Philip Seib is a professor of Journalism and Public Diplomacy and a professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, as well as the director of USC's Center on Public Diplomacy. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Headline Diplomacy: How News Coverage Affects Foreign Policy; The Global Journalist: News and Conscience in a World of Conflict; Beyond the Front Lines: How the News Media Cover a World Shaped by War; Broadcasts from the Blitz: How Edward R. Murrow Helped Lead America into War; New Media and the New Middle East; The Al Jazeera Effect: How the New Global Media Are Reshaping World Politics; Toward A New Public Diplomacy: Redirecting U.S. Foreign Policy; Global Terrorism and New Media: The Post-Al Qaeda Generation; and Al Jazeera English. He is editor of the Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communication, co-editor of the Palgrave Macmillan Series in Global Public Diplomacy, and co-editor of the journal Media, War, and Conflict.

The 2011 uprisings in the Middle East proved that democracy retains its appeal, even to people who have long lived without it. They also illustrated how, in a high-speed, media-centric world, conventional diplomacy has become an anachronism. Not only do events move quickly, but so too does public reaction to those events. The cushion of time that enabled policymakers to judiciously gather information and weigh alternatives is gone. Real-Time Diplomacy analyzes the essential, but often unhappy, marriage between diplomacy and new media, evaluating media's reach and influence, and determining how policy makers might take advantage of media's real-time capabilities rather than being driven by them.