Ari Melber

Ari Melber is the Net movement correspondent for The Nation magazine, the oldest political weekly in America, a writer for The Nation's blog, a columnist for Politico, and an attorney. During the 2008 general election, Melber traveled with the Obama Campaign on special assignment for The Washington Independent. He previously served as a Legislative Aide in the US Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign. Melber is also a contributing editor at techPresident, a nonpartisan website covering technology's impact on democracy. In 2010, he authored a 74-page special report for techPresident analyzing the first year of Organizing for America, the 13-million person network that grew out of the 2008 presidential campaign, which Northwestern political scientist Daniel Galvin called "the most comprehensive and insightful account of Obama's 'Organizing for America' to date." Melber received a Bachelor of Arts in political science from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a J.D. from Cornell Law School, where he was an editor of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy.

Deemed "one of the left's most important young voices" by Politico's Mike Allen and a "smart up-and-coming pundit" by MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, Melber is a frequent commentator on public affairs, including appearances on NBC, CNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Bloomberg News, FOX News, FOX Business, and NPR. He has appeared on such programs as The Today Show, American Morning, Washington Journal, Power Lunch, Anderson Cooper 360, The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, Reliable Sources, The Dylan Ratigan Show, Your World with Neil Cavuto, and The Daily Rundown with Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie, among others. Melber also served as an Election Night commentator on MSNBC for the 2010 midterms. His views have been quoted by publications such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Time.

Melber has contributed chapters or essays to the books America Now (St. Martins, 2009), At Issue: Affirmative Action (Cengage, 2009), and MoveOn's 50 Ways to Love Your Country (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2004). He serves on the advisory board of the Roosevelt Institution and is a member of the American Constitution Society and the National Security Network.

As an expert on politics and new media, Melber has been a moderator and featured speaker in a range of academic, media, and political forums. He has been a featured speaker at Oxford, Yale, Harvard Law School, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Columbia University Political Union, Fordham University's "American Age Lecture Series," The Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, USC, Center for American Progress, TimeWarner Summit, Democracy for America, Personal Democracy Forum, and Netroots Nation. Melber also co-moderated the Pennsylvania Leadership Forum for the 2010 US Senate primary, interviewing Sen. Arlen Specter and Rep. Joe Sestak on C-SPAN, and moderated "Elected and Connected," a George Washington University forum with Sen. Claire McCaskill and several members of Congress.

Melber founded "Ask the President," a project to inject citizen questions into White House press conferences, which Columbia Journalism Review dubbed "an idea whose time has come," and he has participated in several online coalitions advocating open government and civil liberties.

Melber's reporting and analysis of politics and social media has been widely cited by news organizations across the spectrum, such as The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Week, The Washington Times, Slate, BBC, CNN, FOX News, ABCNews.com, CBSNews.com, Rolling Stone, MTV.com, Wired.com, Economist.com, The Guardian Online, Wall Street Journal Online, National Review Online, American Conservative Online, and American Spectator Online. His reporting has also been cited in over a dozen nonfiction books, including Typing Politics, Rethinking Arab Democratization, The American Elections of 2008, and Sticks and Stones: How Digital Business Reputations Are Created Over Time, and in academic journals including, among others, The New England Journal of Medicine, Boston University Law Review, Catholic University Law Review, and The Middle East Journal.