PERSON: Jeff Zeleny

Senior Washington Correspondent

Jeff Zeleny was named ABC News Senior Washington Correspondent in February 2013. In this role he covers Congress and national politics for the network, reporting for all broadcasts and platforms including “Good Morning America,” “World News with Diane Sawyer,” “Nightline” and contributes regularly to the “This Week” roundtable on Sunday mornings. Zeleny also reports for all ABC News digital properties including “Power Players,” the ABC News/Yahoo! News digital video series.<br> <br> Mr. Zeleny has traveled to all 50 states and reported from more than two-dozen countries, across six continents. He is one of the country’s premier political journalists and his reporting often drives the news cycle for days. After the 2012 election, Zeleny was the first reporter to reveal that Karl Rove was starting a new group to focus on recruiting seasoned Republican candidates to run in the next round of Congressional races. He also broke the news in 2012 that President Obama would support a Democratic Super PAC, a reversal from his strongly held position in 2008.<br> <br> Prior to joining ABC News, Mr. Zeleny was the national political correspondent for The New York Times, where he was the lead reporter on the 2012 presidential campaign. He also covered Barack Obama’s road to the White House in 2008 and his administration, traveling to Cairo in June 2009 to cover the President’s first major address to the Muslim world and to Oslo to cover the president receiving a Nobel Peace Prize. He also covered Congress for the Times.<br> <br> Before his tenure at the Times, Mr. Zeleny was the national political correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. There, he covered the 2004 presidential campaign and the first years of the George W. Bush administration.<br> <br> Mr. Zeleny joined the Chicago Tribune in 2000 as a reporter on the Metropolitan desk in Chicago, where he was a member of the reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism for documenting gridlock in the nation’s air traffic system.<br> <br> He began his career at the Des Moines Register, where he covered the opening round of the 2000 presidential campaign. He graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1996, where he studied news-editorial journalism and political science. He has also worked at The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the Florida Times Union and the Lincoln Journal Star.<br> <br> Jeff Zeleny is a native of Exeter, Nebraska and he currently lives in Washington D.C.<br> <br> — abcnews.com