Foreign Correspondence

No this is not a repeat of our previous interview with Ian Urbina ( @ian_urbina ) from three years ago. Ian comes back on the pod to discuss the second season of The Outlaw Ocean Podcast, the audio arm of his independent non-profit news organization The Outlaw Ocean Project. We also talk about work-life balance and his old job working at the Blue Man Group. Countries featured: China, North Korea,...

Elon Musk incited the troll hordes upon Emily Glazer. Not only did she live to tell the tale, she went on to write bombshell stories on Musk's drug use. Talk about not pulling your punches. Glazer, who reports on power and influence at the Wall Street Journal, talks about her roller coaster career and how she manages to produce so many big stories. Countries featured: United States, Mexico Publica...

Humo: Murder and Silence in El Salvador connects a gruesome story of mass murder in El Salvador to a larger shift in the country's society with the election of Nayib Bukele. Daniel Alvarenga ( @pipianspice ), host of the English-language version of the podcast, brings years of experience reporting on El Salvador as well as his experience as a Salvedorean-American to the show. He discusses his back...

“If someone were going to make this story into a movie, I want to hear about the scenes that would be in it.” Notable scenes of Jen Wieczner's career include commuting from Boston to New York while juggling a juice bar job and a journalism internship, scrambling for interviews in Japan, and attending the Goldman Sachs CEO's late night DJ set. Now a features writer at New York Magazine, she discuss...

"To tab. Verb. To rewrite a news article in a tabloid-style." We learn a new word in this episode of the podcast from Sean Collins Walsh, a City Hall reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Sean looks back on his first job at the tabloid Philadelphia Daily News and a career that has landed him reporting back in his hometown of Philly. Countries featured: USA, Uganda Publications featured: Philadelp...

A promising journalism career briefly takes a dark turn down the path of Instagram influencing. Alden Wicker, a freelance journalist and author, managed to come out the other side. Her career as a sustainable fashion journalist - as the editor of EcoCult and freelancer for numerous big name publications - culminated with her book To Dye For. We also discuss manifesting, MDMA and sex parties.  Coun...

Born in Mexico to American parents, David Luhnow ( @davidluhnow ) returned to report on the country for decades. Luhnow talks about the tectonic shifts in Mexico and yet, how through all this time, the country's institutions continue to fail. The mental toll of years reporting on Mexico's drug war contributed to his leaving to become the current United Kingdom bureau chief for The Wall Street Jour...

Leaving school at age 16 for a technical apprenticeship, Andrew Downie ( @adowniebrazil ) would stumble into his first journalism job while traveling in Mexico. Within five years he'd be working for The New York Times in Haiti. After decades of covering Latin America, Andrew now lives in Spain where he is working on a biography of soccer legend Pelé. Countries featured: Brazil, Haiti, Mexico, Spai...

Business is a lot like sports. It's competitive and stock prices keep the score. Also keeping score is one of the world's highest powered business journalists: Liana Baker ( @LianaBaker ), managing editor for the Bloomberg deals team in the United States. She talks about how dabbling in sports, foreign reporting and environment eventually led her down the path of hardcore business reporting on the...

Can you name the world's eight bear species? Gloria Dickie ( @GloriaDickie ), a London-based Climate & Environment Correspondent for Reuters, has documented them all in her book Eight Bears. Gloria tells the improbable story of how she conceived and reported the book while working as a freelancer and living on the road as she traveled the world in search of each bear. Countries featured: USA,...

There are no happy endings in Syria after more than a decade of war. Lina Sinjab ( @BBCLinaSinjab ), a BBC correspondent based in Beirut, talks about covering the civil war from the start and the terrible toll it has taken on her and her home country. As a multi-format journalist, she regularly produces radio and video documentaries as well as written articles from Syria and the wider region. Coun...

Climate change reporting often means documenting some of the worst events that ever happen to people. But Kendra Pierre-Louis ( @kendrawrites ), whether reporting for the podcast How to Save the Planet, or posting pictures of bear sex, manages to make it not totally depressing. Kendra, an independent climate reporter, talks about gradually finding her way into journalism, reporting in India and My...

The day the war broke out in Ukraine, Valerie Hopkins ( @VALERIEinNYT ) was in Kiev unsure of what was about to happen. Only a few months into working for The New York Times, she was at the center of the biggest story in the world. She now reports on the war as one of a dwindling number foreign correspondents in Russia, interviewing Russians who see the conflict in very different terms than the re...

