Garrett M. Graff is the editor of The Washingtonian magazine and widely recognized as one of the nation’s leading experts on technology and politics.
His first book, “The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House,” which examines the role of technology in the 2008 presidential race, was published in December 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux to strong reviews. The New York Times’ literary critic Michiko Kakutani wrote, “The astonishingly young Mr. Graff (who was born in 1981) proves in these pages that he is a cogent writer, willing to tackle large-scale issues and problems.” Graff also teaches internet and social media at Georgetown University in the school’s master’s in journalism and communications program.
After four years with The Washingtonian covering politics and Washington life, Graff became in September 2009 only the third editor in the magazine’s 44-year history. The National Magazine Award-winning Washingtonian magazine, which calls itself “the magazine Washington lives by,” has a monthly readership of about 400,000. Previously, he was the founding editor of mediaBistro.com’s Fishbowl D.C. (www.FishbowlDC.com), a popular blog that covers the media and journalism in Washington, and co-founder of EchoDitto, Inc., a multi-million-dollar Washington, D.C.-based internet strategy consulting firm. A Vermont native and graduate of Harvard, he served as deputy national press secretary on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign and, beginning in 1997, was then-Governor Dean’s first webmaster.
As the first blogger admitted to cover a White House press briefing, he is a frequent speaker on blogging and the intersection of politics and technology, and his reporter’s notebook from that first day in the White House hangs in the newly opened Newseum in Washington, DC. His writing and commentary has appeared in publications like the Washington Post, The New York Times, Wired magazine, the Politico, and the Huffington Post, and in 2008, he was named as one of four young “new media” journalists to watch by PRWeek.
He has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning America, Fox News, CNN, CNN Headline News, CNN International, CNBC, MSNBC, CBC, the BBC, Al Jazeera English, and various NPR programs, as well as local and regional television and radio channels, and been quoted in publications ranging from US Weekly to the Miami Herald. He has spoken on the internet, new media, and politics at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the National Press Club, Harvard Business School, the Defense Department, and the Google headquarters, as well as universities from Duke and Princeton to the University of Florida and Rice University, as well as to companies, trade groups, and to many international audiences.
In college, Garrett was a news writer and executive editor at the Harvard Crimson, Harvard University’s daily newspaper, where he wrote more news articles than any other writer in half-a-century, and held internships at ABCNews’ Political Unit and at the Atlantic Monthly.
Personally, he enjoys sailing, cooking, scotch, and Graham Greene novels. He comes from a long line of journalists: His grandfather, Bert McCord, was the drama critic for the New York Herald Tribune; his father, Christopher Graff, was the long-time bureau chief of the Associated Press in Vermont, and his mother, Nancy Price Graff, is a historian, children’s book author, and former magazine editor.
