Gil Durán was born in Tulare, California, the grandson of Mexican immigrant farmworkers. He started his journalism career at the San Jose Mercury News. As the newspaper industry hit turbulence, he pivoted to politics and spent ten years as an adviser to politicians, including Jerry Brown, Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris.
In 2018, he returned to journalism as California opinion editor of the Sacramento Bee and then became editorial page editor of the San Francisco Examiner. Now an independent journalist, he publishes two newsletters: The Nerd Reich, focused on extremist tech politics, and FrameLab, focused on political language.