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Founding Editor-in-Chief, UCLA Blueprint · Former Editorial Page Editor, Los Angeles Times · Author and Biographer
Pasadena, California, USA · UCLA, Los Angeles
UCLA Blueprint (Founding Editor-in-Chief)
UCLA Communication Studies (Lecturer)
UCLA Public Policy (Lecturer)
Los Angeles Times (25 years, 1986–2011)
CalMatters (Contributing Columnist)
Dartmouth College (BA)
Jim Newton is a veteran journalist, biographer, and journalism educator who spent twenty-five years at the Los Angeles Times before coming to UCLA in 2015 to found Blueprint, the university's award-winning public affairs magazine, and to teach in the departments of Communication Studies and Public Policy. He is the author of five critically acclaimed books of biography and history, whose subjects span Earl Warren, Dwight Eisenhower, Leon Panetta, Jerry Brown, and — in his most recent, published by Random House in August 2025 — Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. He grew up in Palo Alto, California, graduated from Dartmouth College, and began his journalism career in 1985–86 as a clerk to James Reston, the legendary New York Times Washington columnist. Before joining the Los Angeles Times, he worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He lives in Pasadena and is a contributing columnist to CalMatters, the nonprofit nonpartisan news organisation focused on California government.
Newton joined the Los Angeles Times in the mid-1980s and spent the next quarter century working across the full range of roles the paper offered to its most capable reporters and editors. He began as a general assignment and police reporter — a reviewer of his most recent book remembers him as "a superb police reporter at the L.A. Times in the O.J. era" — and was part of two staff efforts that were awarded the Pulitzer Prize: the Times's coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, one of the most consequential civil disturbances in twentieth-century American urban history, and its coverage of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. He subsequently served as a bureau chief, covering government and politics in Washington and Sacramento, and became one of the Times's most respected writers on California government, law enforcement, the Supreme Court, and national politics.
From 2007 through 2010, Newton served as editor of the Los Angeles Times editorial pages — overseeing the paper's institutional voice at a period of significant turbulence in California government and the early years of the financial crisis. He subsequently became a columnist and editor at large before leaving the paper in 2015 to join UCLA full-time. The career arc — police reporter to Pulitzer contributor to bureau chief to editorial page editor to biographer and academic — tracks the Los Angeles Times's own institutional trajectory through its decades as one of the great American regional newspapers. His departure to UCLA in 2015 was part of a broader pattern in which experienced journalists left major legacy newspapers for university positions as print advertising revenues collapsed and newsroom staffing fell.
Newton came to UCLA full-time in early 2015 with a specific charge: to found and edit Blueprint, a new magazine examining the intersection of public policy research and the practical realities of governance in Los Angeles and across California. Blueprint launched in spring 2015 and has published continuously since. Newton describes it as a journal that translates the findings of UCLA's research community — faculty across law, public policy, urban planning, economics, public health, and social sciences — for an audience of policymakers, civic leaders, journalists, and engaged citizens, connecting academic knowledge to the immediate challenges of California's cities and state government. The magazine is published under the auspices of UCLA's Government and Community Relations office and carries the institutional weight of one of the nation's most significant public research universities behind its public affairs journalism.
The Blueprint staff Newton assembled draws heavily on the Times's tradition of long-form narrative journalism. Senior editor Richard E. Meyer — described by Newton as "legendary" and his colleague for more than twenty years at the Los Angeles Times — brings the same editorial sensibility to Blueprint that he applied to long-form narratives and national features at the Times and the Associated Press. The magazine has published substantive reporting and analysis on California water policy, housing and homelessness, criminal justice reform, public health, immigration, and state political economy, alongside in-depth profiles of California's major institutional players. Newton's own regular contributors and interlocutors on Blueprint's podcast have included Senator Alex Padilla, discussing his confrontation with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's security forces in the summer of 2025, and other senior state and federal officials. Blueprint is freely accessible online and in print editions distributed through UCLA and partner institutions across California.
Alongside his journalism and teaching, Newton has built an unusually substantial body of biographical work, spanning five books and reflecting a sustained interest in the intersection of individual character and American public life. His subjects are connected by a thread — all are figures who shaped California and/or the federal government in ways that outlasted their formal power — but the range of the biographies, from the jurisprudential legacy of Earl Warren to the cultural history of the Grateful Dead, demonstrates a restless intellectual appetite that goes well beyond any single genre or beat.
Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He MadeRiverhead Books, 2006 · Described as "the definitive biography of Earl Warren for this generation" · Warren served as California governor before being appointed Chief Justice by Eisenhower, then presided over one of the most transformative courts in American history — desegregation, Miranda rights, the reapportionment revolution · A New York Times best-seller
Eisenhower: The White House YearsDoubleday, 2011 · Focused on Eisenhower's presidency rather than his military career, examining his governing philosophy, his management of the Cold War, and his less-appreciated sophistication as a political operator · A New York Times best-seller
Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and PeacePenguin Press, 2014 · Written in collaboration with Leon Panetta, the former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense · The Washington Post described it as "this genre at its best" · A New York Times best-seller
Man of Tomorrow: The Relentless Life of Jerry BrownCounterpoint, 2020 · Biography of California's four-term governor, arguably the most consequential state political figure of the late twentieth century · The Los Angeles Times described it as "a thoughtful look at the governor who shaped the state that has always reached the American future before the rest of the country"
Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and an American AwakeningRandom House, August 5, 2025 · National bestseller · A departure from his political biographies: a kaleidoscopic cultural history of the Grateful Dead through the life of Garcia, their frontman, placing the band at the centre of the American counterculture and its multi-decade confrontation with mainstream politics — from the Acid Tests and the Human Be-In through Woodstock, the War on Drugs, and the band's unlikely commercial ascendancy in the 1980s, when Dead shows became, as Newton has put it, "the antithesis of a Reagan rally." Newton has described having been thinking about this book since 1982, when he attended the US Festival as a freshman and first experienced the Deadhead community's particular culture of mutual care and freedom. Kirkus Reviews described it as "a deft portrait of a quintessential American artist"
Newton teaches as a lecturer in Communication Studies and Public Policy at UCLA, where his courses draw on his career at the Times and his biographical research to offer students sustained engagement with California government, journalism practice, and American political history. He continues as editor-in-chief of Blueprint, which publishes new issues and digital content throughout the year. He is a contributing columnist at CalMatters, writing on California politics, government, and public affairs for a statewide readership. He has appeared as a documentary subject and commentator — most notably in ESPN's landmark series O.J.: Made in America (2016), drawing on his decade of reporting on the O.J. Simpson case at the Times, and in The Nineties and The L.A. Riots: 25 Years Later. In November 2025, with Here Beside the Rising Tide newly published and selling briskly, Newton was doing a sold-out book tour through California and commenting publicly on the book's resonance at a moment when, as he has said, it feels as though the country may be on the cusp of another awakening. He lives in Pasadena with his family.
Jim Newton
Founding Editor-in-Chief, UCLA Blueprint
Lecturer, Communication Studies and Public Policy
UCLA, Los Angeles, California, USA
Blueprint: blueprint.ucla.edu
UCLA expert page: newsroom.ucla.edu/experts/jim-newton
CalMatters columns: calmatters.org/author/jim-newton