Tom Watson

Tom Watson is a journalist, author, media critic, entrepreneur and consultant who has worked at the confluence of media technology and social change for more than a decade. Tom is the author of CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World (Wiley, 2008) a best-selling book that chronicles the rise of online social activism.

He is also the managing partner and co-founder of CauseWired, a New York-based consultancy specializing in helping nonprofits and foundations tell their stories and activate their supporters.

During his long career as journalist and blogger, Tom has written for The New York Times, Huffington Post, Industry Standard, Inside, Worth and Contribute magazines, among many other publications. He writes about politics and media on his own popular blog, My Dirty Life & Times, and is the founder and editor of Newcritics, a group blog on popular culture.

Tom is also the publisher of onPhilanthropy.com, CauseWired’s extensive online resource for philanthropy professionals.

Previously, Tom served for nine years as chief strategy officer of Changing Our World, Inc., the international philanthropic services company he helped to found. Before joining the philanthropy sector, Tom was co-founder and co-editor of @NY, the pioneering Internet news and information service that chronicled the rise New York’s Silicon Alley new media in the mid-90s.

Early in his career, Tom was the executive editor of The Riverdale Press, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper in the Bronx, where he covered politics and won more than a dozen state and national awards for excellence in journalism.

Tom is a member of the board of directors of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, a progressive think tank based in New York. He holds a degree in English literature from Columbia University, where he served as an adjunct professor of new media at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in Mount Vernon, NY with his wife, artist Beryl Watson, and their three children, Veronica, Kelsey and Devon.