Editor

Garrett M. Graff became in 2009 just the third editor of The Washingtonian in the magazine 40-plus year history. At the time, Gawker.com wrote, Graff was "an up and coming whippersnapper if we have ever seen one." 

As editor of the magazine, he oversees The Washingtonian's editorial and art staff, as well as assigning and selecting which stories should run in a given issue. Prior to becoming editor, Graff spent four years at the magazine, during which time he wrote often about media and politics, profiling Barack Obama, Tom Friedman, and FBI Director Robert Mueller, among others.

Graff is 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.”

His second book, "The Threat Matrix: The FBI in the Age of Global Terror" (Little, Brown, 2011), examined the rise of the FBI's counterterrorism program and its international expansion since the 1980s.

Graff also teaches internet and social media at Georgetown University in the school’s master’s in journalism and communications programs. Previously, he was the founding editor of mediaBistro.com’s Fishbowl D.C., 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, 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 Newseum in Washington, DC. His writing and commentary has appeared in publications like the Washington Post, 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 Good Morning America, Fox News, CNN, CNN Headline News, CNN International, CNBC, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English, and various NPR programs, as well as local and regional television and radio channels. He has spoken at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the National Press Club, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the Defense Department, and the Google headquarters, as well as universities from Princeton to UT-Austin, companies, trade groups, and to overseas audiences at the invitation of the U.S. State Department.
 
In college, Garrett was a news writer and executive editor at the Harvard Crimson, Harvard University's daily newspaper, and held internships at ABCNews' Political Unit and at the Atlantic Monthly. He comes from a family of writers: His father, Chris Graff, was head of the Associated Press bureau in Vermont for nearly 30 years, and his mother, Nancy Price Graff, is an editor, author, and historian. His grandfather, Bert McCord, was the drama critic for the New York Herald Tribune.

He can be reached at ggraff AT washingtonian DOT com.