Nick Penniman is the president of the Democracy Fund, a foundation whose mission is to reduce the influence of well-financed interests over US politics.
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Previous to the Democracy Fund, he was executive director of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, which he founded with Arianna Huffington in 2009. Supported by large foundations and the Huffington Post, the operation established a nonprofit newsroom of seasoned journalists who reported on a variety of timely topics, most notably the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and its aftermath. The fund was favorably profiled in media publications like the American Journalism Review and the Columbia Journalism Review. In 2011, the Fund merged with the Center for Public Integrity, one of the largest investigative operations in the country.
In the two years previous to the the investigative fund, Penniman founded the American News Project and served as the Washington director of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, where he worked closely with broadcaster Bill Moyers. Moyers and Penniman first met in 1999, when Penniman was running a national grassroots organization called the Alliance for Democracy, which focused primarily on campaign finance reform and corporate globalization.
From 2005-2006 Penniman was the publisher of The Washington Monthly magazine. Before that he was the executive editor of an independent news and opinion website called TomPaine.com perhaps best known for the "op ads" it regularly ran on the opinion page of the New York Times.
He has also worked as the program director of the Campaign for America's Future, a multi-issue national nonprofit organization; the associate editor of the American Prospect, a monthly liberal magazine; editor of the Lincoln Journal, a weekly newspaper; and associate editor of the Missouri Historical Society.[1]
He has served on multiple nonprofit boards and advisory boards, including the Homeless Empowerment Project, which publishes Spare Change News, and the Roosevelt Institution.
He graduated from St. Lawrence University in 1992 with a degree in philosophy. While there, he started a number of student groups, was a member of the executive committee of the Thelomathesian Society (the student senate), an adviser to the board of trustees and the recipient of the top prize for poetry writing.
He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, where he attended the St. Louis Country Day School. His father, Nicholas G. Penniman IV, was publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and a senior executive with Pulitzer, Inc..[2][3]
He lives in Maryland with his wife and three children.