David McCraw serves as the lead newsroom lawyer for The New York Times. He has been at The Times for more than two decades and currently holds the position of Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel. He also oversees international security for Times journalists working in high-risk areas and has served as the crisis response manager when journalists have been kidnapped or detained abroad.

In 2023, McCraw and his newsroom legal team were honored with the Tony Mauro Media Lawyer Award from The American Lawyer Magazine for their advocacy on behalf of press freedom. Last year, he received the Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

He is also a co-founder of the Journalism Refugees Education Fund, a nonprofit that helps exiled media workers and their families pursue higher education in the U.S. and Canada.

McCraw is the author of the book Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts, a first-person account of the legal battles that helped shape The Times’s coverage of Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, national security, and the rise of political partisanship in America.

McCraw serves as a visiting faculty member at Harvard Law School. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois, Cornell University, and Albany Law School.

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