Assistant Managing Editor
The Chronicle of Higher Education

Expertise: Higher education news and issues | Chronicle editorial style (why it doesn’t use “Dr.” for professors) | What copy desks do

Background: Heidi Landecker has been an assistant managing editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education since 2005, after joining its staff as a copy editor in 1998. She now supervises a four-person copy desk and manages myriad aspects of producing The Chronicle, The Chronicle Review, and the Careers section, online and in print. Among other duties, she edits front-page stories, advises the editor on news decisions, writes headlines, maintains the editorial-style database, advises new interns and employees, develops production processes for the Web and print, and generates story ideas. In 2008 she oversaw the rearrangement of the copy desk so that more copy editors worked on daily articles.

For two years before becoming an assistant managing editor, she served as copy chief and a senior editor. She has edited and advised editors about coverage of campus policy and leadership, fund raising, admissions, technology, faculty grievances, and free speech. She has also copy-edited essays on the arts and higher-education policy in The Chronicle Review, Careers, and The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

As a senior editor at Architecture magazine from 1990 to 1997, she was a featured speaker about New Urbanism for the American Institute of Architects. She also wrote about residential, corporate, and campus architecture for the magazine and conducted focus groups of readers. Her freelance articles and essays on politics, protectionism, travel, and higher education have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and her short stories have been published in The Boston Globe Magazine and The New Yorker.

Before coming to The Chronicle, she was the editor at Spacemaker Press, where she edited monographs on landscape artists and architects. She was a senior editor at Architecture magazine, a senior editor at Landscape Architecture magazine, a copy editor at The Boston Globe Magazine, and a staff editor at The Atlantic Monthly. From 1983 to 1999, she was a researcher and fact checker for the novelist Gore Vidal.

Landecker received a bachelor's degree in environmental studies and art from Antioch College and a master's in science education, with a focus on science writing, from Cornell University. She obtained college-level proficiency in German at Ludwig Maximilian University, in Munich.