Women Behind the News
While women are still in the minority in newsrooms all over the world, there is no shortage of accomplished female journalists whose work is highly deserving of recognition. The IWMF turns the spotlight on the women 'behind the news'.
Bloomberg's head of television production Mindy Massucci
Mindy Massucci was riding in an SUV that crashed during her first big assignment for Fox News Channel. She hopped out of the car and ran five blocks to the New York Stock Exchange to deliver interview tapes. It was the day in 1998 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 9,000 for the first time -- and the day Massucci, an intern, got hooked on business television.
Now, she manages 154 people as head of operations for Bloomberg Television, which produces 24 hours every weekday of live TV out of New York, Washington, San Francisco, London and Hong Kong. Massucci previously worked for ten years on the Bloomberg TV assignment desk and served as BTV's head of field production. "The assignment desk controls everything," Massucci says. "It broke me in, big-time." ... Read more
Bloomberg News' Vietnam bureau chief K. Oanh Ha
Bloomberg News' Vietnam bureau chief K. Oanh Ha speaks to economy reporter Nguyen Dieu Tu Uyen on returning to report on her homeland's renewal and leading Bloomberg's only all-female news bureau.
K. Oanh Ha spent her early childhood in Saigon. In 1979, she left Vietnam on a boat with her family and lived in a Malaysian refugee camp for a year before moving to California. Thirty-two years later, she became Bloomberg's Vietnam bureau chief, based in Hanoi.
Ha leads four women journalists who are chronicling the communist nation’s transformation toward what its government calls a “socialist-oriented market economy.” It's her first job as a manager, not counting that she's the oldest of eight siblings, she says. ... Read more
Bloomberg News Executive Editor Laurie Hays
Bloomberg News Executive Editor Laurie Hays talks with reporter Christine Idzelis about learning to read tea leaves in Moscow and the outlook for Europe from a Davos perspective.
Laurie Hays, Bloomberg News executive editor in charge of global company news, says she learned to read tea leaves as a Wall Street Journal reporter in the opaque political atmosphere of Moscow in the early 90s.
"After covering the Kremlin, I felt that I could pry information out of just about anybody,'' she says. "It was a very good experience in tea leaf reading -- figuring out between the lines what was really going on in a story.'' she says ... Read more
Bloomberg News Managing Editor Victoria Richards
Bloomberg News Managing Editor Victoria Richards talks with corporate finance editor Sarah McDonald about managing Bloomberg First Word and the Speed Teams in Asia, and the thrill of typing out the fresh news that moves markets.
Victoria Richards remembers the jitters she felt when first hired in London to send out headlines for Bloomberg News. Eight years later, overseeing more than 500 missives a day written by almost 100 staff, she now just enjoys the pressure. "You're at the forefront of everything -- massive announcements -- and there's so much adrenalin that goes along with that,'' she says. . ... Read more
Bloomberg Managing Editor Tasneem Brogger
Tasneem Brogger left Australia when she was 18 to study music in Europe. After graduating as a flautist from the conservatory in Cologne and playing in symphonies as a freelancer, she gave it up. "One comes out of that life realizing 'I've been living in this bubble,'" she says. Brogger and her husband moved to his home base in Copenhagen, where she learned Danish and earned a degree in business economics and finance at the Copenhagen Business School. During her studies, she worked as a reporter for Reuters, doing general assignment work and covering the information technology and services industry. She wrote a paper for a grad school assignment comparing her employer and Bloomberg News, she says, which her boss told her "really socked it to us.'' . ... Read more
Bloomberg Managing Editor Laura Zelenko
Laura Zelenko was a stringer in Prague in 1992 when she learned that a little-known newswire was looking for reporters. A few months later, Zelenko and a colleague, Rob Urban, were filing stories from the city's Intercontinental Hotel and searching for space to establish Bloomberg LP's fourth European bureau after London, Paris and Frankfurt. ... Read more
Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler
Two years ago, Bloomberg News founder Matt Winkler began a project to better reflect the role of women in the global economy. About 2,300 Bloomberg journalists are taking part -- adding women's voices to their stories, meeting influential women on their beats and understanding women as consumers, executives and voters. "Something as important as this had to be universal,'' Winkler says. ... Read more
Bloomberg News German Bureau Chief Angela Cullen
To Angela Cullen, timing is everything. Born in Ireland, she traveled to Germany in 1992 in search of her mother's roots. She arrived just months after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty -- the agreement that paved the way for monetary union in Europe -- and found it was a great time to get into business journalism ... Read more
Bloomberg News Executive Editor Susan Goldberg
Susan Goldberg was a 20-year-old news intern at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1980 when the paper's managing editor offered her a full-time reporting job. She jumped at the chance, putting off a final year of college to go to work reporting on education, City Hall and writing general news stories. Now, as Bloomberg News' executive editor of federal, state and local governments based in Washington DC, Goldberg says her interest in civic affairs hasn't flagged ... Read more
Bloomberg News Managing Editor Adriana Arai
In January 1999, Adriana Arai bought herself a beach chair with a credit card and sat down outside Brazil's finance ministry. The country's currency had been devalued and Brazil was slipping into financial crisis. When someone ran from the building to announce the central bank chief had been fired, Arai, on her first big story, was right there ... Read more
Bloomberg News Executive Editor Amanda Bennett
Amanda Bennett, executive editor for the projects and investigations unit at Bloomberg News, bought a motorcycle and toured France alone right after high school. She laughs about what her reaction would be if her 17-year-old daughter tried the same thing ... Read more