After four years at the helm of The Palm Beach Post, Rick Christie is stepping down from his role as executive editor to take on a new challenge for Network.
Christie, 64, will become the Florida State Opinion Group Editor, a newly created position where he will lead a unified and collaborative network of Opinion teams across the Sunshine State.
As the state continues to emerge as a national thought and cultural leader, Network expects this role will be pivotal in fostering a culture of shared resources, expertise, and a commitment to producing timely, relevant, and hyper-local content that resonates with our audience. The Opinion Group Editor will facilitate information sharing, coordinate statewide opinion efforts, and ensure that our coverage areas are saturated with valuable, informative, and timely content.
“For decades now, I’ve watched as Florida has become more of a focal point for national political and cultural leaders looking to influence the trajectory of our country,” Christie said. “I look forward to our network of 18 daily newspapers not only engaging our growing audiences in more topics and issues they want to want to discuss but facilitating more of those discussions on various platforms.”
A nationwide search for Christie’s replacement is underway to lead a newsroom that has won numerous top state and national awards under Christie’s leadership the past four years, as well being a 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
That followed his award-winning run as Editorial Page Editor of the Post, which he hopes to tap into as Opinion Group Editor.
“We see tremendous opportunity for Opinion content in Florida, especially now with the election of Donald Trump as president, and with his decades of experience Rick is the right leader for this initiative,” said Wendy Fullerton Powell, VP and Florida regional editor for Network, who will serve as interim Post editor.
The first person of color to run Palm Beach County’s largest news organization, Christie will also step down as Deputy Regional Editor for USA Today Network-Florida, where he oversaw collaborative efforts between editors and newsrooms of the Palm Beach Daily News and newspapers in the Treasure Coast (Martin, St. Lucie and Indian River counties) and Florida Today in Brevard County.
Christie first worked at the Post, then a Cox Newspapers publication, as a business writer in the 1980s, covering banking and finance. He left to report on banking, real estate and the economy for The Wall Street Journal, and later was a senior business writer and assistant city editor for the Miami Herald.
He returned to the Post as state editor in the early 1990s before moving to the Cox Washington Bureau as an assistant national editor and later became the foreign editor. In the latter role, he coordinated coverage in six foreign bureaus, including Beijing, Moscow, Jerusalem and Mexico City.
Christie rejoined the Post in 2002 as assistant managing editor for business news and was breaking news editor and public affairs editor before becoming editorial page editor in 2013.
Christie, who grew up in Martin County about 40 minutes north of West Palm Beach where the Post is based, recalls “delivering The Palm Beach Post and the Evening Times in my East Stuart neighborhood. It’s part of what inspired me to become a journalist. Well, that and my mom instilling in me a love of reading.”
After high school, he went on to the University of Florida for a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He began his journalism career in 1982 at The Ledger in Lakeland, before moving to the News-Press in Fort Myers.
Christie is a board member of the Florida Society of News Editors and First Amendment Foundation. He is also a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, National Association of Black Journalists, and Society of Environmental Journalists. He is very active in the community as a member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity and is a member of St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church in West Palm Beach.
Christie and his wife, Klemie, have three adult daughters — Rachel, Taylor, and Elisabeth — all of whom live in Florida.
