Nina Munk (born 1967) is an American journalist and non-fiction author. She is a Contributing Editor at Vanity Fair, where she writes about finance and business, and is the author of Fools Rush In: Jerry Levin, Steve Case, and the Unmaking of Time Warner.
Munk was born in Canada to businessman and philanthropist Peter Munk and University of Toronto professor Linda Munk. She spent her childhood in Switzerland before moving to Toronto for high school. She received a B.A. in comparative literature from Smith College in 1988, an M.A. in French literature and language from Middlebury College in 1989, and, in 1992, an M.S. with honors from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where she was awarded the Philip Greer Memorial Scholarship for outstanding business and financial journalism. Munk lives in New York City.
Munk's work has appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Forbes, and Fortune. Before joining Vanity Fair as a Contributing Editor, she was a Senior Writer at Fortune and a Senior Editor at Forbes. Among other honors, she has won three Business Journalist of the Year Awards and three Front Page Awards. Her article "Rich Harvard, Poor Harvard," published in the August 2009 issue of Vanity Fair, was nominated for the 2010 Gerald Loeb Award.
Her book about the merger of AOL and Time Warner, Fools Rush In: Jerry Levin, Steve Case, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner, was published by HarperCollins in 2004 and widely praised for its in-depth reporting. According to the New York Times Review of Books, it is "the best [book] so far" on the subject of AOL Time Warner. In 2008, Munk co-wrote The Art of Clairtone: The Making of Design Icon, a coffee-table book about the celebrated Canadian stereo manufacturer Clairtone Sound Corporation, a company co-founded by her father in 1958. Archival photographs, documents, and artifacts gathered for and used in The Art of Clairtone were displayed in an exhibition about Clairtone at the Design Exchange museum in 2008.
Munk is currently writing a book for Doubleday about the crusade to end extreme poverty in Africa. To be published in 2011, the book was inspired by a profile of the economist Jeffrey Sachs that Munk wrote for Vanity Fair in 2007.
As a sideline to her journalism career, Munk founded UrbanHound.com, a website for dog owners, in 2000. The website led to two spin-off books: Urbanhound: The New York City Dog's Ultimate Survival Guide, co-authored by Munk in 2001; and The Complete Healthy Dog Handbook, written by veterinarian Betsy Brevitz in 2009. But while Urbanhound.com was a critical success, Munk conceded to the New York Times that it never made much money. In November 2009, FetchDog, an e-commerce and catalog company based in Maine, acquired UrbanHound.com from Munk for an undisclosed sum.
