National Journal and The Atlantic, along with CBS News, will hold live briefings each morning in Tampa and Charlotte that draw an engaged audience of convention attendees. The briefings will feature informed insight on the latest convention developments with incisive analysis from leading reporters from all three organizations.
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Bio
Molly Ball
Molly Ball is a staff writer covering national politics at The Atlantic. She joined The Atlantic in September 2011 from Politico, where she covered the fight for the 2012 GOP nomination, the 2010 midterm elections, and the national political landscape. Prior to joining Politico in 2010, she was a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Las Vegas Sun. There she covered Nevada’s competitive primary and general-election presidential race in 2008. Ball has also worked for newspapers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia, as well as The New York Times and The Washington Post. She was a 2009 recipient of a Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan.
James Bennet
James Bennet has been editor in chief of The Atlantic since 2006. Before joining the Atlantic staff, Bennet was the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times. During his three years in Israel, his coverage of the Middle East conflict was widely acclaimed for its balance and sensitivity. His much-lauded long-form writing for The New York Times Magazine was responsible for catching the eye of Atlantic owner David Bradley during his year-long search for a new editor. Upon accepting the position, Bennet told a Times reporter that he saw the Atlantic job as “a chance to help, encourage and preserve the practice of serious, long-form journalism.” Prior to his work in Jerusalem, he served as the Times’ White House correspondent and was preparing to join its Beijing bureau when he was offered the Atlantic editorship. Bennet began his journalism career at the Washington Monthly.
Ronald Brownstein
Ronald Brownstein is political director of the Atlantic Media Company and National Journal Group’s editorial director, in charge of long-term editorial strategy. He also writes a weekly column and regularly contributes other pieces for both National Journal and The Atlantic, and he coordinates political coverage and activities across publications produced by Atlantic Media. Brownstein was twice named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 1996 and 2004 presidential campaigns. In addition, he is the recipient of several journalism awards, including the Exceptional Merit in Media Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Excellence in Media Award from the National Council on Public Polls in 2005, and the Journalist of the Year Award from the Los Angeles Press Club in 2005. In 2007, the American Political Science Association presented him its Carey McWilliams Award for lifetime achievement.
Steve Clemons
Steve Clemons is Washington editor at large for The Atlantic as well as editor in chief of Atlantic LIVE. He also publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note at The Atlantic.com. Steve is Senior Fellow and Founder of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, a centrist think tank in Washington, D.C., where he previously served as executive vice president. Clemons writes and speaks frequently about the D.C. political scene, foreign policy and national security issues, as well as domestic and global economic policy challenges.
Ron Fournier
Ron Fournier is the first editor responsible for editorial strategy and execution for all of the National Journal Group products across all platforms: web, print, video, and live events. He also contributes to 2012 Decoded. Prior to joining National Journal, he worked at The Associated Press for 20 years, most recently as Washington bureau chief. Starting with a posting in Little Rock to cover
Bill Clinton’s second term as governor of Arkansas, Mr. Fournier moved to Washington to report on the Clinton White House. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the Society
of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award for coverage of the 2000 elections. He is a four-time winner of the prestigious White House Correspondents’ Association Merriman Smith Memorial Award. In 2005, Mr. Fournier co-wrote Applebee’s America, a New York Times best-seller that examined the shared attributes of successful political, business, and religious leaders.
Garance Franke-Ruta
Garance Franke-Ruta is the politics editor of TheAtlantic.com, but when she's not trying to understand the mysterious charm of Rick Santorum or why Newt Gingrich would post a picture of himself jauntily posing in front of Auschwitz, she's maintained a sideline in writing about women in politics. She was the first person to report, in a 2002 American Prospect article, that the baby-bust among high-achieving women was a myth, related only to their greater unwillingness to become single moms and not to any kind of reproductive issues inside marriages. Before joining The Atlantic, she was an online politics editor and blogger at The Washington Post, and in 2006 she spent a semester at the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School studying why there are so few women in opinion media.
Major Garrett
Major Elliott Garrett is a Congressional correspondent with the National Journal. Prior to joining the National Journal he was the senior White House correspondent for the Fox News Channel. He covered the 2004 presidential election, the War on Terror, and the 2008 presidential election where he covered the Democratic primaries and later Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee.
He is married to Julie Kirtz, a Washington, D.C. correspondent for Fox News weekend.
Reid Wilson
Reid Wilson is editor-in-chief of National Journal Hotline, Washington’s premier daily tip sheet on campaigns and elections. He regularly contributes analysis of the national political environment in his weekly column, “On The Trail,” to National Journal Daily and to National Journal Magazine, as
well as writing for 2012 Decoded. He regularly appears on MSNBC, CNN, and C-SPAN and is a political contributor to Sirius-XM Radio.
Before becoming Hotline’s editor-in-chief, Mr. Wilson was editor of the political blog Hotline On Call. He has also served as a staff writer at The Hill newspaper, where he covered Congress, politics, campaigns, and elections.
Mr. Wilson spent the 2008 election cycle authoring a popular political blog at
RealClearPolitics.com and hosted a nationally-broadcast political talk show on XM Radio, on which he talked with top newsmakers, reporters, and political analysts. He has also written for The New
Republic, The Arizona Capitol Times, The Seattle Times, and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. A native of Seattle, Mr. Wilson graduated from George Washington University.
Joe Rospars, Chief Digital Strategist for Obama for America, discusses the importance of single donors in overcoming Romney's super PAC backers in the 2012 election.
