Gil Durán was born in Tulare, California, in 1976. The grandson of Mexican immigrant farmworkers, he got his first taste of work in the fields, but took an interest in journalism after winning the local newspaper’s "My Mom Is the Best" contest in the fifth grade. In the tenth grade, his family moved from California to Kentucky, where he dropped out of high school for a year, then returned and befriended an English teacher who encouraged him to apply to college. He graduated DePauw University in 1998 and 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 advisor 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.