In Sept. 2010, Jim Rosenberg (@jerotus) was named Head of Social Media at the World Bank, where he oversees global social media efforts,including crisis response, campaigns, governance and standards. Worldbank.org is one of the top online destinations for developmentresearch and data, visited 2.5 million times a month with content innearly 60 languages. Owned by 187 member countries, the World Bank is a vital source of financial and technical assistance to developing countries for investments in education, health, public administration, infrastructure, financial and private sector development, agricultureand environmental and natural resource management.
Previously, Jim spent nearly four years as communications team lead at the microfinance center CGAP for a global mobile phone banking program supported by UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. As part of the Technology Program at CGAP, Jim facilitated a culture of external engagement through media relations, blogging, social networking, and live events. He managed CGAP’s role in the GSMA Mobile Money Summits in 2008 (Cairo) 2009 (Barcelona) and 2010 (Rio de Janeiro), as well as at the Clinton Global Initiative (2008).
Jim created one of the first blogs in the World Bank Group, http://technology.cgap.org, which has become a prominent voice in the microfinance and mobile telecom community, routinely cited in trade and mainstream media. While at CGAP, Jim proactively sought and obtained coverage of major CGAP projects and knowledge work in Reuters, the Economist, WIRED, NPR, the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor, CNN.com, as well as dozens of national news outlets in Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, India, Mongolia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and South Africa, among others. Jim first joined the World Bank in 2004 as the Multimedia Editor for the South Asia region.
Jim has nearly eight years of experience as a radio journalist. He has been a producer for Bob Edwards at XM Satellite Radio, and for four years was a local radio reporter at NPR affiliate WAMU-FM where he covered business and technology. His beat took him all over the mid-Atlantic – from the ‘dot bomb’ fallout of the technology sector tothe workplace challenges facing lower-income residents, as well as gubernatorial and US Senate campaign coverage in Maryland and Virginia. Jim was also the lead reporter for WAMU’s coverage of Sept.11th, and its aftermath at the Pentagon. He contributed stories frequently to Marketplace, the public radio business program of record in the United States. His work was recognized with two New York Festivals Bronze WorldMedals, as well as a regional Associated Press award. Before joining WAMU, Jim was the radio producer for the Washington bureau of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Jim was born and raised in Scottsdale, Arizona. He left home for Los Angeles where he received his bachelor’s in English and Spanish with honors, cum laude from Loyola Marymount University. After school, the Rotary Foundation named him an ambassadorial scholar to the University of Seville, Spain for one year. Jim returned to the U.S. to earn his master’s in Journalism from Columbia University in New York, where he was a research assistant for the Alfred I. duPont Center for Broadcast Journalism. He has lived in the same Washington D.C. zip code for 12 years.
