our correspondents
Students in our programs benefit from a team of experienced foreign correspondents.
News Decoder correspondents have worked for the world’s leading media organizations, including Reuters, the Financial Times, CNN, The Times, Bloomberg, the International Herald Tribune and Agence France-Presse. Collectively, they have covered most of the major news events of the past 50 years in politics, wars, economics, diplomacy, corruption and religion. They are also authors, professors, scholars and consultants.
Correspondents share their wealth of knowledge through:
- writing exclusive decoders on a variety of global topics
- mentoring students one-on-one
- advising on student pitches and story development
- participating in webinars and interviews
- sharing tips for careers in journalism.
Correspondent Elaine Monaghan perched on a Berlin underground station entrance in the fall of 1989
CORRESPONDENT SPOTLIGHT
On the Front Lines
Meet five of our correspondents in this series by former News Decoder intern Amari Leigh.
- Maggie Fox has a press pass to history
- Elaine Monaghan: “Talk to strangers”
- Betty Wong is a storyteller at heart
- Sue Landau helps youth fix the climate
- Barry Moody recalls sleepless nights
MEET OUR CORRESPONDENTS
BEN BARBER has reported from all over the world since 1980 and written for many newspapers and magazines. He was State Department Bureau Chief for the Washington Times and editor of USAID’s newsletter. He has taught journalism at Georgetown University, and is author of a photojournalism book, GROUNDTRUTH: At Work, Play and War in the Third World.
TIZIANA BARGHINI worked as a correspondent and editor in Europe and the United States for more than two decades, reporting on popes, mobsters, fraud and political crises. She led Reuters’s coverage of the euro crisis in southern Europe before moving to New York where she tackled the U.S. political economy including Detroit’s bankruptcy and the beleaguered U.S. public pension system.
DEBORAH CHARLES reported as a Reuters correspondent for 24 years. She worked on four continents and was the White House correspondent during the Clinton and Bush presidencies. She covered four U.S. presidential campaigns and six Olympics, and worked in multiple bureaus. She currently is News Editor at Devex.
NATASHA COMEAU is a former fellow in global journalism at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. She works on refugee integration in Toronto and holds a Master of Global Affairs degree from the Munk School at the University of Toronto, where she focused her studies on development and global health.
SUSANNE COURTNEY is a freelance journalist and writer based in Canada. A former Fellow in Global Journalism at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, her writing focuses primarily on international affairs, international development, and development finance. Recently she authored the 2021 State of the Sector Report on Canada’s Impact Investing in Emerging and Frontier Markets.
MALCOLM DAVIDSON worked for four decades as a journalist in Europe, Asia and Australasia. He served as correspondent with Reuters in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Philippines, and reported widely from other parts of Asia. He also worked in Brussels and most recently was the London-based editor of Reuters’s Front Page multimedia news service.
BERND DEBUSMANN began his international career with Reuters in his native Germany and then moved to postings in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and the United States. He reported from more than 100 countries. He was shot twice in the course of his work: once covering a night battle in the center of Beirut and once in an assassination attempt prompted by his reporting on Syria. He now writes from Washington on international affairs.
ALISTER DOYLE is a British freelance writer based in Oslo who worked with Reuters for more than three decades as the company’s first environment correspondent. He has worked in more than 50 nations, mostly in Europe and Latin America, and spent a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Knight Science Journalism fellow 2011–12.
SARAH EDMONDS has been a journalist for three decades. She spent 27 years with Reuters in seven countries on three continents as a reporter, news editor, bureau chief and news operations manager.
LEAH EICHLER launched her career as a journalist working for the Jerusalem Report. Her success in the Middle East led to a 13-year career at Reuters, in which she interviewed the famous and infamous alike, including Salman Rushdie, Henry Morgentaler and the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Leah subsequently spent seven years as a columnist for the Globe and Mail. She is currently the managing editor of Esoterica Magazine.
MAGGIE FOX has been reporting on health and science for more than 20 years and before that covered conflict, politics and other international events from London, Hong Kong and Beirut. She covered the cloning of Dolly the sheep, Ebola epidemics, stem cell technology, vaccine controversies and other stories for Reuters, National Journal and NBC News. She lives in Washington, DC.
GENE GIBBONS covered six U.S presidents during his career with Reuters and UPI. He was president of the Radio-Television Correspondents Association and served as a Presidential Debate panelist in 1992. An ex-U.S. Army officer, he once served as press aide to U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
NELSON GRAVES is the founder of News Decoder. An experienced educator and administrator, Graves was a correspondent, bureau chief and regional managing editor at Reuters for 24 years, holding posts in Washington, Paris, New Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Milan and Tokyo. He later served as admissions director at Johns Hopkins University’s graduate program in international relations.