A chance meeting with some French journalists in a New Delhi park led Will Brown ( @_Will_Brown ) to quit his job as a teacher to become a reporter. After freelancing doesn't work out, he finds himself back in London working at The Economist, eventually being dispatched as a stringer to Senegal. He also talks about covering the outbreak of the Tigray War from the Sudan-Ethiopia border as Africa Co...

The Society of News Design's best designer in the world, Marco Hernandez ( @TmarcoH ) tells us how he grew up in Costa Rican coffee country and has been recruited to a series of jobs that took him around the world. Ever humble, he also talks about how he likes to draw insects to relax and maintains a website dedicated to his failed projects. Countries featured: Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Singapore, US...

The kidnapped Chibok girls were the identifiable victims of Nigeria's war with Boko Haram islamist insurgents. Drew Hinshaw ( @drewhinshaw ) talks about reporting around Europe and Africa for the Wall Street Journal while co-writing an award-winning book about the Chibok girls on nights and weekends. We also find out what happens when you wear the wrong pants to cover a press conference with Barac...

Russia invaded Ukraine and the next day Thomas Peter was crossing the border from Poland to cover the war. Tom, a Reuters photographer, thought he understood Russia after spending his 20s living in the country. But little could prepare him for the indiscriminate brutality he saw there. He’ll also talk about his childhood in Soviet East Germany, covering the early days of COVID-19 near its epicente...

Turns out Russian mercenaries stand ready to troll journalists and produce big-budget action movies in war-torn African countries. Neil Munshi, West Africa Editor now for Bloomberg, went to the Central African Republic to report on that mercenary group, while writing an award-winning series of stories seeking to explain the conflicts raging in most of the countries in the region.  Countries featur...

In this additional bonus content, Jon Lee Anderson talks about what has gone wrong with democracy in Latin America and discusses what it's like to work for the hallowed magazine The New Yorker. Jon Lee's story about Chilean President - https://bit.ly/3ukSKE5   Follow us on Twitter @foreignpod or on Facebook at facebook.com/foreignpod Music: LoveChances (makaih.com) by Makaih Beats From: freemusica...

Have Hugo Chavez and Barack Obama read your book? Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker can say that they have. Jon Lee tells us about his early years chronicling rebel groups and insurgents from Latin America to Asia, culminating in writing a book about the quintessential guerrilla Che Guavara. Working for The New Yorker, he has gotten to know many world leaders more intimately than most any living...

The open ocean is about as foreign as it gets. No country can claim it. And as a result, a whole lot of bad stuff happens there. Ian Urbina ( @ian_urbina ) talks about his series of stories for The New York Times about lawlessness at sea, that later became a book and now a non-profit journalism initiative called The Outlaw Ocean Project. Urbina will also talk about how his stories were made into t...

History matters to Julie McCarthy ( @JulieMcCarthyJM ). She’s gone around the world with National Public Radio to Tokyo, London, Rio de Janeiro, Jerusalem, Islamabad, New Delhi and Manila, trying to understand each place through its history. Her reporting brings to life events like the Hiroshima bombing and the partition of India, explaining how they continue to reverberate today. Most recently sh...

Little Uruguay, we don’t hear from many correspondents based there. Lucinda Elliott ( @lucinda_elliott ) - who covers South America's Southern Cone of Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay for the Financial Times - tells us how she ended up there in the middle of the pandemic. That’s just one way Lucinda has come full circle, having also been laid off by the FT at the start of her career, only to...

The foreign country in this episode is the United States. Guga Chacra, a Brazilian journalist based in New York City, is one of the most recognizable faces of Brazilian TV news. With his signature shaggy hair and a legion of Twitter followers, he is known for his work with Globo TV, the 24 hour news channel Globo News, his column for newspaper O Globo and his radio show on CBN. Before he was a one...

Reporting the Arab Spring is the story of a lifetime. Evan Hill ( @evanhill ) tells us how a blog got him hired by Al Jazeera in the Middle East where he was sent to cover the Arab Spring, witnessing the Egyptian Revolution first hand from Tahrir Square. He discusses almost quitting journalism, only to later join the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times visual investigations team. Countries featu...