Fran Coombs was in many ways the chief architect of The Washington Times' news coverage over the past 20 years. Working closely with Editor in Chief Wesley Pruden, Mr. Coombs, beginning with his days as the editor of the newspaper's political and national security reporting, hired, developed and encouraged key reporters and editors, worked closely on the paper's major investigative projects, and set the tone and direction of its news pages.
Once viewed by many as a product without a future, The Washington Times is now America's leading conservative newspaper and one of the most influential journalistic voices in the world. Mr. Coombs, working his way up through the ranks since joining the paper in 1987, was managing editor from January 2002 to January 2008.
Before being promoted to assistant managing editor in 1994, he served as deputy national editor and national editor. He was named deputy managing editor in 1997.
While at The Times, Mr. Coombs personally interviewed or participated in interviews with numerous prominent U.S. officials, including President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright, Defense Secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and William Perry, Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, and countless congressional leaders from both major political parties. He also interviewed world figures such as Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then-Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif, the presidents of several Latin American countries, and leaders of Hamas on the West Bank and the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo.
Mr. Coombs cherishes two moments in particular from his overseas travel for The Times: Watching East Germans break through the Berlin Wall for the first time in 1989 on television as he sat sipping wine with a colleague in the Cosmos Hotel in Moscow, a singularly ironic perch behind the Iron Curtain for such a momentous event; and the Cuban finance minister showing acute – and almost sinister – awareness of The Washington Times in a 2002 conversation with Mr. Coombs in Havana. The paper has indeed come a long way.
Before joining The Times, Mr. Coombs was the founding editor of a national newspaper syndication service in Washington, D.C., and a reporter for two Virginia newspapers, the Winchester Evening Star and the Roanoke Times & World-News. Mr. Coombs has been honored with several awards from the Virginia Press Association.
The Washington Times has won dozens of national and regional journalism awards under his leadership.
A member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Mr. Coombs in 2004 was an invited member of that organization’s first Diversity Leadership Institute.
Mr. Coombs has been a media fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
A graduate of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., Mr. Coombs and his wife live in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. They have two grown children.
Other than his family and The Washington Times, the overarching passion in Mr. Coombs' life is his prized vinyl album collection, with emphasis on the British Invasion and classic film scores. Meetings with his editors have been known to devolve into impromptu jams or listening and discussion sessions. Beware, too, of his tendency to reminisce about the great concerts he's seen including Jimi Hendrix, the original Byrds and the Who BEFORE "TOMMY."