FEATURED STORIES

Burning the Furniture to Warm the House:
Layoffs at American Newspapers
by James Hagengruber (Burns 2002)

Earlier this year, I was awarded a scholarship to attend the Wesleyan University Writers Conference. My editor was pleased for me, but he said the budget for training and workshops had recently been frozen. I paid my own way, grumbling for most of the flight from Washington state to Connecticut.

Jim Hagengruber

My mood was still sour during the welcome reception. I didn’t get any sympathy from the other journalists I met, though—I was one of the few in attendance who still had a newspaper job. The conference seemed to be crawling that week with disgruntled, laid off journalists from Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston and many points between.

I returned to work with an appreciation for what I had: a job in a unionized newsroom at a family-owned newspaper. From my office, I could see the Rocky Mountains and a stable future. The tornado that was ravaging newsrooms everywhere else was nowhere in sight.

Near the end of summer, The Spokesman-Review’s top editor, Steve Smith, issued a warning that job cuts were coming. Fewer businesses were advertising with the paper. Craigslist had been sucking away the newspaper’s classified advertising gravy. The circulation numbers continued their decade-long slide. But because the newsroom is unionized and I had considerable seniority within my department, I never imagined the cuts would hit me.

Do you see where this is going? On Nov. 1, I was one of 14 journalists laid off from The Spokesman-Review. Instead of the cuts being distributed throughout the newsroom’s various departments, as others and I had expected, the editor cut my entire department and shrank the newspaper to a single edition. In the days that followed, another half-dozen journalists quit, including my colleague and fellow Burns alumnus, Benjamin Shors.

I’m typing this from my home office. My only colleague—my dog, Ollie—is sleeping at my feet and my beard is three weeks thick. I’m now one of them: an unemployed newspaper reporter. The management decisions that led up to the lay offs seem short-sighted. Many of the newspaper’s core writers and photographers are now gone while top managers remain in their jobs. Cutting journalists to save a newspaper seems to me about as smart as keeping your house warm by burning your furniture.

The Boise Weekly recently published a story about the cuts and quoted my former editor, Smith, who said he was pessimistic about the fate of daily newspapers, but expected the Internet would soon be here to save the profession. “I’ve never been more optimistic about the future of journalism,” Smith said.

I have a different opinion. A cursory glance of the newspaper’s recent history seems to back me up. In 2000, The Spokesman-Review employed about 160 people in its newsroom and published a paper with a subscription of 126,000. Today, a newsroom of about 120 publish a paper read by 92,000. The newspaper also publishes nearly 40 blogs, many of which are produced by editors and are focused not on reporting, but on the reprocessing of news. The last time I checked, only a handful of the blogs had attracted comments from readers. Meanwhile, The Spokesman-Review reportedly continues to earn a profit in the 15 percent range, which would be high for most any other business, but is considered relatively low for a daily newspaper in the United States. The profit margin, however, is said to be slipping. A former colleague of mine wrote in his blog: “Makes you wonder if there’s any connection.”

Jim Hagengruber paddling with his dog on Priest Lake, Idaho

I share these facts because it makes it easier to leave behind a job in a newspaper that seems to be going nowhere. And in all honesty, I’ve been thinking for a while now that it’s time for me to move on to something else. It’s the something else that scares the hell out of me. I can’t imagine not working at a newspaper, but I’m not sure I have the heart to spend the rest of my career playing this perverted game of survivor.

And what about the readers? As newspapers become thinner and thinner, should we be surprised that fewer Americans read them? What will this country be like with fewer serious journalists? I found a possible answer in a recent column by Hal Crowther, a columnist from The Independent Weekly of North Carolina (I found the excerpt in a recent column by James F. Vesely, editorial page editor of The Seattle Times).

“While the newspaper is expendable, the tradition it represents and the information it supplies are not,” Crowther wrote. “As newspapers are eviscerated, marginalized and abandoned, they leave a vacuum that nothing and no one is prepared to fill — a crisis on its way to becoming a tragedy. When railroads and riverboats began to go the way of the passenger pigeon, no one was harmed except the work force and a few big investors who had failed to diversify. If professional journalism vanishes along with the newspapers, this thing we call a constitutional democracy becomes a banana republic.”

I’m not sure what I’ll be doing in the long term. I’ve considered everything from teaching to carpentry. For the next few months, though, I’ll be hanging out in republics where bananas are grown. It was supposed to be a sabbatical—I bought the tickets the night before I was laid off. But without a job, I suppose I should just call it time on the beach. I should also tell you that I have stacks of clips on my desk that I plan to send to editors at other newspapers. Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment, but I can’t imagine not working in journalism. Regardless of what happens, I suppose I should count myself lucky—my spouse works in a profession that’s booming. She’s a nurse.

