Douglas Herbert
Douglas Herbert, a New York-born, Paris-based TV commentator with France 24, parlayed his early love for languages, literature, and travel into a journalism career that has taken him from New York and Philadelphia to Estonia, Russia, the UK and, for the past 17 years, France.
Douglas’s first “posting” was his childhood bedroom on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where he edited a hand-scribbled Sunday newspaper – “House News” – for a readership of two: his mom and dad. Over a decade later, as a rookie reporter in Moscow following the Soviet collapse, Douglas scored his first big news scoop by revealing the source of the sesame seeds on the Big Mac buns at Russia’s first McDonald’s. (Spoiler alert: Finland.)
As a freelance writer in the Moscow Bureau of The New York Times in the mid-90s, Douglas reported on a catastrophic oil spill in Russia’s frigid Far North, near the Arctic Circle. Back in the US, he segued from Kremlin intrigue…to covering a county courthouse, and a swathe of working-class industrial towns, as a suburban reporter for a large metropolitan daily, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Douglas subsequently moved to CNN, covering business and markets for the network’s financial news website in New York City, before crossing the Pond to work at CNN International, in London, as a multimedia feature reporter specializing in EU issues. At France 24, a Paris-based news channel that he joined at its launch in 2006, Douglas offers his perspective on international affairs, working in both English and French. He has covered numerous G7 and G20 summits, from Mexico to Québec to Northern Ireland, along with four US presidential elections. Last month, Douglas helped lead France 24’s coverage of the Biden-Harris inauguration, from Washington, DC. Douglas received his Master’s Degree in Russian Studies from Harvard University, having studied at the Moscow Energy Institute in the late 1980s, in the heyday of Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’ reforms. He is a regular conference speaker on US politics and French and Russian society. In recent years, Douglas has also taught a graduate-level fact-checking course at Paris’s Sciences Po journalism school.
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