Entries for July 2001

In more than 60 years as a journalist, Colleen "Koky" Dishon has opened many doors previously closed to women.

She began her career in 1941 while still in high school at the Zanesville (Ohio) Sunday Times Signal. During World War II, she worked for the Associated Press and later became editor and president of a news and feature service she founded. Dishon then worked at newspapers in the Midwest before joining the Chicago Tribune in 1975. At the Tribune, she was responsible for creating at least 15 new sections for the newspaper. In 1981, only six years after she was hired, she became assistant managing editor/features, and in 1982, a year later, she became the first woman on the Tribune's masthead.

Jineth Bedoya Lima, a 27-year-old reporter for El Espectador, a daily newspaper in Bogota, Colombia, covers the conflict between the Colombian government and paramilitary groups. Her reports have regularly earned her harassment and death threats from those she writes about.

Carmen Gurruchaga Basurto, a political reporter for El Mundo, a Madrid-based daily newspaper, writes frequently about the Basque separatist group, ETA. Gurruchaga's stories have so threatened the terrorist group that since 1984 it has waged a campaign against her, hoping to intimidate her into stopping reporting on their activities.

In the two years since she became editor-in-chief of the Khartoum-based independent daily newspaper Al-Rai Al-Akher, Amal Abbas has faced constant harassment and censorship. The only female editor-in-chief of a newspaper in Sudan, Abbas was sent to prison in January 2001 and held for 36 hours because she published an article charging a judicial authority with misappropriating funds.