Born in London, Alison Smale is a veteran journalist, manager and analyst with nearly 40 years’ experience in media – some 20 years with The New York Times, 17 years with The AP, three with UPI – before she recently spent two years as Undersecretary General for global communications at the United Nations in New York. In her long career, she covered Cold War Germany, the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and perestroika in the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet bloc. She reported from the Balkan wars of the 1990s and organized all AP coverage of those conflicts, later doing the same at The NYT for the 1999 war in Kosovo. She was in New York on 9/11 and helped organize awardwinning NYT coverage before being sent to Paris for nine years first as managing editor, then executive editor of the International Herald Tribune, the only woman ever to hold that post. From 2013 to 2017 she served as Berlin bureau chief of The New York Times.
She speaks fluent German, French and Russian and is married to Russian concert pianist and composer Sergei Dreznin.