Media Challenges on the Last Frontier
by Christian Rüttger, with Christian Meier

The closing of a popular Anchorage restaurant or the hunt for a murder suspect is clearly more important than the newest development in the conflict over Iran’s nuclear power program or foiled terrorist attacks in Germany.

From left to right: 2005 Fellow Christian Meier, Anchorage Daily News editor Pat Dougherty, and 2007 Fellow Christian Rüttger in Anchorage.

“For Alaska, we are like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal combined,” editor Pat Dougherty proudly says of the Anchorage Daily News. With an average daily circulation of about 70,000, the two-time Pulitzer prize-winning paper may be considered small. But in Alaska—a state with not even 700,000 residents—it is by far the largest paper. And it is the only printed media that can be bought in virtually every corner of the self-proclaimed “Last Frontier.”

But Dougherty knows only too well that an existence without real direct competition does not equal one without economic challenges. Alaska may be far away from the Lower 48, but the reality of today’s newspaper business is just as present there as anywhere else in the U.S. Like most other American papers, the Daily News faces both declining circulation and advertising revenues. The Internet emerged as a powerful contender and is taking away much of the money that used to be made with classified ads for real estate and cars. As a result, costs have to be cut, affecting among other things staff numbers and travel expenses. Today, the Daily News reporters’ most important tools are their telephones and online search engines. Gone are the days when they could hop on a small plane or a four-wheel-drive rig to research a story in the middle of the wild Alaskan bush or some remote outpost in the tundra where the story is happening.

The Daily News team is not happy about this. But there is no way around the constraints that publisher McClatchy recently set for the 60-year-old paper. The California-based newspaper empire bought the Daily News in 1979, invested heavily, added staff and turned it into Alaska’s market leader. In 1992, the only serious contender, The Anchorage Times, ceased publication and surrendered the field to the Daily News.

Today however, McClatchy strikes a different tune. “We have to become more efficient,” says Howard Weaver, one of the vice presidents of the struggling stock market listed company that currently owns 31 papers in several states including The Sacramento Bee and The Miami Herald. America’s newspaper business is under a lot of pressure these days. Profit margins have to satisfy investors’ expectations, and often 30 percent is the aspired target. German newspapers usually have to get by with only half of that, sometimes even less.

“Smaller is better,” is Dougherty’s response to the demands raised in California. In his view, there need to be fewer stories, but they must be better told to catch the attention of readers in a world where Internet, television and radio court the audience’s favor. Dougherty is convinced that he can achieve this by strongly focusing on local news. Thus, national and international stories mostly only make it as very brief teasers into a small box at the bottom of the front page. The closing of a popular Anchorage restaurant or the hunt for a murder suspect is clearly more important than the newest development in the conflict over Iran’s nuclear power program or foiled terrorist attacks in Germany.

On the way to the Daily News calendar shooting.

Apart from local news, almost every section in the Daily News represents mostly a digest of news agency reports or stories published in other McClatchy papers. “Our strength is local and Alaska news. We want to put all of our time and energy into covering local and Alaska news,” explains the Daily News’ managing editor Julie Wright. “Life” was the latest section subordinated to this strategy. “Let’s face it: Project Runaway is the same whether you’re watching it in Anchorage or Atlanta. Recipes for meatballs work whether you’re making them here or in Tucson. Why not pull those stories off the wire?” says Wright.

And then there is the Internet. Just like German newspapers, the Daily News puts its hopes on its online presence. In tune with the slogan “value added news,” Dougherty expects his reporters not just to write stories but to maintain blogs and contribute to the paper’s online pages with photographs or video footage they shot or audio files they recorded.

“We are going to be a hybrid company, print and digital,” says Weaver, who once ran the Daily News.  Thanks to the Internet, newspapers “are back in the breaking news business.” They become contenders with TV and radio, he says. But at the same time, Weaver admits that he is far from certain whether this strategy will prove to be successful. “We don’t know what’s going to work. It really is: fire first, then aim.” Weaver calls the process difficult and painful. “But it’s also a great time,” he adds, saying that it will be this generation of journalists that will determine the future of their craft.

Sometimes a little successful business on the side might help to get past some of the hardships. The Daily News proved it had good instincts in that respect when it published its moose calendar last year. “People stood in lines to get a copy,” Dougherty smiles.

Christian Rüttger is a senior subeditor at Reuters’ foreign news desk in Berlin. This summer he spent his Burns fellowship at the Anchorage Daily News. 2005 Burns Fellow Christian Meier visited him there. A longer German version of this story appeared in the Berliner Tagesspiegel.

