Markos Kounalakis
Advisory Board Member
President and Publisher, Washington Monthly magazine
 
Markos Kounalakis is a print and network broadcast journalist and author who covered wars and revolutions, both civil and technological. He worked as the NBC Radio and Mutual News Moscow correspondent and covered the fall of the Soviet Union as well as the war in Afghanistan. He reported the overthrow of communism for Newsweek in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria, the rise of both democratic institutions in Hungary and of ethnic strife in Yugoslavia. He was based in Rome and Vienna and later ran the magazine’s Prague satellite bureau for over a year.

Mr. Kounalakis has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The International Herald-Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, and many other regional and international newspapers and magazines. He is the author of the book Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton (1993) and co-author of Beyond Spin: The Power of Strategic Corporate Journalism (1999).

Born to Greek refugees in San Francisco in 1956, Mr. Kounalakis received a public education in the Bay Area and received his Bachelor's degree in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1978. He received his MSc in Journalism from Columbia University in 1988, was a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow in Europe (1988-1989), and an International Journalism Graduate Fellow at the University of Southern California (1995-1996). Today, he serves on the Board of Visitors at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism; Board of Advisors at Georgetown College; on both the Wilson Council at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and on the Center¹s Board of Advisors for the Southeast Europe Project; and formerly served as Chairman of Internews Network 2002-2004; Vice Chairman of the California State World Trade Commission 2001-2003; Board of Trustees of the Western Policy Center 2001-2005. In June 2003, he chaired a multinational reconstruction conference in Athens, Greece where Iraq's media laws were drafted.

Markos Kounalakis is married to Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis, president of AKT Development, a land development corporation in Sacramento. Mr. Kounalakis is AKT Development's executive vice president.