Mr. Gowing was a main news presenter for the BBC’s international 24-hour news channel BBC World News from 1996 to 2014. He presented The Hub with Nik Gowing, BBC World Debates, Dateline London, and location coverage of major global stories.
For eighteen years, he worked at ITN, where he was bureau chief in Rome and Warsaw, as well as diplomatic editor for Channel Four News. He has been a member of the councils of Chatham House, the Royal United Services Institute, and the Overseas Development Institute; the board of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy; and the advisory council at Wilton Park. In 1994, he was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center in the JF Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
Mr. Gowing's extensive reporting experience spans three decades in diplomacy, defense, and international security. He also has much sought-after analytical expertise on the failures to manage information in conflicts, crises, emergencies, and other times of tension. His peer-reviewed study at Oxford University, “Skyful of Lies and Black Swans,” predicts and identifies the new vulnerability, fragility, and brittleness of institutional power in the new, all-pervasive public information space. In 2016, he co-authored interim findings of the “Thinking the Unthinkable” study, based on sixty top-level confidential interviews of corporate and public service leaders, as well as hundreds more conversations with millennials.
In 2014, he was appointed a visiting professor at Kings College, London in the School of Social Science and Public Policy and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Geo-Economics. In 2016, he became a visiting professor at Nanyang University, Singapore. He was awarded honorary doctorates by Exeter University in 2012 and Bristol University in 2015 for both his ongoing cutting edge analyses and distinguished career in international journalism.