Germany Warming up to Climate Change Fight
By Matt Johanson

Getting world leaders to recognize the incremental, often subtle effects of global warming has challenged environmental leaders for decades, but Frank Huber doesn’t have to look far to see evidence that his climate, at least, is changing. The chief architect of Zugspitze’s ski slopes, Huber has worked with a steadily shrinking glacier and an ever-decreasing amount of snow for decades, and to him, the trend is unmistakable.

Frank Huber

“Global warming is here. I’m sure of it,” said the 20-year veteran of Germany’s highest mountain. “Every year, ice is melting away. We can’t hold it up. I think we have to live with it.”

But that doesn’t mean giving up. Every summer, Huber and his crew labor to cover some 12,000 square meters of Zugspitze’s glacier with plastic tarps. The coverings reflect the sun’s heat, thereby slowing the glacier’s recession.

Similarly, Germany’s government is also acting to combat climate change. Passing an energy tax to finance the production of solar photovoltaics and approving a cap-and-trade system of reducing emissions, the nation has taken steps towards reducing its carbon footprint that other G-8 nations like the United States have so far refused to match. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has lobbied hard for greater American action, though to date many Germans consider U.S. President George W. Bush’s response to be no more thoughtful or appropriate than the president’s famous backrub to the chancellor.

Dr. Ludwig Ries

“Maybe this shows a little bit of the German character. We are trying to do something,” said Dr. Ludwig Ries of the Federal Environment Agency. “There are a considerable number of people in Germany who are aware the environment is warming. They are aware of the world we are giving back to our children. They are also aware we live in a way that we can’t continue to live. Germany is one of the biggest producers of carbon dioxide in Europe.”

Germany and America’s varying responses to global warming and the issue’s effect on the nations’ relations were the focus of my work during my 2007 trip to Germany supported by an Arthur F. Burns Fellowship alumni research stipend. The grant permitted me to visit southern Germany where sources told me about the climate changes they’ve witnessed in their lifetimes and their thoughts about the nations’ reaction to the situation.

Also helpful were a number of other Burns alumni who helped me make contacts in such institutions as the German Embassy, the State Department, the Öko Institut in Freiburg, and the Technical University Bergakademie Freiberg.

The sources and material I collected enabled me to write about the issue for a 2008 edition of German Life magazine. The project has also positioned me to report in the future on a topic that will surely carry headlines for many years. I also gathered information to write travel and feature stories for submission to National Geographic Adventure, The Contra Costa Times, Adventure Sports Journal and other publications.

To the International Center for Journalists and the supporters of the Arthur Burns Fellowship, thanks for making this productive and rewarding project possible.

Matt Johanson, a 1995 Arthur Burns fellow, authored the recent book, “Game of My Life: Memorable Stories of Giants Baseball,” described at www.giantsgamesbook.com

Fellowship Impressions

TV reporter Torben Börgers flew in the KCBS chopper over Los Angeles

“I was able to eliminate many stereotypes, confirm some remote diagnoses, and return with a thousand new questions – beautiful! In the end, I foremost came to one conclusion: Anyone who wants to understand a foreign culture (and the United States of America is a foreign culture, despite different assumptions by many Europeans after they have consumed several hundred Hollywood flicks, a similar number of fast-food burgers and dozens of U.S. TV shows), cannot do so without living in this culture. Sharing a kitchen, bathroom and refrigerator will turn former strangers into friends within a short amount of time. Personal encounters are the best medicine against ugly prejudice and ill-fated stereotypes, and thanks to the Arthur Burns program, my medicine cabinet is full!”

Torben Börgers, reporter, NDR (TV), Hamburg
Hosted by KCBS, Los Angeles, CA

2007 Burns fellows Marissa Muller, Paul-Anton Krüger, Georg Matthes and Toben Börgers during their reception at the residence of German Ambassador Klaus Scharioth.

“Looking back at my time in Germany, I am amazed at what two months can do. By simply stepping out of the daily grind and gaining a fresh perspective, I was inundated with new ideas. I realized my desire to further explore renewable energies (primarily solar and tidal power), to become fluent in German, and to shoot, write and edit mini pieces for cnn.com. Now that I am back in Atlanta, all I can think of is when I will return to Germany.”

Marissa Muller, assignment editor, CNN, Atlanta, GA
Hosted by Reuters TV, Berlin

“…this is maybe the most surprising finding for someone like me who has traveled and lived in much more exotic countries than the United States: It is the discovery that Americans and Europeans tend to believe they know each other – but in fact they sometimes live in rather different worlds. In reverse, it is the discovery that Europeans think and act more similarly than they tend to assume – and that from the American perception there is a distinct European identity that Europeans are sometimes insufficiently aware of.”

