Biography
SYDNEY H. SCHANBERG
Sydney H. Schanberg, a journalist for nearly 50 years, has written extensively on foreign affairs – particularly Asia – and on domestic issues such as ethics, racial problems, government secrecy, corporate excesses and the weaknesses of the national media.
Most of his journalism career has been spent on newspapers but his award-winning work has also appeared widely in other publications and media. The 1984 movie, “The Killing Fields,” which won several Academy Awards, was based on his book “The Death and Life of Dith Pran” – a memoir of his experiences covering the war in Cambodia for The New York Times and of his relationship with his Cambodian colleague, Dith Pran.
For his accounts of the fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, Schanberg was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting “at great risk.” He is also the recipient of many other awards – including two George Polk awards, two Overseas Press Club awards and the Sigma Delta Chi prize for distinguished journalism.
Schanberg’s first journalism job came after college and a two-year stint in the army, stationed in Europe. The New York Times hired him in 1959 as a copy boy and he spent the next 26 years there. After rising through the clerical ranks to the reporting staff and doing local and national news for eight years, he was posted overseas – first to New Delhi, where his reporting included the 1971 war between India and Pakistan. In 1973 he moved to Singapore from where he covered all of Southeast Asia, but primarily Cambodia and Vietnam.
In 1975, he was one of a handful of Western correspondents to witness the collapse of Cambodia.
Afterward, Schanberg returned to The Times’ home office as Metropolitan Editor and, later, as a columnist on the opinion page. In 1986, he left The Times to write his column for Newsday. There he explored a range of subjects, from police corruption and real estate scandals, to the press’s invasions of privacy and the fate of American POWs still missing in Vietnam.
Schanberg departed Newsday in 1995 to work on his own projects. He lectures, usually on the press, and writes in-depth news articles, including a Life magazine piece on child labor in the third world that led to reforms by Nike and other multinational companies in their overseas factories.
To better understand the world of the Internet, he spent a year as investigations editor for APBNews.com, a website that won several press awards for aggressive pursuit of government records and other exclusive stories. APB went into bankruptcy in August 2000 in a wave of dot.com financial failures.
Most recently, he spent three years at The Village Voice, writing long-form news reports and press criticism as the paper’s Press Clips columnist.
Schanberg’s work has been reprinted in many anthologies and journalism textbooks. In 2002, he taught journalism at the New Paltz campus of the State University of New York, as the first fellow appointed to the James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professorship.
Schanberg was born on January 17, 1934 in Clinton, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard College, graduating with a B.A. in government in 1955. He lives in New York City with his wife, Jane Freiman, an editor and designer. He has two daughters by a previous marriage – Jessica and Rebecca.
August 2006
