John Hughes was editor of the Deseret Morning News in Salt Lake City from 1997 to 2006, and returned to BYU as a professor of communications in 2007. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former editor of The Christian Science Monitor.
Hughes has also served as U.S. assistant secretary of state and as assistant secretary-general of the United Nations, and he has chaired presidential and congressional commissions on international broadcasting.
Born in Wales and educated in England, Hughes served for six years as the Monitor’s Africa correspondent and six years as Far East correspondent before serving for nine years as the paper’s editor. For three of those years he was both editor and publisher.
He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Indonesia and the Overseas Press Club award for an investigation into the international narcotics traffic. He is a former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Hughes has written two books and writes a nationally-syndicated column for The Christian Science Monitor.
Hughes and his wife Peggy, a Brigham Young University graduate, have three children — Mark, Wendy, and Evan — and have six grandchildren.