Lara Jakes

Background

About Lara Jakes

Lara Jakes is a foreign correspondent at The New York Times, focused on conflict diplomacy and weapons in Ukraine and the Middle East. She has reported and edited from more than 70 countries over the last three decades and covered war and conflict from Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, the West Bank, Northern Ireland and Ukraine. Earlier at The Times, Lara was a diplomatic correspondent, covering the State Department and foreign relations. She also served as a deputy Washington editor who oversaw coverage of foreign policy, and was the Washington bureau’s night editor in the first year of the first Trump administration. Before coming to The Times in 2017, she was the managing editor for news at Foreign Policy magazine and co-authored “The American Pope,” which was published by the Vatican in 2016. Lara worked for more than 12 years at The Associated Press, including three in Iraq and as Baghdad bureau chief in 2012. As an award-winning reporter in Washington, she covered the State Department, Pentagon, Justice Department and Homeland Security Department, and was named AP National Security Writer in 2013. Earlier, Lara was a national correspondent for Hearst Newspapers and worked for over five years at the Times Union newspaper of Albany, N.Y, ultimately as chief political writer. She is a 1995 graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and has won journalism fellowships at the University of Maryland (2005), Harvard University (2018) and Stanford University (2019). She was named an adjunct lecturer in 2019 at Georgetown University’s Master of Professional Studies in Journalism program.