Name John Mulholland | Role Journalist | |
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John Mulholland (born 20 November 1962) is an Irish journalist who is the editor of the British Sunday newspaper The Observer and assistant editor of The Guardian. He has worked for most of his career with the Guardian Media Group.
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Early life and education
Mulholland was born in Ranelagh, Dublin, and has seven siblings. Mulholland received a degree in Communications in 1983 from Dublin City University and he also studied for an MA in media and communications at California State University, Sacramento.
Career
Mulholland worked as arts assistant at The Independent from 1987–8, then briefly for London Daily News in the same role. He co-founded Listings Limited in 1988 as the deputy editor, providing arts and entertainments listings to newspapers.
He joined The Guardian as assistant editor of the arts desk in 1990, then became media editor in 1994. In 1998 he left The Guardian to manage the relaunch of Mirror Group Newspapers' Sporting Life, but his contract was ended after three months and before the launch after a disagreement over the management of the project.
The Observer
Mulholland rejoined the Guardian Media Group as deputy editor of The Observer in 1998, overseeing the magazines, sport, travel and culture sections. He developed and launched the monthly food, sport and music magazines and lead the change of format to Berliner. He encouraged Nick Paton Walsh when Paton Walsh was a trainee at the newspaper, and entered his first piece into the Press Gazette's Young Journalist of the Year award in 2000, which it won.
Editorship
Mulholland succeeded Roger Alton as editor in January 2008 (announced in October 2007), having read The Observer as a teenager, and reshuffled the paper's editorial team. He closed the monthly sport, music and women's magazines in 2009, and relaunched the paper in February 2010 with four sections and a reduced staff of 70 to reduce costs.
Mulholland faced criticism and calls for his resignation due to an article by Julie Burchill published in The Observer on 13 January 2013, later withdrawn from the website, which was seen as transphobic. Mulholland responded on the comments page to what he described as "many emails protesting about this piece" and stated that he would be looking into the issue.
On 1 June 2015, Muholland additionally became an assistant editor of The Guardian in one of the first appointments made by Katharine Viner, the new editor-in-chief of Guardian News and Media. From July to autumn 2017, Mulholland will be the temporary editor of Guardian US while Lee Glendinning is on maternity leave.