Alex Markels

Alex Markels wrote his first newspaper story, a jazz music review, as a high school student in Palo Alto, California. But his journalism career didn't begin in earnest until 1989, when he published stories in the New York Observer while still a student at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. When his advisors, former Newsweek editor Bruce Porter and Karen Rothmyer (now managing editor of The Nation), asked him where he hoped to work, he named Outside Magazine, a monthly he'd read since his teenage years mountaineering and skiing in the California Sierra. He soon found himself fact-checking and proofreading articles written by the likes of Tim Cahill and John Krakauer, whose work he'd long admired.
     Markels then returned to New York to help launch a winter sports magazine for the New York Times Co. The magazine, Snow Country, quickly became the nation's largest-circulation ski magazine, with more than 460,000 readers. He later established an editorial bureau in Vail, Colorado, and began writing stories for the New York Times  and for the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, both of which ran major features about the growth of the extreme sports movement.
     In 1994, a Wall Street Journal editor who'd read an especially riveting story about the life and death of a professional skier, offered Markels a job as a staff reporter in the paper's New York bureau. So he returned to Manhattan and spent the next three years on the management/workplace beat under the tutelage of  editors Roger Ricklefs, Joann Lublin and Carol Hymowitz.
     He published Page One stories on subjects like corporate downsizing and bosses who won't go home when they're sick, as well as the occasional feature about his outdoor passions. Eager to broaden his reporting and pursue a book-length writing project, he left the paper in the summer of 1997 and moved to Minturn, Colorado, a 1,100-population railroad town on Vail's backside where he helped launch the town's first radio station, Minturn Public Radio, 107.9 FM. Over the next five years, Markels published articles in Outside, Wired, Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones and many others. Beginning in 2002, Alex became a contributing editor at US News & World Report, where editors Gordon Witkin, Susan Headden and Marc Silver assigned more than 80 stories, such as articles on the presidential election, importation of prescription drugs and North America's first explorers. He also contributes to the New York Times, working with editors including  Trish Hall and Stuart Emmrich.
      In 2003, Markels was awarded the Ted Scripps Fellowship at the University of Colorado's Center for Environmental Journalism, in Boulder, where he studied environmental science and policy.
     He then became the supervising editor at National Public Radio's Morning Edition program in Washington, D.C., where he helped oversee the show's coverage and production. Most recently, he was a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report magazine, where he covered the housing downturn and resulting economic crisis.
     He and his wife, Holly, recently moved from Washington, D.C. to Boulder, with their sons Moses and Atticus.