Journalists to discuss local reporting of global issues

The role of international news will be addressed during “From Shanghai to Sheboygan: Local Reporting on Global Issues,” a conference to be held at UW–Madison today.

Guest speakers will include local journalists and the foreign editors of National Public Radio and the Chicago Tribune, one of them a Pulitzer Prize winner.

The afternoon event in 1100 Grainger Hall is free and open to the public.

The conference, sponsored by the UW–Madison and UW-Milwaukee Joint Center for International Studies, will address two key topics:

• The importance to U.S. citizens of being informed about international news
• The difficulty journalists face when reporting international events locally

The first session will open at 1 p.m. with keynote addresses by Loren Jenkins, foreign editor of National Public Radio, and Gary Thatcher, foreign editor of the Chicago Tribune.

Before joining NPR, Jenkins was the Washington Bureau chief in Rome and Newsweek’s bureau chief in Beirut, Hong Kong, Saigon and Rome. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for covering the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Thatcher came to the Chicago Tribune after working as the diplomatic correspondent and national editor for the Christian Science Monitor. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he served as deputy director of Radio Free Europe in Munich.

A panel discussion at 2:30 p.m. will include Alec Dobson, national editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; Jean Feraca, who hosts a show on Wisconsin Public Radio; Mitch Martin, New York correspondent for the International Herald Tribune, headquartered in Paris; John Nichols, editorial page editor for the Capital Times in Madison; and Thatcher and Jenkins.

James L. Baughman will introduce the conference and Jo Ellen Fair will moderate the panel; both are faculty members in the UW–Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication.