Anya Schiffrin is the director of the International Media, Advocacy and Communications Specialization. She spent ten years working overseas as a journalist in Europe and Asia, writing for a number of different magazines and newspapers. She was bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswires in Amsterdam and Hanoi and wrote regularly for the Wall Street Journal. She was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1999-2000 and then a senior writer at the Industry Standard, covering banking and finance. She writes a monthly column for the Japanese business magazine Toyo Keizai.
Since 2003-2004, she has held a part-time position at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, teaching and serving as co-director of the International Media Concentration. She also directs the journalism training programs of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD). The IPD journalism training program has received support from Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the Open Society Institute.
Schiffrin organizes seminars around the world to strengthen the capacity of journalists in developing countries to cover finance and economics. She has taught in Azerbaijan, China, Indonesia, Moldova, Mongolia, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, South Africa and Vietnam. She is a regular lecturer at the International Institute for Journalism in Berlin. Five years ago, Schiffrin launched, in collaboration with Columbia’s Journalism School, an annual seminar for journalists on “Covering Globalization”. The seminar, which has been supported by The New York Times Foundation, attracts journalists from around the world, as well as students from SIPA and the Journalism School.
Schiffrin has edited three textbooks and manuals for journalists: Covering Globalization: A Handbook for Reporters (Columbia University Press, 2004); Covering Oil: A Reporter’s Guide to Energy and Development (2005); Covering Labor: A Reporter’s Guide to Worker’s Rights in a Global Economy (2006). She also is the co-author of Business and Economic Reporting: Covering Companies, Financial Markets and the Broader Economy, which was published in 2005 by the Washington, DC-based International Center for Journalists. Her new textbook on business reporting, written with a former editor of The Financial Times, was published in China in 2007. Her other publications/writings have been translated into French, Spanish, Bahasa, Mongolian and other languages.
She currently serves on the Advisory Board of Revenue Watch, an international NGO which seeks to ensure that developing countries receive the full benefit of their natural resources, and that the revenues generated are used, in an open and transparent way, to promote development.
She is a member of the sub-board of the Open Society Foundation’s Media Program.