STUART GRUDGINGS reported from dozens of countries in a 19-year career with Reuters. As Malaysia bureau chief, he contributed to a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of stories on the plight of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims.
TOM HENEGHAN was a correspondent, bureau chief, regional news editor and global religion editor during his 40 years at Reuters, with postings in Vienna, Geneva, Islamabad, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Bonn and Paris. Based in Paris, he now writes regularly for The Tablet in London and Religion News Service in Washington.
ROBERT HOLLOWAY had a long career at Agence France-Presse as a journalist and editor before becoming director of the AFP Foundation.
RICHARD HUBBARD is a finance and economics journalist with more than 35 years reporting from Australia, the UK, Asia and the United States. He is currently a freelance journalist based in Sydney.
BRYSON HULL is vice president of communications and media at the HBW Resources consulting firm. He spent 17 years in journalism, reporting on politics, business and wars in nearly 20 countries across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and North America. He has also taught journalism at Loyola University-Chicago.
KATHARINE LAKE BERZ is a freelance writer focusing on environment and humanitarian issues. She was a consultant at McKinsey & Company for 10 years and has since advised a number of not-for-profit organizations. She holds a Bachelor of Commerce from Queen’s University, a Master of Philosophy in International Relations from Cambridge University and was a fellow in the Fellowship in Global Journalism at the University of Toronto.
SUE LANDAU is a retired journalist and translator based in Paris, France. Her editing and reporting career was mainly in financial and business journalism at the International Herald Tribune, Reuters and the Investor’s Chronicle. She now contributes articles on climate change issues to News Decoder.
MARTIN LANGFIELD served as a Reuters correspondent in El Salvador and Mexico from 1990 to 1997, with reporting and training assignments to Chile, Nicaragua, Peru and Argentina through 2008. He was a Latin America columnist for Reuters Breakingviews from 2015 to 2019, based in New York. He is also a published novelist and occasional drummer.
JEREMY LOVELL was a correspondent for Reuters for more than 23 years in Europe, Asia and Africa. He covered Dutch, Belgian, British and South African elections, the EU’s Exchange Rate Mechanism crisis, Belgian pedophile murders, NATO going to war for the first time, Zimbabwean farm invasions and climate change, energy and the environment.
ALISTAIR LYON worked 30 years for Reuters, mostly covering conflicts as well as political and economic news. He began his reporting career in Lebanon and headed Reuters bureaus in Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan/Afghanistan and Egypt/Sudan. He also spent five years in London as Middle East diplomatic correspondent and five in Beirut as special correspondent.
STELLA MAPENZAUSWA is a Johannesburg-based journalist, media consultant and trainer who covered economics and politics in southern Africa, including Zimbabwe, South Africa, Zambia, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Botswana and Malawi, for Reuters for more than two decades. She has conducted workshops for the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
RANDALL MIKKELSEN has more than two decades reporting and editing political and economic stories for Reuters, including seven years covering the White House and postings in Stockholm and Philadelphia. He helped cover the 9/11 attacks in the United States, two U.S. presidential campaigns, a U.S. presidential impeachment, Guantanamo terrorism trials and the 2008 financial crisis.
ELAINE MONAGHAN has worked for two decades in international journalism. For Reuters, she was a correspondent in Russia; chief correspondent in Ukraine, Belarus and Ireland; and U.S. State Department correspondent. She joined The Times in 2002 as Washington correspondent. Currently she is professor of practice at Indiana University’s Media School.
BARRY MOODY was a correspondent and editor for Reuters for more than 40 years, based in Italy, Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa, the United States, Hong Kong and Australasia. He was Africa Editor for 10 years and Middle East editor for seven, during which time he led coverage of the 2003 Iraq war. His assignments took him from covering global tours by Pope John Paul and mafia gangs in Italy to head-hunters in Papua New Guinea and conflicts in the Middle East and Africa as well as U.S. politics, plus three football World Cups and three Olympics.
JESSICA MOODY is an Economic and Social Research Council-funded PhD candidate in the War Studies department at Kings College London, researching post-conflict peace-building in Côte d’Ivoire. Moody is also a research assistant for the atrocity prevention project at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and works as a freelance political risk analyst focusing on west and central Africa.