Sabine Muscat, editor, Financial Times Deutschland, Berlin
Hosted by The San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco, CA

Georg Matthes reported on the decline in commercial tuna fishing along the New England coast.

“On my first day I was introduced to the entire newsroom as a full member of the reporting team – although the description ‘German veteran reporter’ took some time to get used to. In the weeks to come I learned about local journalism in New England. The New England Cable News is the biggest regional cable channel in the USA and provides news, documentaries, sports and entertainment 24 hours a day. I worked for news and accompanied 15 reporters around five days a week all over New England. In Vermont, we visited the family of a fallen U.S. soldier; in Massachusetts, we reported from the court room about a fight on a boat; and in Maine, a 25 pound lobster climbed in front of our camera. Politically, it was also an exciting time. Together with Alison King, I managed to meet with all the leading presidential candidates who would repeatedly visit New Hampshire before the start of the primary elections there. The inside of the channel’s office – a huge, windowless square building in Newton with studios and newsroom – I rarely saw during my first week… During the home run that I witnessed at Fenway Park, all three bases were loaded with runners, thus resulting in a ‘Grand Slam.’ I cannot describe my time with NECN in Newton, Massachusetts, any better – it was a ‘Grand Slam.’”

Georg Matthes, editor, Deutsche Welle DW (TV), Berlin
Hosted by New England Cable News (NECN), Newton, MA

“I realized I missed Berlin my first morning back in Baltimore. It was a Sunday and my phone was oddly quiet. In Berlin, I would have been making plans with the other Burns fellows for a two-hour Frühstück followed by a stroll through the flea market. The Germans appreciate their weekends, and brunch with the other fellows became a ritual I looked forward to each week.  It was a chance to recap the workweek and toast cappuccinos to Arthur F. Burns for introducing us to Germany. Food (and good bier) aside, this fellowship surpassed my expectations, which were already high. With newspapers (including my own) shuttering foreign bureaus in droves, there are increasingly few opportunities for reporters like me to get foreign experience, so I am grateful to Burns for allowing me to work in Germany. I managed to visit all of the big cities and the island of Rügen during my two months there, and learned much about the country and its people. I would move there tomorrow if I had a job waiting for me, which is something I probably would not have said before Burns. I also feel like I came back a better reporter. It is important for a journalist to leave the comfort zone of a particular beat or city. In Germany I was challenged every day, whether it was trying to find an address or set up an interview for a story.”

Allison Connolly, business reporter, The Baltimore Sun, MD
Hosted by Spiegel Online, Berlin

“I basically spent my first day in a restaurant. After I introduced myself to my third boss Sandy Clark over a second breakfast, my day continued with lunch with the editor-in-chief Bill Marimow, and finished over coffee and cake with a colleague in the cafeteria. At the end of my first day, I never sat at my desk alone for more than half an hour. My colleagues came by one after the other to chat. This would not change much during the coming eight weeks. Quite the opposite: Not only at work did I feel cordially and warmly accepted, but soon they invited me to their homes over the weekend. The hospitality of my colleagues, of Burns alumni in Philadelphia and my neighbors has extremely impressed me and allowed for an easy start to my fellowship.”

Lara Fritzsche, editor, Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, Cologne
Hosted by Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia, PA

“Despite any qualms I may have had about my placement, Reuters was an invaluable resource when I needed help reporting the main story I had come to Germany to pursue for my home paper (The Albany Times Union, which hired me as a freelancer after I quit the Post-Star). I wanted to learn more about AMD, a semiconductor maker based in Dresden that has promised to build its next factory in upstate New York. The Reuters technology correspondent used her contacts to set up interviews for me with government and corporate sources in Dresden, and when she discovered that the Saxony economy minister didn’t speak English, she convinced a German-speaking colleague to accompany me. I’m very grateful for that, since the result was an important business news story for the Albany paper that I couldn’t have reported without this assistance.”

Amanda Bensen, freelance reporter
Hosted by Reuters, Frankfurt

Christine Lagorio pushes her bike along a remaining part of the Berlin Wall

“My first news meeting with the politics staff of the Financial Times Deutschland now stands out in my mind as emblematic of my experience there. Thrust into the thick conversation of the news of the day (entirely in German), I understood little. In fact, just two words made sense at first: “Brücke” (bridge) and “Minnesota.” I chimed in about the story: the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis. The editors asked me eagerly to write a second-day story about the shabby state of some of the U.S. highway system and its bridges. I reported and wrote in English, they translated and edited, and so it went with us for the first month. After I’d gotten a handle on the news reporting, I worked mostly on longer features on the U.S. presidential race, a topic which, in regard of the foreseeable fact George Bush will be leaving office, is of immense interest to the German audience. The topics I covered were diverse, but mostly U.S.- or European-U.S. relations related. Eager to truly function as a foreign correspondent, I was actually functioning more like a national correspondent who happened to be abroad. Fortunately, I was to make up a bit of the Germany-deficit in my reporting by filing weekly dispatches from Berlin for CBS News.”

