(photo: fifth from left)

Biography

Laura Santini is a reporter covering Asian financial markets for The Wall Street Journal. In the three years she’s lived in Hong Kong, Laura has written about private equity, hedge funds and corporate governance, covering stories such as the tax investigation of Lone Star Funds in Korea, Carlyle Group’s travails in China, Vietnam’s booming stock market and efforts by shareholder activists to shake up Korean conglomerates. She also sometimes writes about non-financial topics, like classical music in China and Americans adopting overseas. Before Hong Kong, Laura worked in New York, writing about Wall Street for a number of financial publications owned by Institutional Investor and Thomson. She also covered the 2003 accounting scandal at HealthSouth, a Birmingham, Alabama-based hospital company. Before that, Laura spent three years living in Berlin, teaching English in elementary schools in former East Berlin and in private language schools. Laura has a master’s degree from Columbia School of Journalism and a bachelor’s in English from the University of Pennsylvania, where she got her start in journalism at The Daily Pennsylvanian. She grew up in Wilmington, Delaware.This summer, Laura plans to use her time on the Burns Fellowship writing about Asia’s impact on German workers and on the country’s economic prosperity. She is also looking forward to diving into a bunch of non-financial feature stories, including tales to illustrate Berlin’s emergence as a hot city and its thriving arts scene.

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Final Report

I spent my two months of the Burns Fellowship working on the editorial page of Der Tagesspiegel, a daily newspaper in Berlin that is mainly read in the western districts of the city.

The paper provided a supportive home base while giving me lots of latitude on stories. The opportunity to take a break from the finance beat I cover in Hong Kong for The Wall Street Journal made for an invigorating two months that I’ll treasure for years to come.

When pitching ideas, my editor insisted only on one criterion – that any story be relevant to the “Wilmersdorfe Witwe,” the widows living in the city’s relatively conservative district of Wilmersdorf. Perhaps all editors have their own version of the saying? At the Journal, one of the editors in Asia is known for admonishing reporters to write stories for “the guy on a barstool in Idaho.”

Berlin has a vibrant local media, and Der Tagesspiegel is thick with local coverage of politics, arts, culture and human interest. The paper is also grappling with the same challenges facing U.S. paper, dwindling readership and advertising dollars. To some degree, being there was like hanging out with someone else’s dysfunctional family. Tagesspiegel has a large staff and, inexplicably, two editors-in-chief.

I couldn’t help but share the pessimism of some of my colleagues there about the paper’s future—while confiding to them that the very same worries have pervaded every American newsroom I’ve worked in.

The edit page focused mainly on international politics, especially on decisions taking place in Washington. Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was discovering the page’s rather pro-American stance on certain issues, including the Middle East. This contrasted with the rest of the paper, and didn’t mesh at all with my expectations. The European media often takes a beating in the U.S. for being tendentious and anti-American. My experience with the editorial page was that the writers were nuanced, complex and defied categorization.

That didn’t always hold for the rest of the paper. One op-ed contribution by a Tagesspiegel reporter about Muslims in GermanyU.S. than did the Islamic fundamentalists who had attacked on 9/11. The piece ran, even though it never substantiated that claim with any data. made the offhand claim that fundamentalist Christians had killed more people in the  

Perhaps one reason for the edit page’s more balanced take: the page editor had worked as a correspondent in the U.S., and was there during Sept. 11, before taking up his present job. Symmetrically, the former edit page editor is currently the paper’s U.S. correspondent.

Another dichotomy between German and U.S. press—reporters and editors move freely between news reporting and editorial writing. In fact, a lot of the reportage includes the writer’s perspective on events, the way a U.S. “news analysis” piece might.

Some of the German journalists I met preferred the dispassionate style of American papers, at least for some stories. This summer, when the paper was writing about a case involving journalists accused of endangering Germany’s national security, the editors at Tagesspiegel instructed reporters to write the stories “American” – in other words, cool.

I’ve always been a supporter of keeping a stark division between news and editorial. I still am in favor of keeping the operations separate, but journalists do benefit greatly from the opportunity to try out different modes of work. Editorial writers have much to gain from approaching their commentaries with the same reporting rigor that a police reporter would bring to a news story. On the flip side, I had fun trying out a more conversational style appropriate to commentaries.

Perhaps the only way to get such an opportunity is through a ring-fenced program like the Burns fellowship, where journalists can dip into another environment, take what’s there, and go back to the previous job.

In addition to sitting in on the meetings, eating lunch in the canteen, partaking of after-hours drinks at the local hangout, I contributed several commentaries:

A column on the German penchant for staying in touch with an ex – a first-person piece.
A comparison of the 1997 Asian financial crisis with the global contagion at the time caused by the U.S. sub-prime debacle.
A portrait of an Indian judge revered in Japan for not meting out punitive sentences to Japanese war criminals.
A portrait of a Chinese journalist who had been released from prison, after serving a sentence for allegedly revealing state secrets what his experience says about China’s relationship with the media.
A love letter to Berlin – my reunion with the city after having lived there in the 1990s as an English teacher.

For my home publication, The Wall Street Journal, I wrote a page-one piece about a recent flurry of memoirs by family members of Nazi officers and how they reflect a reappraisal in Germany of the Nazi period.