Calvin Sims

Calvin Sims is a seasoned media and nonprofit executive with over three decades of experience in journalism, international affairs, education, and philanthropy. He is an award-winning director, producer, and reporter with a successful track record of developing high-impact content at CNN, The New York Times, Discovery Times Channel, International House, Ford Foundation, and Council on Foreign Relations.

At CNN, Sims served as executive vice president for Standards and Practices, ensuring the network’s content, business practices, editorial policies, and protocols adhered to the highest ethical standards across all platforms. At the Ford Foundation, Sims managed a $100 million portfolio of journalism and media grants to strengthen investigative and foreign reporting, public television and radio, traditional, new, and ethnic media, standards and ethics, and press freedoms.

Before joining Ford, Sims was a reporter, foreign correspondent, and producer for The New York Times for two decades. His work has appeared in multimedia platforms, print, podcast, documentary, and web videos. He served as host of “The Conversation,” a web video program featuring in-depth interviews with prominent personalities. He also anchored the website’s World View podcast, a weekly discussion of foreign affairs with Times correspondents across the globe, and Page One, a nightly news program of the stories on the newspaper’s front page, broadcast on the Discovery Times channel.

Sims was senior producer for Struggle for the Soul of Islam, a critically acclaimed documentary for PBS on the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia, based on his reporting for The Times. Before joining the television division, Sims was a foreign correspondent based in Buenos Aires, Tokyo, and Jakarta. He has covered guerrilla insurgencies in South America, political developments on the Korean peninsula, and the advent of democracy in Indonesia. He has interviewed thirty heads of state.

During a sabbatical from The Times, Sims was a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he led a research project that examined the rise of radical Islamic forces in Indonesia. Concurrently, he held the Ferris Professorship of Journalism at Princeton University, where he taught a course on the media and terrorism. He also conducted workshops and cultural exchange programs for journalists in Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan as part of an effort to resolve historical conflicts.

Calvin Sims is a graduate of Yale University and recipient of the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellowship of the Council on Foreign Relations. He serves as a trustee of Consumer Reports, The Asia Foundation, National Book Foundation, Harlem Educational Activities Fund, and GroundTruth Project/Report for America.