ABOUT

An award-winning correspondent for Newsweek, he chronicled the break-up of communist Europe and German unification and, subsequently, the decade-long war in the Balkans. Between 1999 and 2001, he worked in Kosovo with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, after which he returned to Newsweek as the magazine’s Europe editor.

Michael is the author of the Alexander Complex, an examination of the psychology of American empire builders, and the Year that Changed the World: the Untold Story of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, an eye-witness account of the revolutions of 1989, published in eleven languages and rated one of the “ten best books of 2009” by the Washington Post.

Michael Meyer appears regularly as a commentator for MSNBC, CNN, NPR and other broadcast networks; his work has appeared in most of the world’s major newspapers. He is a member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations and was an inaugural fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

More recently he showed how climate change was imperiling the lives and ancient culture of the last hunters using dog sleds in northwest Greenland. The program “On Thin Ice” produced for nbcnews.com is a Webby honoree.

In Mali he documented how the artisanal gold mining industry was exploiting children and poisoning them with mercury. The NBC program called “The Real Price of Gold, ” was nominated for an Emmy. In Bangladesh he documented the largest poisoning in history, when arsenic was discovered in thousands of hand pumped wells installed with “The Best of Intentions.” In Vietnam he followed the tragic trail of “Agent Orange,” and the devastating effect the U.S. military’s spraying of the defoliant had on the environment and the people. In the United States he produced hour long documentaries on threatened marine environments and the Alaskan oil spill.

Prior to forming his own company, Messy Moment Media, Tkach was the principal long form producer for Christiane Amanpour – CNN’s chief international correspondent. For thirteen years they collaborated on a string of award winning CNN documentaries and over 30 TV magazine reports for CBS News 60 Minutes. He also produced hour long documentaries for National Geographic, ABC News Turning Point and 48 Hours. His expose of modern day slavery, “Of Human Bondage, Slavery Today” won the Dupont Silver Baton, News & Documentary Emmy and the Overseas Press Club Awards. Prior to directing the Environmental Reporting Program at AKU GSMC, Tkach taught broadcast journalism at the University of Indonesia and the University of the South Pacific through multiple Fulbright grants. He has also taught at the Sciences Po Journalism School in Paris. Tkach earned his MS in Journalism from Columbia University.

He then spent nearly a decade at the St. Petersburg Times (now Tampa Bay Times) in Florida, where he was a national reporter, assistant managing editor, managing editor, and digital publisher. Then he moved to The Poynter Institute, where he served as dean of the faculty for four and a half years.

Stephen has served four times as a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes, and he was a regional judge for the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists for three years. He also has taught at National Writers Workshops and at the Nieman Narrative Conference at Harvard University, and has conducted writing and leadership training for journalists throughout the United States, in the Caribbean, East Africa, and South Africa.

Stephen has won the InterAction Award for Humanitarian Reporting and the international reporting award given by the National Association of Black Journalists, and was a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. In 2002, the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors named him the state’s best reporter.

He joined the Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications in June 2015.