Christine Lagorio, Online editor, the CBS Evening News
Hosted by Financial Times Deutschland, Berlin

“All around, editors who delegate and write don’t seem to exist here. The ‘editor’ edits, the ‘reporter’ writes – I already knew that from my time at The Christian Science Monitor. Here now [at Time magazine], they added a further category: the up-and-coming wanna-be reporters; young guys whose task is to write briefs and check articles. The rules of ‘fact-checking’ are rigorous: Each comment and each number in an article must be verified by two reliable sources. Without help by the author of the story. At the end, the whole text is researched all over again. A Sisyphean challenge.”

Bettina Gartner, freelance business journalist, Bruneck, Italy
Hosted by The Christian Science Monitor, Boston, MA and
Time magazine, New York, NY

Alison Hawkes interviewing Stasi museum tour guide with other fellows watching.

“The last weeks of my fellowship I had a glut of stories piled up, and even though I extended my tour of duty at Deutsche Welle two weeks, by the end I still had not completed several. I think this is a fairly typical experience for Burns fellows on a two month program. It simply takes a little while to get the ball rolling and then it’s rolling pretty fast towards the end.”

Alison Hawkes, Capitol bureau chief, Calkins Media, Harrisburg, PA
Hosted by Deutsche Welle (radio), Bonn

“Bottom line is that I found it shocking to what extent newspapers are put together with material from AP, as well as stories from McClatchy papers’ syndication that included the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post and New York
Times, among others. Especially the international news section was not more than a digest of this outside material. To work for the international desk, as it was suggested during the orientation in Washington, was not recommended, as they didn’t write any of their own stories. ‘We don’t do international news,’ I was clearly told. And that applied also to news from Germany. It was similar with other departments. For example, when Sean Penn’s film of the Jon Krakauer bestseller book ‘Into the Wild’ premiered in Fairbanks, the Daily News did not send a single reporter for the 500 kilometer-long trip from Anchorage to cover this important Alaskan cultural event. Instead, they printed a dry AP article the following day about the movie, filmed on site in Alaska and based on real events, about a young escapist who starved in Alaska’s wilderness.”

Christian Rüttger, senior foreign news subeditor, Reuters, Berlin
Hosted by the Daily News, Anchorage, AK

“It…took me a little while to figure out what kinds of stories they would like. Several of my early pitches were dismissed for these reasons:
1. “We’ve already done it.”
2. “It’s more of a U.S. story.”
3. “There’s not really a good peg for it.”
I was pretty discouraged at first, but just like Frank said, this would change. After a few strike-outs, they finally went for one of my pitches. Then another. And before long, they were pitching me stories. This is an important thing for future fellows to remember: despite their initial hesitancy, Deutsche Welle has a big incentive to use you. You cost them nothing, and once you prove you’re competent, they will want to get as much work out of you as possible.”

Curtis Gilbert, producer, Minnesota Public Radio News, St. Paul, MN Hosted by Deutsche Welle (radio), Bonn

“Hagengruber [Jim Hagengruber, a 2002 Burns fellow] wrote to me about the looming layoffs after I had returned from my fellowship. His editor in Spokane described him as one of his best reporters, and Jim therefore wasn’t worried. We had just spoken on the phone about his story about two U.S. Marines I had helped to translate for publication in Süddeutsche Zeitung, when he had to interrupt our conversation: The boss had just come to his Spokesman bureau in Idaho. It was the only bureau for the Spokesman outside Spokane. An hour later I got his email. ‘I got laid off!’ The bureau was closed completely, and the entire staff I worked with on a daily basis for two months, was laid off. The reporter in Spokane, whose desk I used while he was out, left on his own terms. My desk neighbor left. The photographer, whom I worked with most, has left. Within days, the paper has either lost or fired some of its best people. The Spokesman-Review is one of the few remaining regional papers of high quality in the United States, and for two months I was able to explore why. But their profit margin wasn’t high enough.”

Peter Wagner, reporter, Süddeutsche Zeitung (jetzt.de), Marzling
Hosted by Spokesman Review, Spokane, WA

The Burns Fellowship program is adminstered by:

December 2007 | Vol. 16, No. 2

Dr. Frank-Dieter Freiling

Dear Friends,

You are now reading one of our initiatives to intensify the dialogue among Burns alumni. We have decided to increase the Burns newsletter to four times a year to provide you with more frequently updated news about alumni and what is happening in the Burns community. In addition, we will distribute the newsletter by email, giving you the chance to either store them on your computer or print them out for easier reading, as you prefer. We will also continue to provide you with an electronic and printable copy of the updated address list of all Burns alumni worldwide, so that you can stay in touch and ask for help and advice on international matters whenever needed. Of course, the list is only as factual as you make it—so please continue to send us your updated contact info.

