International Reporting Quotes

I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The mot juste unarriving? Tell that to your desk.

I started out in journalism in the mid '90s working for the sister wire service of the 'Wall Street Journal,' which is called Dow Jones Newswires. Then I joined the 'Journal' in its Brussels bureau back in 1999.

At Al Jazeera, we are getting our local Somalis, Yemenis and Sudanese, local correspondents from within the society, who understand much better than the people who come from overseas. We will get a much better insight.

I started at 'The Daily Telegraph' as a daily news reporter. I moved then to 'The Guardian,' and then I moved to New York as the correspondent for 'The Guardian,' moved to 'The Times of London.' And really, it was the best job you could imagine. You could cover any story you wanted in America.

I didn't know Michael Hastings very well, but one thing about him was always obvious - he was born to be in the news business, he loved it, he was made for it. He wrote about Iraq and Afghanistan as places he had always been destined to visit.

Nothing is better for a young journalist than to go and write about something that other people don't know about. If you can afford to send yourself to some foreign part, I still think that's by far the best way to break in.

The desire to become a journalist came really because I very much like living abroad, and like to travel, and wanted to be paid for it.

The meat-and-potatoes work of world journalism is performed by the wire service reporters.

I was planning, I told everybody, to take him on the road with me. At the very least I fully expected to keep up my hectic pace, and my passion as a war correspondent.

I always knew I wanted to be on air and travel the world and tell people's stories. I wanted to convey something from other cultures to the U.S. - and vice versa.

When an international news organization covers a story in Somalia, Yemen, Sudan or wherever, they will fly a crew to go there, spend a few days, interact with some officials and analysts, most of the time English-speaking elite, and file the story and go home.

On the flip side, I enjoy covering the Arab world, I've spent my entire career here in the Middle East, but I would never call myself a war correspondent.

My first assignment was 12 weeks in Afghanistan. After that, I covered the Indian election for two months. Then I got a phone call saying, 'Hey, we want you in Brazil,' and the same happened for Somalia.

Growing up, I wanted to be a journalist. I was in love with Lisa Ling, who's a broadcast journalist and who travels the world. I used to read all of her articles and watch her when she'd go to China or South Africa or Australia. I thought that was the coolest job because she got to travel and tell people's stories.

Well, the fact that the news industry doesn't have enough money to only send salaried staff to war zones means there is an enormous, wide-open opportunity for young people who want to be on staff and don't know how to get there.

I was no stranger to risk myself, having made documentaries in dangerous conditions in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Africa.

I'm interested in Russian language, culture, history... and I lived there, for four years, as a reporter for the Washington Post and have visited many times since.

If you see what passes as the news on the networks in the United States, there's virtually no coverage of the rest of the world, not even of neighboring countries like Mexico or neighboring continents like Latin America.

CNN can still afford 36 bureaus around the world.

I was really just the tea boy to begin with, or the equivalent thereof, but I quickly announced, innocently but very ambitiously, that I wanted to be, I was going to be, a foreign correspondent.

I've been to all seven continents on assignment for 'SI.'

I'd gotten myself into a kind of journalism that wasn't really compatible with rearing an infant. I'd been a foreign correspondent for a long time and had this subspecialty in covering catastrophes. It had spoiled me a little because you have a tremendous amount of autonomy, and I couldn't really see being an editor in an office.