Manny Fernandez - California editor at large, The New York Times

Manny Fernandez is the California editor at large of The New York Times. He has served as a reporter and editor at The Times for more than 20 years. 

Mr. Fernandez began working for The Times in 2005. He covered New York City for the paper’s Metro section, writing about politics, housing and the many characters and oddities of the city. He spun a tale out of a guy who lost his pants in Brooklyn and captured the secret, gritty life of a Queens pay phone. He was part of a team of reporters whose coverage of a fire in the Bronx that killed 10 people from West Africa in 2007 was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for breaking news reporting. 

From 2011 to 2020, Mr. Fernandez covered Texas as the Houston bureau chief. He reported on natural and man-made disasters in the nation-state that is Texas, writing from the scene of floods, droughts, wildfires, tornadoes, mass shootings, political scandals and industrial explosions. During lulls in the news, he searched for what makes Texas Texas, writing about bootmakers, barbecue critics, truck rodeos, fishing-contest fraud and Texans named Texas.

He eventually moved from Texas to his home state of California in late 2020. He served as the Los Angeles bureau chief and began editing. He soon became the deputy editor of politics, helping shape coverage of the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election. In 2023, he was a lead editor of a groundbreaking series examining Donald Trump’s early plans to expand the power of the presidency if he won the White House again. 

In 2025, Mr. Fernandez was named California editor at large, a new position to help coordinate the paper’s coverage of the state across multiple desks and platforms.      

Mr. Fernandez grew up in Fresno, Calif., the son of a mailman and a teacher’s aide. He graduated from California State University, Fresno, in 1997 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He worked as a reporter with The San Francisco Chronicle for three years, from 1997 to 2000. A series he wrote in 1998 about homeless runaways in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district was the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize nominee for feature writing. He eventually traveled east, working at The Washington Post as a general assignment reporter. He covered the murders of two students at a Washington university for the deaf and the human toll of the anthrax mailings.

He and his wife, Michelle O’Donnell, live in Los Angeles with their son and daughter.