We have also designed a new exclusive online portal for Burns alumni. On the new site, you will find all the necessary background on Burns; on your activities concerning books and blogs; on the Burns awards, alumni tours and follow-up grants; and whatever is of interest to all of you in the field of transatlantic relations. I hope you will use this resource, and we expect lots of feedback. In order to give you access to this secure site, we need you to fill out a short form where you will choose a username and password.

By now most of the 2007 class of fellows has returned home after their fellowships across the Atlantic. Sabine Muscat, one of the German fellows, already prolonged her stay in the U.S. by being promoted to U.S. correspondent for her paper immediately following her fellowship. This is what I call German efficiency at work. This should be yet another incentive to promote the applications for 2008 to interested friends and colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic, since we are already looking for strong candidates to participate next summer. You can find the application as part of this e-newsletter. Please forward the link to our online application form to potential applicants.

Those of you on the U.S. side of the Atlantic will hopefully reunite at the next Arthur F. Burns Dinner during the last week of February in New York. The German dinner will again be in May in Berlin.

I hope you all have a happy holiday season and a great start to the new year, wherever you are celebrating in the over 20 countries around the globe where alumni are located. I wish you a year full of happiness, health, professional satisfaction and, of course, success.

Yours,

Frank-Dieter Freiling

1988

Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, was awarded the Leo Baeck Medal in New York for his commitment to German-American relations, and combating terrorism and intolerance. The award was given by the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, which supports the study of German-speaking Jewry, and was presented by former U.S. Secretary of State (and Burns trustee) Henry Kissinger.

1989

Annette Dittert, now head of ARD’s New York bureau, will become ARD’s bureau chief in London, starting August 2008.

1990

Dagmar Aalund left Brussels to become an editor for Marketplace at The Wall Street Journal in New York City.

1991

Gerold Büchner has returned to Germany from Brussels, and is now covering parliament for Berliner Zeitung. Angela Elis gave birth to her second child, Leonardo Elias Elis, in April. In November, she ended her tenure as anchor of 3-Sat’s science show “Nano,” only to be followed as anchor by another Burns alumna, Kristina zur Mühlen (Burns 1996). Olaf Kische is covering capital affairs for MDR TV at the ARD bureau in Berlin. Aliza Marcus just wrote a book on the Turkish Kurdish PKK rebel group, terrorism and the Middle East called “Blood and Belief.” Juliette Marischka became the proud mother to a son, Nico Tobin, in June. Bernd Neuendorf left his post as SPD spokesman to become general manager for the SPD in Nordrhein-Westfalen.

1992

Kara Swisher now runs a blog from Silicon Valley called BoomTown.

1993

Nikolaus Blome received the prestigious 46th Theodor Wolff Preis in the category of commentary/essay for his piece published in Die Welt, “Warum uns Gerhard Schröder fehlt.” Markus Günther has recently published a book titled “Barack Obama: Amerikas neue Hoffnung.” His book gives both an in-depth picture of Obama, as well as a broader view of U.S. culture and the American electoral system.

1995

Matt Johanson recently published a book titled, “Game of My Life: Memorable Stories of Giants Baseball,” described at www.giantsgamesbook.comAndrea Witt-Hentz left the German Marshall Fund in Berlin and now works as a freelancer in Hamburg. She is expecting her second child in December.

1996

Kristina zur Mühlen moderates the science and future show “Nano” on TV network “3-Sat,” in addition to the information show, “EinsExtra Aktuell” on digital channel, EinsExtra, part of ARD. She also welcomed a daughter, Charlotte, on March 16.

1997

Eric Jansson is freelancing for the Financial Times and other publications. Sheryl Oring will publish a book, “I Wish to Say (The Birthday Project),” on Feb. 26, 2008, by Quack!Media. The book features letters to President Bush by people across the country. Oring typed the letters as they were dictated to her by people who stopped by her public “office” during a 2006 tour of her public performance project. Oring received a Burns alumni travel-research stipend in 2005 to conduct a similar project in Germany. Richard David Precht has published yet another book, a journey into the world of philosophy, titled “Wer bin ich?” (Who am I?), through Goldmann Publishing. Gregor Peter Schmitz left Brussels and the Bertelsmann Foundation to return to journalism. He started in September as the U.S. correspondent for Spiegel Online, and is based in Washington, D.C.

