Mark Nelson

Washington D.C.

Former Senior Director of the National Endowment for Democracy, head the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA)

Mark Nelson is a media, governance, and democracy expert, currently based in Washington D.C.  Since 2020, Nelson has served on Facebook's News Integrity Expert Circle, which is advising the company on ways to improve the quality and transparency of news products shared on the platform. 

He is former Senior Director of the National Endowment for Democracy where he headed the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA). Nelson joined CIMA from the World Bank, where he spent 17 years in Paris and Washington as a media and governance expert.

From 1985 through 1996, Nelson was European diplomatic correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, based in Brussels, Berlin, and Paris. He covered the negotiations leading to the Maastricht Treaty, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the war in Bosnia. From 1992 to 1993 on leave from the Wall Street Journal, he was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he focused on the conflict in former Yugoslavia.