Nicholas Kristof Interview (page: 3 / 7) Journalist, Author & Columnist	Print Interview

It doesn't sound like you go out of your way to court danger, but doing the kind of work you do, you have to take risks, don't you?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nicholas Kristof: As a journalist, you have to balance the risks against the benefits of getting the story out. There are times when there is no other way to get the story but to endure a certain amount of risk. But when you do that, you need to go in with eyes wide open. You need to know exactly what you're getting into. I have a bunch of rules for myself. You stop at every village, you ask what the situation is like between this village and the next village, you look for fresh tire tracks. If there are any land mines in the area, then you always want to make sure you go on fresh tire tracks to reduce the risk of mines. You carry a certain amount of money so that if some soldiers with guns want to rob you -- no fuss -- you give them a decoy wallet or some other money to make them happy, and you just learn to kind of be soothing with unpleasant people. And so there are ways that don't make the risk disappear, but make it more manageable. And then, you still have to balance that risk against the benefit of getting that story that may not be gettable any other way.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

Did you ever consider a career other than journalism?

Nicholas Kristof: I didn't really at that point have other ambitions. Later on, there was a close call. There was some risk that I might have become a lawyer or a law professor. I did, after college, study law. I thought about becoming a law professor. But there was one crucial week where I had to make a decision, and I ended up as a journalist.

What led you to study law?

Nicholas Kristof: When I was graduating, it was pretty much legally obligatory to go to law school if you didn't go to med school. It was just the natural instinctive reaction, that everybody, if they didn't know what they wanted to do, went to law school. So I did. I won a Rhodes Scholarship and went to Oxford and studied law there.

As a Rhodes Scholar, do you have to apply for a particular subject?

Nicholas Kristof: Correct. I'd never been to Oxford, but I looked through a catalogue and I saw that Magdalen College sure looked pretty, so I applied to Magdalen College. There were a lot of disciplines. I thought about international relations, but as I said, it was sort of intuitive at that point that young people should study law. So I studied law and I came dangerously close to enjoying it. So there was some real risk that I would have ended up as a lawyer. Thank heaven I didn't!

Could you tell us about the crucial week when you had to choose betwween law and journalism?

Nicholas Kristof: Sure. With my Oxford law degree, I really couldn't do much of anything. To practice law or be an academic in the U.S., I would have needed to get at least one more year of law school and pass the bar exam in the U.S. I couldn't even take the bar exam in most states, other than Nevada, without one more year of law school. So I applied to a one-year program at Harvard Law School and was accepted. I think I got the acceptance in the beginning of May. That was the route that I would take if I wanted to be a law professor.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I had been doing a lot of traveling, had traveled through the Middle East, and in particular had gone -- this was 1982 -- had gone to a town called Hamah, in Syria, where about 30,000 people had been wiped out as part of a suppressed insurrection. The center of the town had been completely destroyed. It was rubble, this big, huge, vast area of rubble. And I found some survivors who wanted to tell their story. I couldn't speak any Arabic, they couldn't speak any English or any French, so we couldn't communicate. That experience really made me think that if I wanted to become a journalist, that one of the key skills that would help in that career would be Arabic language, 'cause so few journalists speak it, yet a lot of things happen in the Arabic-speaking world. And so I had applied to study Arabic in Cairo, at the American University in Cairo, and the same week that program came through -- my acceptance there came through and Harvard Law School came through. The Cairo program would essentially take me toward a career in journalism, I thought, and the Harvard Law School to a career maybe as a law professor. So I thought about it, agonized about it, and then decided that Cairo sounded like a lot more fun.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

How did you come to work for The New York Times?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nicholas Kristof: After studying in Egypt, then I thought I was going to be hired by The Washington Post and that had been the expectation. Then The Washington Post was going through some internal upheavals and there was a bit of a turf battle, and so they didn't hire me. They didn't really make a decision one way or the other, and in desperation I went and interviewed at The New York Times, and the business editor was an Anglophile, and since I'd just recently been at Oxford, I managed to have a job interview. It was all about Britain, and fortunately didn't touch on business at all, which I had zero knowledge of. I could never have told him the difference between an investment bank and a commercial bank. But fortunately, he never managed to figure out my ignorance in all these subjects, or frankly, a lack of interest in a lot of it.

