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Ben Sessoms is the Chattanooga Times Editor at the Times Free Press, representing the liberal side of the newspaper\u2019s opinion section. Before taking on this role, he covered growth, development, transportation and the environment for Chattanooga\u2019s paper of record.<\/p>\n
Born and raised in eastern North Carolina, he has covered housing, education and local government at multiple publications in his home state, including at The Raleigh News & Observer in the state’s capital city.<\/p>\n
Ben has spent most of his adult life in Appalachia, graduating in 2019 with degrees in journalism and communication studies at Appalachian State University.<\/p>\n
Outside of work, Ben enjoys hiking, reading, eating local cuisine and caring for his two cats Jasper and Juno. Reach him at bsessoms@timesfreepress.com or by phone at 423-757-6346.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.timesfreepress.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ben Sessoms bsessoms@timesfreepress.com Ben Sessoms is the Chattanooga Times Editor at the Times Free Press, representing the liberal side of the newspaper\u2019s opinion section. Before taking on this role, he covered growth, development, transportation and the environment for Chattanooga\u2019s paper of record. Born and raised in eastern North Carolina, he has covered housing, education and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2499017,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2499016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Times-Opinion-Elect-Amanda-Sovago-Royal-to-bring-transparency-to-Hamilton.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2499016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2499016"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2499016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2499018,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2499016\/revisions\/2499018"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2499017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2499016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2499016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2499016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}