Foreign Correspondence

Ever wonder about the right formula for being an international freelancer? Kit Gillet ( @kitgillet ), a freelancer for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Economist and any number of magazines and newspapers, seems to have figured it out. He has reported from more countries than just about any other journalist I know, freelancing for the last eight years first in China and then in Romania. A wil...

Man this is an American episode. There is cocaine, the military, refugees, the decline of the American newsroom, a one-room school house, steel mills, the list goes on. Lots of laughs too. I talked to Janet Morgan, editor of the Myrtle Beach Herald, a weekly newspaper in South Carolina. Janet has won copious awards for her photography and likes to spend a long time following her subjects. She walk...

Capturing the perfect moment is essential for visual journalists. For two stories by Hélène Franchineau (instagram: @helene_fr ), the critical images were moments of reunion. First, she tells the odyssey of Chinese migrant workers going home for Chinese New Year, the only chance to see their children and family each year. And then the story of a Uyghur man jailed in Turkey, likely under pressure f...

You've been reporting on Brazil for about six years and an old source gets in touch. The preacher tells you how bad things have gotten since the last time you saw him years back, when things were already stalling out for what was once billed as an oil boom town. A militia had taken over their small town, and people are disappearing. What do you do? Well, if your Bruce Douglas ( @bruceecurb ), you...

What was it like reporting on the Christchurch mosque attack? Charlotte Greenfield tells us how it felt to be there as someone from New Zealand and takes us inside her story examining how such an attack could happen. We also talk about her story from when she did a stint in Afghanistan on how US peace talks with the Taliban could be marginalizing Afghan women. We talk about growing up in Wellingto...

The Taliban has interns. David Stout a correspondent in Pakistan for Agence France Presse (AFP) looked into the communications apparatus of the Islamic fundamentalist group, only to find it operates much like any media organization, unpaid interns and all. We also discuss how after growing up in small town New Mexico, Dave pingponged around Asia before landing in more-idyllic-than-you’d-expect Isl...

Brian Rosenthal ( @brianmrosenthal ) is proof that outstanding local journalism can get you places. *THE* place in fact - The New York Times. Brian walks us through the story that got him there, a bombshell of a report on how the state of Texas systematically denied special education to 250,000 children. That story was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and landed him at the Times. He's also the st...

Strap in for a hero's journey through the world of Indonesian terrorism. Charlie Campbell ( @charliecamp6ell ) of Time magazine walks us through the series of strange turns that took him to that took him to a prison, the Ivy League for Jihadists before landing an interview with the first female suicide bomber (she was not successful and therefor alive). Charlie takes us all over Asia as he walks u...

Have you ever wondered what it's like for a journalist to work with sensitive sources who could get fired or go to jail? We get right into that with our guest Koh Gui Qing ( @GQReuters ) of Reuters in New York. After Singapore, Australia and China, her latest turn as an investigative reporter in New York was set in motion by an unexpected tip off and is "the kind of story that makes you fall off y...

Is being a news producer on Netflix’s Patriot Act with Hasan Minahj technically journalism? Who cares, it’s pretty f***ing cool. Our guest Meredith Clark ( @MeredithLClark ) hails from the same hometown as our host and guides us from McFarland, Wisconsin through her lengthy list of credits as a journalist taking us to some parts of the industry we have not been: fact-checking at Rolling Stone, opi...

Let’s talk about goons baby, let’s talk about goons and me. Let’s talk about all the good things and the bad things goons could be. Our guest this episode is Joseph Campbell ( @detectivejoe88 ), a journalist for Reuters Video News in Beijing. Lugging around his camera to report the biggest news of the day, Joe has become an expert on the goons who seek (not very successfully) to intimidate him. Bu...

Hermit state North Korea has to stay afloat somehow. As Financial Times reporter Don Weinland ( @donweinland ) found out, that means managing ships through Hong Kong. In this interview, we navigate the twists and turns that got Don from the deserts of Nevada to digging through shipping records for the UK’s premier financial newspaper. Unlike my first three guests who were journalists from early on...

Camilla Costa ( @_camillacosta ) is kind of a big deal. As a reporter for the BBC in Brazil, she broke the story of the Zika virus outbreak wide open. She's now just started as an data journalist for the BBC at the mothership in London, but has an extremely varied career before that. She's worked for Brazil's premier magazine and the top newspaper and had a streak of doing journalism for kids. We...

Paul Carsten ( @paulcarsten ) covers Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, for Reuters news agency from the capital city of Abuja. Hailing from the north of England, we talk about how he got to Oxford, Beijing and ultimately Abuja. Paul talks about a piece he did in the run-up to the Nigerian election on a grisly Islamic State massacre of dozens of people, contradicting a government statement t...

Nomaan Merchant (@NomaanMerchant) covers immigration for the Associated Press in Houston, Texas. We discuss how he visited the Chicago Tribune in middle school, our shared experience as student journalists and how he ended up working for AP for a stint in China. He also walks us through his reporting a piece showing the human impact of an ICE immigration raid not just on those arrested but their f...