1998

Nikolai A. Behr left BMW AG to head the management team of the community TV network “UProm.TV” in Munich. Kyle James won the gold medal at the New York Radio Festival for his feature “50 years of Trabi,” aired on Deutsche Welle. Stefan Krücken has published a new book, “Orkanfahrt,” a collection of stories about captains, ships and oceans, through his own new publishing house, Ankerherz Verlag. Cordula Meyer is now in Washington, D.C., as the new elections correspondent for the weekly Der Spiegel.

1999

Warren Cohen won a news and documentary Emmy Award for outstanding arts and cultural programming for his role as supervising producer for “VH1 Rock Doc: DMC: My Adoption Journey.”

2001

Robert Jacobi is publishing his travel journals from Latin America next spring through the publishing house, Prestel. The journals document his seven-month trip through the continent along the Pan-American Highway, including being kidnapped in Lima, Peru.

2002

Adrian Feuerbacher returned from his five-year tenure as capital correspondent of NDR/ARD to Hamburg headquarters of NDR. Megan Mulligan recently became senior editor at Guardian America, a new Washington-based, online-only edition of the British newspaper. Hans Nichols, fresh from law school and a reporting Fulbright fellowship in West Africa, is now covering the White House for Bloomberg. Katrin Scheib now works for Welt Online in Berlin.

2003

Markus Verbeet became a correspondent for Spiegel in Brussels, and he and his wife welcomed their first child, Benedikt, on July 21. In October, Clemens Wergin became the new chief foreign policy editor for the newspapers Die Welt, Welt am Sonntag and Berliner Morgenpost.

2004

Ulf Meyer and his wife welcomed their daughter, Dana, on August 31. Lennart Paul won a USAble Award 2006 for an article that was published during his fellowship in 2004 at the Oakland Tribune.

2005

Daniela Gerson was a German Chancellor Scholar/Alexander von Humboldt Fellow until November. While on her fellowship, she also freelanced for a few media outlets. Susanne Gieffers had her first child, Heike, on June 17. Manuel Hartung became the new editor-in-chief of Die Zeit’s spin-off, Zeit Campus. His first novel, “Der Uni Roman,” was published in May (Piper). Fred Pleitgen, a CNN Berlin correspondent, spent six weeks this summer in Baghdad. Christian Thiele is now working as a text editor for Playboy.

2006

Steffen Schwarzkopf has made Afghanistan his home again this year, covering events for N24/Sat1 TV.

2007

Amanda Bensen will soon start a new job as an assistant editor at Smithsonian magazine. Curtis Gilbert is starting a new job—he will move from being a producer at Minnesota Public Radio to an on-air reporter. The position is a year-long assignment covering the 2008 elections. His boss told him that his Burns experience helped him get the job. Sabine Muscat just finished her Burns Fellowship when she was already promoted to Washington correspondent for Financial Times Deutschland, starting immediately. Christian Rüttger married Carolin in Berlin in June, and they were thrilled to welcome their baby girl, Luzie Henrike, on Nov. 13.

2008 Application Deadlines
German Applicants: February 1
U.S. Applicants: March 1

Apply Now (U.S.)
Apply Now (German)

2008 Alumni Dinners
February: U.S. Dinner, New York
May: German Dinner, Berlin
Exact dates to be announced.

The newly launched Alumni Portal will soon feature a directory of Burns Alumni. To send us your updated information and mug shot, please fill in this short form.

U.S. Trustees

Joyce Barnathan
President, International Center for Journalists (ICFJ)
Elizabeth Becker
Contributor to the International Herald Tribune, and German Marshall Fund Fellow
The Honorable J.D. Bindenagel
Vice President, Community, Government & International Relations, DePaul University
The Honorable Richard Burt
Chairman, Diligence
Dr. Martin Bussmann
Mannheim LLC
David W. Detjen
Partner, Alston & Bird, LLP
Dr. Frank-Dieter Freiling
Director, Internationale Journalisten-Programme (IJP)
Ronald Frohne
President and CEO,
GWFF USA, Inc.
General Alexander M. Haig, Jr.
Chairman, Worldwide Associates
James F. Hoge, Jr.
Editor, Foreign Affairs
Fred Kempe
President and CEO, The Atlantic Council of the United States
Craig Kennedy
President, The German Marshall Fund of the United States
The Honorable Henry A. Kissinger
Chairman, Kissinger Associates
Charles Lane
Editorial Writer, The Washington Post
Fred H. Langhammer
Chairman, Global Affairs, Estée Lauder Companies
Klaus Peter Löbbe
Chairman and CEO, BASF Corporation
The Honorable Frank E. Loy
Former Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs
Norman Pearlstine
Senior Advisor, Global Telecommunications & Media, The Carlyle Group
Charles E. Redman
Region President, Europe/Africa/Middle East/South West Asia, Bechtel
John E. Rielly
President Emeritus, Chicago Council on Foreign Relations
Paul E. Steiger
Managing Editor,The Wall Street Journal
Garrick Utley
President, Levin Institute, SUNY
Stanford S. Warshawsky
Chairman, Bismarck Capital, LLC
Legal Advisor:
Phillip C. Zane
Attorney at Law, Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz

