Foreign Correspondence

We prowl the halls of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team in the capable hands of Tim Cato ( @tim_cato ), a staff writer with The Athletic. Tim got into sports reporting as a 17-year-old fan, but now he’s seen too much and the fandom has melted away. Still, he loves his job reporting on the huge characters, power dynamics and colorful feature stories the NBA has to provide - even finding what’s i...

Ode to a Grecian journ(alist). Family looms large in this episode with Joanna Kakissis ( @joannakakissis ), a correspondent in Athens for National Public Radio, whose Greek parents instilled in her the importance of their culture from a young age. She made a mark early in her career as part of a Pulitzer finalist newspaper reporting team before returning to her roots in Greece where she has report...

As a journalist, who you are matters. Freelance journalist Fariba Nawa ( @faribanawa ) tells how she learned this the hard way. But her identity, that early in her career may have hindered her, has turned into a strength. She has gone from refugee to a reporter who covers refugees. She is an Afghan American proud of her heritage who also struggles with its deep patriarchy. Now setting her sights o...

A very special election episode! Libby Nelson ( @libbyanelson ) talks to us about how she is approaching U.S. presidential election coverage as Senior Deputy Policy Editor at Vox. As you may well have guessed, covering this election has turned out to be very different than we could have predicted. Libby also talks about how she came to work for journalism startups, becoming one of Vox’s first few...

What’s this? There’s more? We talk in-depth about his job helping shape the visual language of The New York Times and his approach to video journalism, as well as an offbeat story set in North Korea that never quite happened. Countries featured: North Korea, USA Jonah's short doc about zoonotic diseases - https://nyti.ms/2F0fOkS   Follow us on Twitter @foreignpod or on Facebook at facebook.com/for...

Gen X photo bum finds journalism, makes good. Well, ok, there’s about 15 more steps in the middle that leaves out. And like 60+ countries. Jonah Kessel ( @jonah_kessel ) is proof that the right camera can change someone’s life. Now at The New York Times, he is constantly trying to push the limits of what video and visuals can do, even when those limits are the visible spectrum of light.  Countries...

A love story between Cuban spies. Jungle warfare in Central America. A military coup in Chile. A roller coaster relationship with Fidel Castro. Lucia Newman, Latin America Editor and a Senior Correspondent in Chile for Al Jazeera English, has seen and reported on it all over several decades covering the region, dodging more than a few bullets along the way.  Countries featured: Nicaragua, El Salva...

What do you do when there's a pandemic on, but you are a video journalist with no choice but to go out to capture the images you need? Atish Patel ( @atishpatel , Insta: atishp ) a videographer for Agence France-Presse discusses the calculations he makes when deciding whether to go out. He also talks about how being fired helped him to change his perspective and have more fun with his job. Countri...

What insanity inspires 20,000 normal people to run 56 miles (90 kilometers) every year in South Africa? Ryan Lenora Brown ( @ryanlenorabrown ) tells us how Apartheid helped make this race a phenomenon. She talks about trying to tell stories that don’t revert to stereotypes of Africa, even as we ponder the ethics of white foreigners reporting on South Africa or Latin America. Countries featured: So...

Bopha Phorn ( @bophaphorn ) tells of hunting down a Russian pedophile and fearing for her life as she reported on deforestation in Cambodia. The International Women’s Media Foundation has honored her brave reporting with its Courage in Journalism Award. Bopha now reports for Voice of America’s Khmer language edition, a rare source of unrestricted news as Cambodia increasingly stifles press freedom...

The Feel Good Episode of the Year! Bangladeshi photographer Ismail Ferdous (IG: ismailferdous ) went from borrowing money to pay for a camera to his first paid project being published in the New Yorker. He lays out his philosophy of seeking the work that speaks to him and working on personal projects without thinking of where it will be published. Now a freelancer in New York City, he’s been publi...

From covering covert arms deals under Chilean dictator Pinochet to seven-hour speeches by Fidel Castro, Anthony Boadle ( @AnthonyBoadle ) has written the first draft of Latin America’s history over recent decades. Not without risk - he’s been kicked out of a country (but allowed back), had his apartment broken into (likely by state security) and is familiar with being followed by government handle...

