(photo: fifth from right)
Biography
Christine Lagorio, 26, has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune. She contributes book reviews to The Believer and is a former writer and associate editor for Village Voice. Currently, she is the web editor of CBS Evening News with Katie Couric and occasionally writes about culture and politics news for CBSNews.com. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin magna cum laude with three majors – English, history and journalism – Lagorio moved to Washington, D.C., to work for Congressional Quarterly, where she covered the early seedlings of the 2004 presidential race. Living in the politics-saturated capitol, she longed for a more creative environment and moved to New York City in 2004, taking an opportunity to work for investigative reporter Wayne Barrett at the Village Voice. Since, she has reported on a diversity of topics such as illnesses related to 9/11, the aesthetics of virtual worlds and fruit imported from Iraq. For the past two-plus years, Lagorio has been working as at CBS News, slowly learning Arabic (and now of course German) and living in Brooklyn. She hopes the Burns fellowship affords her the opportunity to work on some in-depth reporting projects – particularly to explore the issues of immigration and Islamic cultural integration. She is also eager to get a whiff of what it’s like to work as a foreign correspondent while in Berlin.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Final Report
Immediately, there were hurdles. After some (now semi-infamous) wrangling with the State Department for my passport and unsuccessful bargaining with Continental Airlines over my travel voucher, I stepped off of the airplane into Berlin’s Tegel airport wide-eyed and hopeful. That lasted about five minutes. Then my debit card didn’t jibe with the German ATMs. Then my massive suitcase didn’t arrive. Then I realized I was standing in an utterly unfamiliar city with just €17 in my pocket with nothing but a friend’s address to guide me. I hadn’t even heard a word from my fellowship placement. It was raining. Things weren’t looking good.
Within an hour, the rain cleared. Within 24 hours, I’d attended a diner party held in my honor, been fed two amazing homemade breakfasts, been escorted on an impromptu driving tour of Berlin and been welcomed warmly by the Politics and Foreign Affairs desk of the Financial Times Deutschland. Within 48 hours, my suitcase miraculously appeared on my doorstep, my bank card began functioning and I’d seen two bylined features of mine published – one in the FTD, one on CBSNews.com.
Things weren’t just looking up, they were looking like a spectacular, accelerating whirlwind comprised of equal parts reporting and exploring – and a stimulating balance of those was precisely what I hoped to get out of the fellowship. Lucky me: the whirlwind kept up its strength for two months. Much of this had to do with my fortuitous placement with the FTD – not that it seemed like a snug fit at first. I’m not interested in reporting strictly on business or financial news and at the start of the fellowship didn’t speak much German. Although my work experience might have been richer had I been fluent in the language and adept at the workings of international markets, making my way was a welcome challenge and not an entirely grueling battle.
My first news meeting with the politics staff of the FTD 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 highways 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. Still, this was one downfall of being at a busy daily eager for coverage of the United States – I really only explored extra-office German culture in my free time. Of course, I did a great deal of this, but still at the end of my busy fellowship I had a whole cache of stories just from my neighborhood I wished I’d had time to report.
That said, I got a tremendous amount of respect at work: I had a desk, a beat and – best of all – I was never mistaken for an intern (most at the FTD were older and arguably more experienced than myself). The reporting I did gave me an education about U.S.-EU relations, as did the framework of the fellowship in general. The orientation in Washington laid a comfortable groundwork and our mid-term meeting in Dresden taught me much about the lingering East-West Germany cultural divide. Dresden was an ideal location for the meeting, but whether it is held there in the future, I’d encourage American fellows to do their best to explore as much of the country in addition to their placement city as possible – some of the highlights of the fellowship for me were visiting the galleries in Leipzig, meeting with an administrator of the Stasi files in Dresden and seeing Hitler’s never-completed massive vacation compound on the island of Rügen.
As far as other advice to future fellows, I’d suggest they prepare themselves to hit the ground running. While proficiency in German is certainly not a necessity in Berlin, it will do you an infinite amount of benefit. Also in terms of getting by in Berlin particularly, making German friends and procuring a bicycle are two things that will do you a world of good outside of work. The strong network of Burnsies helped me immensely also. In Berlin this year there were five of us, which meant I never had a shortage of feedback (thanks Laura for your guidance), collaborators (Damaso and his artful photographs), travel companions (Allison and Marissa) or drinking buddies (prost, everyone!).
All-in-all, it’s an experience I’d choose to repeat in a second – even if it meant landing at Tegel one suitcase short and with just €17 in my pocket.