Nik Gowing was a main news presenter for the BBC’s international 24-hour news channel BBC World News 1996-2014. He presented The Hub with Nik Gowing, BBC World Debates, Dateline London, plus location coverage of major global stories.

For 18 years he worked at ITN where he was bureau chief in Rome and Warsaw, and Diplomatic Editor for Channel Four News (1988-1996). He has been a member of the councils of Chatham House (1998–2004), the Royal United Services Institute (2005—present), and the Overseas Development Institute (2007-2014), the board of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy including vice chair (1996-2005), and the advisory council at Wilton Park (1998-2012 ). In 1994 he was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center in the J. F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Nik Gowing has extensive reporting experience over three decades in diplomacy, defence and international security. He also has a much sought-after analytical expertise on the failures to manage information in the new transparent environments of conflicts, crises, emergencies and times of tension. His peer-reviewed study at Oxford University is «Skyful of Lies and Black Swans». It predicts and identifies the new vulnerability, fragility and brittleness of institutional power in the new all-pervasive public information space.

In 2016 Nik Gowing produced a new interim report for the Churchill 2015 21st Century Statesmanship Global Leaders Programme called «Thinking the Unthinkable». A New Imperative for Leadership in the Digital Age, the report is a rolling, ongoing, dynamic investigation into why leaders have appeared more unable or unwilling than ever to anticipate the biggest issues of recent time.

Gowing was appointed a Visiting Professor at Kings College, London in the School of Social Science and Public Policy in 2014. He is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Geo-Economics.