Michael Howerton joined The diaTribe Foundation in 2021. He is the former Editor in Chief of the San Francisco Examiner and was founding Editor in Chief of Granite Media, a digital media company in San Francisco. He also served as Chief of Staff to San Francisco Board of Supervisors President London Breed, now mayor of San Francisco, overseeing her public policy and legislative agenda. 

Michael has worked at the Wall Street Journal, The Daily, Forbes and many other publications, and has won writing awards from the California Newspapers Publishers Association, the New York Society of Professional Journalists’ Deadline Club, the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists and the New England Associated Press Newspaper Association. He led the San Francisco Examiner to its first statewide CNPA General Excellence award in 2015. He is a graduate of UCLA, the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the San Francisco State University Graduate Program in English Composition. 

An essay about his reporting on the 9/11 attacks in New York was published in "At Ground Zero: 25 Stories from Young Reporters Who Were There.” Michael has taught writing at UC Berkeley, the College of New Jersey, and Berkeley City College. He is also a fiction writer and has published stories in Salamander Magazine, Griffel, In Parentheses Magazine, and Yemassee Journal.