Award-winning United Nations reporter Colum Lynch joins Devex

Devex is announcing that Colum Lynch — an award-winning journalist who has covered the United Nations for The Washington Post and Foreign Policy magazine — is joining its newsroom. He will cover the United Nations and its many development and humanitarian agencies for an audience of global development leaders and practitioners.

As Senior Global Correspondent for Devex, Lynch will report from New York City and work closely with Devex reporters in Washington, D.C., and globally to provide insider coverage and analysis from the U.N. and the many global institutions connected to it.

Devex is an independent news organization dedicated to providing insider coverage that drives the global development agenda. Its editorial team includes over 25 full-time reporters and editors and covers development institutions from the World Bank to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Devex Newswire, a daily must-read newsletter for the global development community, has a subscriber base of nearly 200,000, and Devex.com has over 1 million registered users.

“Colum is joining Devex at a key moment: our audience is growing as the issues we cover become more urgent and relevant for the world. From climate change to pandemics to the food crisis, the United Nations plays a critical role and we are committed to covering it from the inside,” says Raj Kumar, Devex President and Editor-in-Chief.

Lynch spent the better part of three decades reporting on global institutions, national security, and foreign policy. He comes to Devex from Foreign Policy, where he served as a senior diplomatic reporter for the past decade. There, he published groundbreaking reporting on international sanctions, U.N. corruption, the rise of China's diplomatic soft power, and the Trump administration’s political targeting of the State Department civil servants — including a series of stories that helped trigger an investigation by the department inspector general.

Lynch began his career at Foreign Policy in 2010, where he joined to write the U.N. blog Turtle Bay. It was co-published between Foreign Policy and The Washington Post and became the must-read blog for international diplomats, scholars, students, and foreign ministry officials. In 2011, it won the National Magazine Award for best reporting in digital media.

Since then, Lynch has uncovered countless scoops and exposés — from Jared Kushner’s secret pre-inauguration campaign to torpedo the Obama administration’s Middle East policy to multipart investigations into U.N. sanctions and peacekeeping. In 2013, Lynch was the silver medal recipient of the Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize for a three-part series detailing the U.N.’s systemic failure to protect civilians in Darfur, Sudan. He also won an International Emmy for a collaboration with four European news outlets — Le Monde, Radio France Internationale, Swedish Television, and Süddeutsche Zeitung — which looked into the U.N. cover-up of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s role in the killing of two of its investigators. 

Before Foreign Policy, Lynch was the U.N. correspondent for The Washington Post, where he played a central role in the paper’s diplomatic coverage in the lead-up to the Iraq war and the war on terror. Before that, Lynch was a reporter for the Boston Globe, where he broke multiple stories, including the U.N. suppression of evidence of genocide in Rwanda. He was the first American reporter to report on the cable from the Canadian force commander, Roméo Dallaire, warning of the coming genocide.

Lynch has an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree from the Columbia University School of Journalism.