You kept the conversation going about Oxford.

Nicholas Kristof: I pushed every Anglo button I could, and we never actually got to the meat of the interview before his next meeting. So he decided then to hire me. Then various other editors at the Times assumed that he had vetted me about business and economics, so they didn't vet me on those particulars. So then I was hired. I remember in one of my first articles I had to do something about an investment bank, and I remember going up and asking someone "What exactly is an investment bank?" and the person was horrified. "Who have we hired?" But at that point, fortunately, I was already on the payroll.

How did you finally get off the business desk?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nicholas Kristof: I was assigned various stories in which editors desperately tried to train me in business. I remember at one point, one of the editors wanted me to do a corporate profile of Harley-Davidson. Here's this nitty-gritty company, talk to everybody. Then, I remember, the people I interviewed about it included the Hell's Angels, and the editors were I think half amused and half horrified that the Hell's Angels were being reported in a New York Times business profile. So they partly gave up on me, and then partly, they were looking for a reporter to send to Hong Kong. And I was well prepared to become a correspondent in, say, West Africa or in the Arab world. I was totally unprepared to go to East Asia, and this being a classic bureaucracy, that's where they sent me. To Hong Kong, initially.

Did you go to Hong Kong to cover business?

Nicholas Kristof: Initially, my mandate was to cover half business and then half international affairs. I did that for a year, and then they decided they didn't really like their Beijing bureau chief, and I had filled in for him at one point and had acquitted myself honorably. I was in the neighborhood, so they sent me on to Beijing.

Had you already met your wife at that time?

Nicholas Kristof: Yeah. The move to Hong Kong was extraordinary, because my wife, Sheryl, and I had been going out in Los Angeles. But one of the impediments in our relationship was that I was interested in going off to Africa or the Arab world, and that seemed to be where the Times was pushing me toward, and she is Chinese-American and wanted to go out to Asia, and was planning to go out to Hong Kong the following summer.

She was also a journalist?

Nicholas Kristof: Yeah. She was working for The Wall Street Journal in Los Angeles, I was working for The New York Times in Los Angeles, both covering business, so we couldn't talk about anything that either of us was doing, which made for a complicated romance. So we went out for the summer, and we thought we would each be heading toward different continents. And then a few weeks later, lo and behold, the Times decides to send me out to Hong Kong. So that rescued our romance and it became much more serious after that. Then we married when we were just on our way to Beijing together, and then she began working for The New York Times as well, so we were The New York Times couple.

That's pretty unusual, isn't it?

Nicholas Kristof: It is very unusual. There were some people who thought it wasn't an ideal arrangement, that if you have the most populous country in the world, should it really be covered, for the most important newspaper in the world, by two people who share pillow talk? There is a real question about that. On the other hand, I think we frankly did a pretty good job, and I think we complemented each other pretty well. It also helped, frankly, having a Caucasian and an ethnic Chinese. There were a lot of times when it helped tremendously that she looked local and could get by. It was much harder to follow her than to follow me, for example.

You had already covered the same beat together, even though you weren't supposed to talk about it.

Nicholas Kristof: Right. It made it much easier, when she came to The New York Times, that we could actually talk about what we were doing!

When were you actually editing the Sunday Times?

Nicholas Kristof: That was later.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Most of my career I was a reporter, and there were various times when editors tried to make me an editor and I always resisted. And finally the executive editor, Joe Lelyveld, made me an offer that was too good to pass up. That was to be the editor of the Sunday New York Times. And so in 2000 -- end of 2000 -- he gave me that job. It was an extraordinary position, to have the responsibility for the premier front page in American journalism.

How long did you have that position?

Nicholas Kristof: I did that for about a year.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I was a beneficiary of 9/11, in some sense. I had always wanted a column, but part of the problem was my main interest and expertise was international affairs and we had an international affairs columnist, Tom Friedman. And so unless Tom got hit by a meteorite, I didn't really see how I might get a column-writing gig. But suddenly, after 9/11, international affairs were so important that our publisher felt that we needed another columnist who had that specialty. So lo and behold, I got that job.

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