HARVEY MORRIS was a foreign correspondent for Reuters, The Independent and Financial Times. He covered revolutions, wars, politics and diplomacy in many countries for more than 40 years as a journalist. He has written three books on the Middle East and is co-author of No Friends But the Mountains: The Tragic History of the Kurds.
ALEXANDER NICOLL is a writer on defence and European issues. From 2003 to 2015, he was on the staff of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Previously he spent 18 years as a reporter and editor at the Financial Times, including as defence correspondent from 1997 to 2002. He began his career at Reuters as a correspondent.
JULIAN NUNDY joined Reuters in 1970. As a staffer for Newsweek, the International Herald Tribune, The Independent and Bloomberg, he covered the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the assassination of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, conflict in Bosnia and the Ukrainian Orange Revolution.
SUSAN RUEL worked on the international desks of the Associated Press and United Press International and reported for UPI from Shanghai, San Francisco and Washington. She has written and edited articles and books for the United Nations. She co-authored two French books on U.S. media history and was a Fulbright scholar in West Africa. Since 2005, she has been writing and editing for healthcare non-profits in New York.
FEIZAL SAMATH covered for Reuters. A journalist for nearly four decades, he recently covered economic development in Sri Lanka for a newspaper in Colombo. A social activist and guitarist, Samath founded a concert series that has raised millions of rupees for children’s charities.
ENRIQUE SHORE is a photographer with three decades experience covering World Cups, Olympics, presidential elections, summits and the first Gulf War. He was Reuters chief photographer for multiple countries. Shore is currently an independent photographer, editor and consultant based in New York.
TIRA SHUBART is a freelance journalist and media trainer based in London. She has produced television news and trained journalists across four continents for international broadcasters, including BBC News, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Al Jazeera, over several decades.
JEREMY SOLOMONS is a global leadership consultant, based in Kigali, Rwanda, where he writes regular columns for the New Times newspaper. In the past, he was a Reuters reporter in Hong Kong and New York City and then a correspondent in Frankfurt. He was also a farmer in Israel, factory worker and teacher in France, banker in England and Switzerland, and entrepreneur in Italy.
PAUL SPENCER SOCHACZEWSKI is a Geneva-based writer who has lived and worked in more than 80 countries, including long stints in Southeast Asia. He has written 14 books; the latest, Dead but Still Kicking: Encounters with Mediums, Shamans, and Spirits, was published by Explorer’s Eye Press in May 2019.
JONATHAN THATCHER is former Reuters bureau chief for Indonesia and East Timor. He was also bureau chief in Korea, the Philippines and Russia. During more than 37 years in journalism, he was also based in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and Britain, and reported from Thailand, India, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.
DANIEL WARNER served as an advisor to UNHCR, ILO and NATO and has been a consultant to the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense of Switzerland as well as in the private sector. Daniel Warner earned a PhD in Political Science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva where he was Deputy to the Director for many years. He has lectured and taught internationally with publications and commenting in international media.
JOHN WEST has been an educator, journalist, researcher and policy-maker. He is the author of Asian Century… on a Knife-edge and currently teaches at Tokyo’s Sophia University. An Australian national, he is also executive director of the Asian Century Institute. These positions follow major stints at the Australian Treasury, the OECD and Asian Development Bank Institute. He has a master’s degree in Economics from the University of New South Wales.
ALAN WHEATLEY is an economics writer and a founding editor of InFacts. He was Reuters’s global economics correspondent, reporting from more than 40 countries. He is the editor and co-author of the book The Power of Currencies, Currencies of Power, which explores the consequences of looming challenges to the dollar’s status as the world’s pre-eminent reserve currency.
JIM WOLF reported from some 30 countries over 40 years for AP-Dow Jones, Agence-France Presse, Jane’s Defence Weekly and Reuters. He specialized in East Asia security, the spy world, terrorism, missile defense, cybersecurity, weapons of war and high technology. Based by turns in Paris, New York, Bangkok and Washington D.C., he taught journalism as a visiting professor in Shanghai, 2015-2017.
HELEN WOMACK is a specialist on former Communist countries. From 1985-2015, she reported from Moscow for Reuters, The Independent, The Times and the Fairfax newspapers of Australia. Since the refugee crisis of 2015, she has written for the United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, about how refugees are settling in Europe.
BETTY WONG was global managing editor of Reuters from 2008-2011, with 29 years of experience at the Wall Street Journal and Reuters. She covered white collar crime on Wall Street from Ivan Boesky to Michael Milken in the 1980s, led U.S. corporate news coverage from the dot com bubble to rubble and was global equities editor for Reuters.