Chris Tomlinson

Chris Tomlinson is the business columnist for the Houston Chronicle, focusing on energy, business and policy. Until April 2014, he was the supervisory correspondent for The Associated Press in Austin, responsible for state government and political reporting in Texas. From 2007-2009, he was an international investigative reporter for the AP working in Iraq, Austin and Washington DC. He served as the AP’s East Africa bureau chief in Nairobi, Kenya from 2004 to 2007 and was responsible for text, photo and television coverage from14 countries. He was appointed East Africa correspondent in 2000 and before that served two years as an international editor at AP’s headquarters in New York from 1998-2000. He started with the AP in 1995 as the Central Africa correspondent based in Rwanda. Tomlinson covered the 1994 elections that ended Apartheid in South Africa for Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper. Shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks, the AP assigned Tomlinson to work from the USS Theodore Roosevelt air craft carrier and later to cover operations in Afghanistan, including the Battle of Tora Bora. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the AP chose Tomlinson as their lead embedded reporter and he has spent two years in Iraq since then. Tomlinson has also reported from conflicts in Uganda, Burundi, Congo, Sudan and Somalia. Before becoming a journalist, he spent seven years in the U.S. Army. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992 with special honours in humanities. He was awarded the Military Reporters and Editors Association award for distinguished reporting and the Associated Press Managing Editors runner-up award for international feature writing for his work in Iraq. He received the New York Association of Black Journalists award for international reporting for his work from Africa. While based in Minneapolis, he won the AP staffer of the year award in 1997. The AP has nominated his international reporting for the Pulitzer Prize twice for Iraq and reporting on the 2004 tsunami from India.