Karen Rothmyer‘s introduction to journalism was running a school newspaper in Kenya as a Peace Corps volunteer. That experience led her to decide on journalism as a career. After earning a master’s degree at Columbia, she worked at news organizations including the AP, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday and The Nation, where she was managing editor for nine years. She is the author of Winning Pulitzers: The Stories Behind Some of the Best News Coverage of Our Time and the recipient of a 1982 IRE award for her investigation of Richard Mellon Scaife, the previously unknown funder of the New Right. She returned to Kenya as a Knight International Journalism Fellow in 2005 and again in 2007, after she and her husband had decided to make Kenya their home. She is now a consulting editor at The Star and a contributing editor to The Nation (U.S.). She also teaches at the University of Nairobi and serves on the board of the Tanzania Media Fund. At the Shorenstein Center, she looked at how NGOs influence media coverage of Africa.
They Wanted Journalists to Say ‘Wow’: How NGOs Affect U.S. Media Coverage of Africa
January 1, 2011
Karen Rothmyer Shorenstein Center Fellow, Fall 2010 Contributing Editor, The Nation Read the full paper (PDF). Excerpt: Seeing Africa Whole: An introduction And now for some good news out of Africa. Since 1995, the rate of poverty throughout the continent has been falling steadily, and much faster than previously thought, according to a study released
