Michael Rogers

One of the nation's leading experts on the impact of technology on business and society, Michael Rogers is an interactive media pioneer, novelist and journalist, as well as author of the Weblog The Practical Futurist.

Previously he was vice president of The Washington Post Company's new media division, helping guide both the newspaper and its sister publication Newsweek in the new century, as well as editor and general manager of Newsweek.com on MSNBC. Rogers is also a best-selling novelist whose fiction explores the human impact of technology.

He has won numerous journalism awards, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science Distinguished Science Writing Award for coverage of a total solar eclipse in the Sahara Desert; and the Computer Press Association award for a feature on neural network computing. He shared the National Headliner Award for coverage of the Chernobyl disaster.

Before turning to new media, Rogers was a writer for Newsweek and Rolling Stone, a founding editor of Outside magazine, as well as a contributor of fiction, nonfiction, criticism and photography to dozens of publications. At Newsweek, he launched and then wrote the Technology section for 10 years, as well as reporting on environmental issues. His assignments took him to Science City in Japan, horseback riding through inner China, and hiking above the Arctic Circle in Alaska.

In 1989, Rogers co-produced Newsweek's Upheaval in China, an early experiment in hypertext multimedia journalism. In 1992, he became managing editor of Newsweek Interactive, the world's first general-interest multimedia magazine on CD-ROM. He has subsequently produced six non-fiction CD-ROMs, as well as managing the development of Newsweek Interactive's award-winning online multimedia service, which launched on Prodigy in 1994, America Online in 1996 and the Internet in 1998. He was executive producer of Newsweeks Parent's Guide to Childrens Software, released on CD- ROM in 1995 and adapted for the World Wide Web in 1996. In 1997 he was the business and technology editor for washingtonpost.com. In 2000 he helped create an extensive multimedia partnership between Newsweek, The Washington Post, NBC television and MSNBC. Under his leadership Newsweek.com became the largest newsweekly site in the world, with more visitors than its two domestic competitors combined.

Rogers has written five books of fiction and nonfiction which have been published worldwide, optioned for film and television, and selected by the Book of the Month Club. His most recent novel, Forbidden Sequence, a suspense story about illegal human genetic engineering, is currently under development as a feature film. He is also a frequent public speaker in the US, Europe and Asia on technology and new media. Rogers studied physics and creative writing at Stanford University and has taught creative writing at the University of California. He lives in New York and is currently at work on his next novel.