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The Chronicle's 10-person Washington bureau was the latest stop on Smith's peripatetic career. In addition to his career tour of Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, Smith edited National Journal and was the founding editor of Civilization magazine. In newspapering, he was the Washington news editor for the former Knight Ridder chain, and worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Boston Globe.
He sits on the Council on Foreign Relations and was vice president for communications at the Brookings Institution.
He will start at the Examiner on Feb. 5.
The Examiner was launched in 2005 by Philip F. Anschutz, a Denver entrepreneur who made his money in oil. The previous year, Anschutz bought the San Francisco Examiner and began expanding the nameplate, thus far to Washington and Baltimore. The Washington Examiner gives away 260,000 copies a day, 206,000 of which are delivered to Washington area homes chosen for their desirable demographics.
Smith was recruited for the Examiner job by a headhunting firm. His interview with the intensely private Anschutz took place in an airplane hanger at Dulles International Airport, after the billionaire flew in on his private jet from New York.
The politics of the two men align. Anschutz is conservative; Smith describes himself as "to the right of the journalism spectrum, which I've always thought puts me in the middle of where most people are," he said.
Smith is a graduate of Deerfield Academy and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to being renowned for line-editing brilliance and wordsmithery, Smith is known for his bespoke suits and patrician manner, which have brought him the nicknames "Suspenders," for the braces he likes to wear, and "Thurston," after the shipwrecked multimillionaire of "Gilligan's Island." He is married to Sally Bedell Smith, author of the Kennedy White House book "Grace and Power."
As an editor, Smith "is one of the loveliest, most writerly editors I've ever worked for," Mason said. "He touches your copy and just makes it shine."
