Peter Finn named International editor at The Washington Post

Peter Finn (Photo credit: Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

An announcement from Executive Editor Matt Murray and Managing Editors Scott Vance and Peter Spiegel:

We’re delighted to share that Peter Finn will become our new International Editor, overseeing more than 60 reporters, editors and other journalists in Washington and in 23 locations around the world.

Peter is well-known as a creative, deeply knowledgeable and highly collaborative editor with a proven record of producing outstanding journalism over many years here. As a longtime foreign correspondent, he brings firsthand knowledge of the challenges and opportunities our journalists in the field face. In his new role, succeeding Doug Jehl, Peter will focus on extending the reach and power of The Post’s international coverage at a time of profound change, when many aspects of the world order of recent decades are shifting and when U.S. relations with China, Europe and other parts of the world are being rewritten.

For the past three years, Peter has been the senior editor for international investigations, running a team that has driven some of our most distinctive reporting on the war in Ukraine, Russian influence operations in Europe, China’s global role, transnational repression and the growing power of drug cartels across Latin America. The latter won the 2025 Overseas Press Club Robert Spiers Benjamin Award for the best reporting in any medium on Latin America. Peter also was an editor on our Gaza coverage which was a 2025 Pulitzer finalist for International reporting and won the OPC’s inaugural Shireen Abu Akleh Award for innovative reporting.

Peter was The Post’s national security editor from 2013 to 2022, and was an editor on the Snowden documents, the Russia investigation, the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, and deep examinations of America’s war in Afghanistan. The national security staff were part of Post teams that won the Pulitzer Prize three times and twice were finalists in his time as editor.

Before becoming national security editor, Peter was The Post’s bureau chief in Warsaw, Berlin and Moscow. He pioneered a new counterterrorism beat after the 9/11 attacks and reported from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, delivering a long line of exclusive reports. He was awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Grand Prize for his front-line reporting from Kosovo and the German Marshall Fund’s Peter Weitz award for stories on al-Qaeda in Europe. He also was twice a Pulitzer Prize finalist for international reporting as part of Post teams for coverage of the war in Kosovo and coverage of the war in Afghanistan.

Peter returned to The Post’s newsroom in 2008 after a decade overseas and became a national security correspondent covering counterterrorism and U.S. detention operations, including at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which he visited multiple times to report on military commission trials.

Peter also is the co-author and author of two books, “The Zhivago Affair” and “A Guest of the Reich.” The Zhivago Affair was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction and the Pushkin House award for best book on Russia. Peter also is the editor of three additional books, two of them Post projects: “The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy” by Greg Miller and “The Mueller Report.” A third book, “Herbert Corey’s Great War: A Memoir of World War I by the American Reporter Who Saw It All,” which he co-edited, resurrected a lost memoir found in the Library of Congress.

Peter holds a B.A. and an M.A. from University College Dublin and an M.S. from the Columbia Journalism School.

Peter will begin immediately and will report to managing editor Peter Spiegel. Please join us in congratulating him as he takes on this important new role.