Bio

Charles Ommanney/MSNBCRichard Wolffe is a best-selling author, journalist and digital media executive, with extensive experience covering politics and foreign policy across multiple platforms.

Richard Wolffe is a best-selling author, journalist and digital media executive, with extensive experience covering politics and foreign policy across multiple platforms.

He currently writes a twice-weekly column for The Guardian, focusing on U.S. politics.

Wolffe is also Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Digital Officer at Global Citizen, a non-profit social action platform to solve the world’s biggest challenges, and to end extreme poverty in our lifetime. In his first year at Global Citizen, Wolffe more than doubled its web traffic and grew its video views by more than 1000 per cent. He also led the organization’s international launch into India and its expansion in Canada.

An MSNBC political analyst for a decade, Wolffe was previously Vice-President and Executive Editor of MSNBC.com, launching the channel’s website and app in 2013 and its digital video channel in 2014. He grew MSNBC’s digital audience and revenues more than ten-fold in less than two years, winning a series of editorial, design and social impact awards.

Wolffe covered the entire length of Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign for Newsweek magazine. His book about the Obama campaign, Renegade: The Making of a President, was first published by Crown in June 2009 and became an instant New York Times bestseller. It was internationally published in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, the Netherlands, and China.

His next book was Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House, which was published by Crown in November 2010. His latest book about the 2012 presidential campaign, The Message: The Re-Selling of President Obama, was published by Twelve in 2013.

Wolffe has appeared frequently across MSNBC’s dayside and primetime shows, from Morning Joe to The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. On NBC, he has featured as a political commentator on Meet The Press and TODAY.

He was featured prominently in the HBO documentary on the Obama campaign, By the People, and played a leading role in the HBO documentary of the 2000 Bush campaign, Journeys with George.

In April 2009, he joined Public Strategies as Senior Strategist at the communications and business advisory firm. He left the firm in December 2009 to work on Revival.

Wolffe began writing about American politics as a senior journalist at the Financial Times, serving as its deputy bureau chief and U.S. diplomatic correspondent in Washington D.C. In that capacity, he managed coverage of business and political affairs in the nation’s capital, and reported on U.S. foreign policy at the State Department and National Security Council.

He first started reporting on George W. Bush and his Texas team in 1999, at the start of the presidential campaign. He travelled with then-Governor Bush for more than a year, through the extraordinary election of 2000. His earlier work for the Financial Times included extensive coverage of the Microsoft antitrust trial and the Clinton administration’s plans to break up the company.

Wolffe spent eight years with the Financial Times, including four years in the United Kingdom. His journalism there included business reporting on the City of London and the manufacturing sector in the British heartland. In politics, he reported on the tumultuous period leading to Tony Blair’s landslide victory in 1997.

He joined Newsweek magazine in November 2002 as diplomatic correspondent, covering foreign policy and international affairs. In the 2004 presidential election, he covered the chaotic Howard Dean campaign before switching to John Kerry’s campaign.

As Newsweek’s senior White House correspondent, his cover stories included What He Believes (on Obama’s faith), Black & White (about Obama and racial politics), Bush In The Bubble (about the president after Hurricane Katrina), and Weight of the World (the behind-the-scenes story of how Bush handled the Lebanon war).

Wolffe is the co-author of The Victim’s Fortune (HarperCollins, 2002), which reveals the behind-the-scenes deals that led to billions of dollars in compensation to the Nazis’ victims in the late 1990s.

His next book was in an entirely different field. Along with his friend, the award-winning chef José Andrés, Wolffe is the co-author of a Spanish cookbook, Tapas: A Taste of Spain in America, published in 2005 in the United States and Spain. Together, they co-wrote a follow-up cookbook, Made in Spain, published in 2008, along with a 26-part TV show for PBS television. They have also written together for food magazines such as Food Arts and Food and Wine.

Born in Birmingham, England, Wolffe graduated from Oxford University with first-class honors in English and French.