Roving the African continent to report the bloodiest conflicts is a far cry from being a polished news anchor, sitting behind a desk. Tomi Oladipo (@Tomi_Oladipo) has shown incredible range in his career working for the BBC for 12 years in Africa before becoming a news presenter for German broadcaster DW News in Berlin. Tomi discusses the toll of continually reporting on violence and reflects back...

Sometimes you have to get fired again and again (and again) to figure out your place in the world. Ed Clowes’ ( @edclowes ) story is not your common journalistic tale. Kids, don’t try this one at home. He gets fired for increasingly noble reasons though, ultimately getting kicked out of the city-state of Dubai. Be warned, despite the title of this episode, it is more about the Middle East than Lon...

After public health got too depressing and following gorillas through the jungle proved monotonous, Laurel Chor ( @laurelchor ) turned to journalism. She quickly made a name for herself covering at civil unrest in Hong Kong, also doing a couple years' stretch working for the Vice News Tonight television show on HBO. She discusses her circuitous path in the industry that has taken her around the wo...

How do you cover violence in a thoughtful way? Megan Crepeau ( @crepeau ) had plenty of time to chew that question over working the overnight beat at The Chicago Tribune, trawling the city with police scanners and looking for news. Now she brings that perspective to covering Chicago’s main criminal court, one of the busiest in the United States. Megan talks about how the coronavirus outbreak is up...

Aarti Betigeri ( @pomegranitaa ) takes us from Australia to India and back again, touching on some new publications like Monocle magazine and geographies like Sri Lanka along the way. She also keeps it real about the struggles of working in a media landscape dominated by Murdoch and seeking more rights for Australian freelance journalists. We also talk about her experience through the Australian b...

The world of Chinese high finance is actually way more stupid and ridiculous than you probably realize. Seriously, sometimes millions or billions of dollars change hands for relatively stupid reasons like, delivery coffee + China, what’s the worst that could go wrong? Pete Sweeney ( @petesweeneypro ), an opinion columnist for Reuters Breakingviews, gives us a crash course. Also discussed: You migh...

Megha Rajagopalan ( @meghara ) brings top-notch investigative journalism to Buzzfeed - yes, the site that rose to prominence based on listicles. She installed Buzzfeed’s first bureau in Beijing, only to be kicked out of the country after revealing the depths of China’s police state. Reporting on surveillance and human rights has been the hallmark of her career, from writing about Myanmar’s opening...

"If you think it’s just fun, you’ve never interviewed Mick Jagger because that motherfucker will rip you into shreds." Freelance journalist Paul Schrodt ( @paulschrodt ) takes the podcast to a very different place, telling us what it’s like to report on the business of entertainment. He also got into digital journalism at a time when it was still the wild west but just starting to overtake print j...

Terrence Edwards ( @TerryReports ) has gone deep on Mongolia. Moving there with the Peace Corps, he’s been in the country for more than a decade, braving 30 below temperatures in a yurt (ger) and runaway horses. He is Bloomberg’s point man for coordinating with Bloomberg TV Mongolia, a local affiliate in Mongolian languages, and does work for Bloomberg across all formats from serious text reportin...

Stuart Lau ( @stuartlauscmp ) weaves his personal narrative together with the story of Hong Kong seamlessly. He touches on his beginnings in journalism that coincided with the first protests there since Tiananmen, pursuing a key official in the HK handover from the UK to China decades later, his inability as a Hong Konger to become a diplomat (much to the benefit of of the journalism industry), an...

Which path to take, editor or reporter? It’s a choice many journalists have to make at some point. Quartz India Editor Diksha Madhok ( @dikshamadhok ) tells us how she went from exercising influence through individual stories on issues like women in Indian society to shaping whole newsrooms and publications. We discuss growing up in India and not becoming an engineer (3:47), going to Columbia j-sc...

A 20+ year career as a foreign correspondent in Japan, Brazil and China has given Jonathan time to reflect on the great responsibility and privilege of the job, but also the preposterousness of being tasked with summing up another country. Speaking to us while on sabbatical in the Amazon rainforest, Jonathan tells how he came to realize that the environment is the most important issue of our time...

Should correspondents abroad for international publications like Associated Press, Reuters, NYT, etc be foreigners or locals? Lynsey Chutel ( @lynseychutel ), a South African journalist who has been a staff reporter for Associated Press and startup website Quartz, can see both sides of the argument. But she also shares her frustration at a two-tiered system within many organizations that at its wo...