Alison Smale

Who is Alison Smale?

Alison Smale is a British journalist. In December 2008, Smale became the Executive Editor of the International Herald Tribune, after being promoted from Managing Editor, making her the first woman to be in charge of the paper.

The Independent, in an article about the IHT's redesign in April 2009, which Smale oversaw, called her "the most powerful British female editor overseas."

Prior, she had been the Deputy Foreign Editor at The New York Times. She organized much of the paper's coverage of the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan.

In her reporting days, she was The Associated Press bureau chief for Eastern Europe, where she covered the rise of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and changes in Russia. She is now based in Paris.

She covered the anti-Communist revolutions in Eastern Europe and, on the night of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, crossed Checkpoint Charlie along with the first East Germans to do so.

Smale studied journalism at Stanford University in the 1970s.

She received the America Award of the Italy-USA Foundation in 2009.