Adrian Monck
Adrian Monck is managing director and head of communications and media at the World Economic Forum. The Forum is an independent, international organisation incorporated as a not-for-profit foundation in Geneva, Switzerland.
His career has mainly been in television journalism, but he is also an author and academic. From June 2005, he was head of Britain’s only Graduate School of Journalism at City University London, and is still a professor there.
His broadcast news career started with a summer internship at CBS News in 1987, and they started paying him a year later. He spent four of the most exciting years in international news with CBS: the ending of the Lebanese hostage crisis and the Iran-Iraq War; the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall; and the first Gulf War.
In 1993, he joined ITN’s News At Ten which took him from Belfast to Bosnia, and to many other places besides. Three years later, he joined the launch team for Five News. Five went on air in 1997, with the British general election that brought Tony Blair to power. It reported the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and took in every story from Kosovo to 9/11 and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its reporters and their cameras travelled light, but they reported with distinction from every continent.
He turned analogue newsrooms digital, pioneered low-cost news production, and did an MBA at London Business School.
His most recent book – written with Business21C editor Mike Hanley – is Can You Trust The Media? (Icon, 2008). It has stirred up some controversy. The Financial Times called it “jaunty.” BBC Radio 5 Live called it “fantastic.” Andrew Gilligan called it “nihilistic.” The Observer said it was “startlingly cynical.” The Guardian called it “amusingly blunt” and its prescriptions “excellent”, and – in the same paper – columnist Peter Preston said Gordon Brown “ought to sit up and take notice.”
The pair also co-authored Crunch Time: How Everyday Life Is Killing The Future (Icon, 2007) which the Sydney Morning Herald called “warm, witty and inspiring.” As an academic he has blogged about the media here at adrianmonck.com. He has written for The Guardian, New Statesman, Evening Standard, Scotsman and Press Gazette, and been quoted everywhere from the New York Times to Asharq al-Awsat.