German Trustees

Erik Bettermann
Director-General, Deutsche Welle
Prof. Dr. Reinhard Bettzuege
Ambassador, Brussels
Dr. Martin Blessing
Board member, Commerzbank AG
Sabine Christiansen
Journalist
Dr. Alexander Dibelius
Managing Director, Goldman, Sachs & Co.
Dr. Mathias Döpfner
CEO, Axel-Springer AG
Gernot Erler
Minister of State, Federal Foreign Office
Leonhard F. Fischer
Partner, RHJI Swis Management
Dr. Michel Friedman
Attorney and Journalist
Emilio Galli-Zugaro
Head Group Communications, Allianz Group
Katrin Göring-Eckhardt
Vice President of the Parliament, Green Party
Dr. Tessen von Heydebreck
Board Member, Deutsche Bank AG
Luc Jochimsen
Member of Parliament, Die Linke
Lars G. Josefsson
CEO, Vattenfall AB
Hans-Werner Kilz
Editor-in-Chief, Süddeutsche Zeitung
Dr. Torsten-Jörn Klein
Board member, Gruner + Jahr AG
Carsten Maschmeyer
Chairman, AWD Holding
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Richter
Former CEO, Bertelsmann-Springer
Prof. Markus Schächter
Director-General, ZDF German TV
Helmut Schäfer
Former Minister of State
Dr. Frank Schirrmacher
Publisher, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Friede Springer
Publisher
Franz Thönnes
Secretary and Member of Parliament, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD)
Dr. Ewald Walgenbach
Member of the Board, Bertelsmann AG
Dr. Guido Westerwelle
Member of Parliament and Chairman of the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP)
Ulrich Wilhelm
Government Spokesman

The Arthur F. Burns Board of Trustees in the United States and Germany acknowledges with gratitude the support of the following organizations and individuals who have made the 2007 Arthur F. Burns program possible.

Sponsors in the U.S.
Alston & Bird, LLC
Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz PC
BASF
The Capital Group Companies Charitable Foundation
Continental Airlines
DaimlerChrysler AG
DHL
Dow Jones Foundation
The Estée Lauder Companies, Inc.
Goldman, Sachs & Co.
The German Marshall Fund of the United States
GWFF USA, Inc.
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
The Ladenburg Foundation
The Starr Foundation
Time Warner

Individual Contributions
John and Gina Despres
David Detjen
Fred Langhammer
The Hon. Frank E. Loy
Stanford S. Warshawsky
Elizabeth Becker
Charles Lane
Charles E. Redman

Sponsors in Germany
Allianz AG
Auswärtiges Amt.
Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend
Deutsche Bank AG
Goldman, Sachs & Co.
Gruner+Jahr AG
Ruhrgas AG
Siemens AG

The Arthur F. Burns Fellowship News is published four times a year by the International
Center for Journalists.

Burns Program Staff:
Frank-Dieter Freiling, Director, IJP
Mario Scherhaufer, Director of Program/Proposal Budgets, ICFJ
Maia Curtis, ICFJ Consultant

Named in honor of the late former U.S. ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany and former Federal Reserve Board chairman, the Arthur F. Burns Fellowship Program fosters greater understanding of German–U.S. relations among future leaders of the news media.

The Burns program was established in 1988 in Germany by the Internationale
Journalisten-Programme (formerly the Initiative Jugendpresse) and was originally designed for young German journalists. In 1990, the fellowship expanded to include American journalists, making it a true exchange.

Each year 20 outstanding journalists from the United States and Germany are awarded an opportunity to report from and travel in each other’s countries. The program offers 10 young print and broadcast journalists from each country the opportunity to share professional expertise with their colleagues across the Atlantic while working as “foreign correspondents” for their hometown news organizations.

Fellows work as part-time staff members at host newspapers, magazines and radio and television stations. In addition to covering local news, fellows report on events for their employers back home, while learning more about
their host country and its media.
This competitive program is open to U.S. and German journalists who are employed by a newspaper, news magazine, broadcast station or news
agency, and to freelancers. Applicants must have demonstrated journalistic
talent and a strong interest in U.S.–European affairs. German language proficiency is not required, but is encouraged. The program is administered
jointly by ICFJ and IJP.