Marc Ambinder brings twenty years of communications leadership, with experience at the highest levels of journalism (ABC News, CBS News, The Atlantic), of industry (Disney/ABC, Facebook) and of academia (Penn, USC). He is considered by peers to be a well-informed observer about national security, digital security and political journalism.
He is a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where he created the Annenberg Digital Security Initiative, an initiative which provides advanced digital security and threat analysis training to hundreds of student reporters and communicators. As part of USC’s Election Cybersecurity Initiative, he developed a comprehensive counter-disinformation curriculum for election officials and political candidates.
His third book, “The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983,” was published by Simon & Schuster in 2018.
He spent 11 years in Washington, D.C., as a television producer, a White House correspondent and as a long-form magazine writer, and for several years was politics editor at The Atlantic. As a consultant, he developed the communications strategy for Facebook/WhatsApp’s endpoint encryption roll-out, created a branded content strategy for a start-up in the talent and people space, and wrote speeches for corporate CEOs.
In 2018, he was awarded a Nuclear Security Innovation fellowship from the N Square collaborative, a cross-disciplinary group of scientists, entrepreneurs, technologists and communicators working to transform how we educate younger minds about nuclear policy. He is also a consultant for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation, where he helped create an immersive educational experience centered on presidential decision-making during crises.
He also works with Spycraft Entertainment to develop espionage-based television series and movies. He has a BA in American History from Harvard University.
His awards include a DuPont silver baton.
Contact Ambinder at commlead@usc.edu.