Jonathan Alter, a Newsweek senior editor, has written the widely acclaimed "Between The Lines" column since 1991, examining politics, media and society at large. Alter is also an originator and author of the weekly "Conventional Wisdom Watch," which uses up, down and sideways arrows to measure and lampoon the news. As an editor, he helps shape the magazine's overall news coverage.

Alter has covered the past five presidential campaigns for Newsweek and frequently interviewed American presidents and other world leaders, including, most recently, Mikhail Gorbachev. In recent years, he has written extensively about the crisis of America's at-risk children, drug abuse, weapons of mass destruction and a wide variety of other issues.

Since 1996, Alter has also been a contributing correspondent for NBC News, where he appears regularly on all NBC broadcasts including "Today," "NBC Nightly News," NBC News specials and MSNBC. In spring 1997, Alter was the Ferris Visiting Professor of Press and Politics at Princeton University.

Alter has earned many awards for his political columns, including the 1994 Clarion Award from Women in Communications for Best Magazine Opinion Column, and the 1993 National Headliner Award for Consistently Outstanding Feature Column. In 2002, he received the John Bartlow Martin Award for his reporting on the death penalty.

His many awards for media criticism include the 1987 Lowell Mellett Award and two New York State Bar Association Media Awards. In 1995, Alter was selected as one of the nation's most influential media critics in a survey of leading media executives and scholars published by the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University. He also won the 1987 Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business Reporting, and a Mentoring USA Award for encouraging mentoring.

Alter joined Newsweek as an associate editor in the Nation section in March 1983, and became media critic the following year. He was named a senior writer in February 1987 and a senior editor in September 1991. For two years prior to joining Newsweek, Alter was an editor at The Washington Monthly. He has also been a freelance writer for such publications as The New Republic, Esquire, Slate, Rolling Stone and The New York Times.

A Chicago native, Alter received his B.A. in history with honors from Harvard in 1979. He is the author of "The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope" (Simon & Schuster, 2006), co-author of "Selecting a President" (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux) and the co-editor of "Inside the System" (Prentice Hall).