Justin Burke

Justin Burke is a journalist with over 35 years of experience. He began his journalism career as an intern for CBS News covering the political conventions of 1980. He subsequently worked for NBC News and TBS, for whom he served as a production assistant during the 1986 Goodwill Games in Moscow. Burke joined the Associated Press in 1987 as a general news reporter based at the agency’s Detroit Bureau. From 1990-93, he was a Moscow correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. During that time, he chronicled the collapse of communism, as well as the rise of the warlord era in Afghanistan. Burke later served as the chief of the Monitor’s bureau in Germany, covering the evolution of the European Union and NATO’s post-Soviet transition. During the 1995-96 academic year, he was a visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard. From there, Burke moved to the Open Society Institute in New York, where, he founded Eurasianet, a news website covering developments in Eurasia. Burke has been the website’s managing editor since its inception in 1999. In 2016, Eurasianet became an independent news organization hosted by Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, and the following year the website was nominated for a Webby award, one of digital media’s leading honors, for its coverage of developments in the former Soviet Union. In the fall of 2017, Burke joined the faculty at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs as a lecturer, focusing on helping students improve their communications skills.

Burke holds a BA in Soviet Studies from Boston University. Among his academic publications are Internal Migration: A Civil Society Challenge in Russia’s Torn Safety Nets, Mark Field & Judyth Twigg eds. (St. Martin’s Press, 2000); and Ukraine: State Building and Stability (OSF, 1999). He also authored an article on colonial American history, William Livingston: An Accidental Politician (New York Archives Magazine, Spring 2008). In his free time, Burke has completed nine marathons, including the 2013 Boston Marathon.