Mark Washburn is a semi-retired journalist who spent his career at newspapers in the South. At the Miami Herald, he rose to State Editor, responsible for coverage of Florida outside Miami and Fort Lauderdale. In 1999 he transferred to The Charlotte Observer, owned at the time by Knight Ridder Newspapers.

At The Charlotte Observer, he was a writer and columnist until his retirement in 2017. With Knight Ridder, he served on three teams that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service – for Hurricane Andrew in Miami, the 1997 Red River Flood in North Dakota, and Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast. He was also detached to the chain’s Washington Bureau for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and served on the bureau’s investigative team during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He also served two tours as a war correspondent in Iraq.

He lives in Davidson with his wife, Betsy Flagler.