Mort Rosenblum

Mort Rosenblum, former chief international correspondent for the Associated Press and editor of the International Herald Tribune, now defines himself as “Reporter. Desert Rat/River Rat. Errant Quixote.” He runs the Mort Report: Non-Prophet Journalism, dividing his time among Paris, Provence, Tucson and reporting trips.

Rosenblum printed his first newspaper at six – “a pathetic biweekly,” he recalls -- on a toy press in his bedroom in Tucson. He edited his high school paper and, at 19, left the University of Arizona to work on the Mexico City Times and the Caracas Daily Journal. He returned to finish his degree and work on the Arizona Daily Star. He joined AP in Newark in 1965 and two years later, at 23, went to cover a mercenary war in the Congo. Since then, he ran AP bureaus in Kinshasa, Lagos, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Singapore, Buenos Aires and Paris.

He has written from seven continents on subjects ranging from war to tango dancing by the Seine. He covered the Biafra secession from Nigeria, Vietnam, the violent birth of Bangladesh, Central American mayhem, Israeli wars, the Iron Curtain collapse, Bosnia and Kosovo, and two Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, and Somalia, among other conflicts. In Argentina in the 1970s, he broke the first stories on the Dirty War. He wrote the first African famine stories in 1984. In 1989, he won an Overseas Press Club award and was short-listed for a Pulitzer for the fall of Romania. He danced on Red Square the night Communism died.

He edited the International Herald Tribune from 1979 to 1981 but returned to AP as a special correspondent, based in Paris, winning AP’s top reporting award three times. He left AP in 2005 and launched the quarterly, dispatches, with co-editor Gary Knight and publisher Simba Gill, then led an International Consortium of Investigative Journalists team on ocean plunder.

In summers, he worked with the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University, taking exceptional students to such places as Cambodia and Kashmir. For part of each winter he taught at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he is now professor emeritus.

Rosenblum has written 14 books and contributed to Foreign Affairs, Harpers, Vanity Fair, the New York Review of Books, Le Nouvel Observateur, Monocle, Travel & Leisure, and Bon Appetit, among others. His honors include a 2001 Harry Chapin Award for a series on water, a Mencken Award for African Famine, a James Beard Award for OLIVES, and an IACP Cookbook Award for CHOCOLATE. He was the 1980 Council on Foreign Relations Edward R. Murrow fellow.

His French and Spanish are fluent; his Italian is passable, and his Portuguese is hysterical. He can say, “Don’t shoot, I’m a journalist,” in a lot of other languages. (Not that it helps.) He is married to Jeannette Hermann, world-class ambiance director and astrology writer. Their cat, Streak, is a neurotic but noble.

One of my first“ dates” with my wife Iris, was in the early 80’s when she accepted a ride on my motorcycle to sit in one my lectures at Emerson College where I was teaching a journalism course on covering international affairs. The book I had assigned and discussing was - Coups and Earthquakes (Harper Colophon Books)  

At the Institute Mort was a powerful contributor to the development of our Exposure human rights photojournalism program. He was a superb teacher and mentored our students in our Exposure  seminars including on site in Kosovo, Argentina, and Kashmir.

Since I had a great respect for Mort’s powers of observation I was chagrined when he described me in our Exposure publication Rebuild: Kosovo Six Years Later as appearing to have a “grizzly bear exterior,” but, he assures me, that was meant to contrast interior warmth … It has been a fun element of our enduing conversations.  

 Mort is the ideal person for a Convisero mentor. In his acknowledgments to one of  his books, is  Escaping Plato’s Cave: How America’s Blindness to the Rest of the World Threatens Our Survival  (2007) He had the audacity to dedicate it to me in this manner:

My focus these days is on young people who care about a world they will have to manage and a noble old profession (journalism) they want to pursue.

He kindly added -  In this regard, I am particularly grateful to a pair of committed world – savers, Jacqueline Sharkey of the University of Arizona and  Sherman Teichman of Tufts University’s Institute for Global Leadership.

Our survival these days may loom as acutely from domestic threats, but Mort’s passion remains the same.