metropolitan news. His tenure at The Plain Dealer was interrupted for two years, from 1993-1995, when he joined The Boston Globe as assistant metropolitan editor. Earlier in his career, Russell was a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s Cleveland and Pittsburgh bureaus.

Russell serves as a director of the Florida Society of News Editors, the American Society of News Editors’ Awards Board, the Central Florida chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists and the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies at North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro, N.C. He is president of the board of directors of the Missourian Publishing Association, which oversees the Missouri School of Journalism’s multiplatform newspaper and advises the School’s dean. Russell also has served as a juror for ASNE’s annual journalism awards and the Pulitzer Prize. He was the founding director of the Cleveland Urban Journalism Workshop, a program started in 1989 by the local NABJ chapter. Russell completed the Advanced Executive Program at the Media Management Center at Northwestern University in 2003.

Russell and his wife, Christina, who graduated from MU in 1985, have a 22-year-old son and 17-year-old daughter.

Updated: July 13, 2012