Backgrounder: Amy Waldman

By Whitney M. Dipolina

Amy Waldman.


“Driving on Indian roads is always a bit like a video game,” said Amy Waldman, national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and former South Asia Co-Bureau Chief for The New York Times, while narrating an online video for The Times’ December 2005 interactive feature, Building a Superhighway. Waldman spent a month last year driving the first stage of India’s biggest public works project since independence: its vast new highway network. The piece garnered an Overseas Press Club Award. “There’s always something coming out in front of you—a cow, or a tractor, or a cart. Or people crossing,” said Waldman “It’s chaos. But, on the new roads that totally changes… You get a sense of how radical a departure this road is for India.”

During her travels in India, she documented not only the geographic path these new roadscut across the continent, but also the economic and social journey India is on as a result of this undertaking.

Waldman came into international reporting as a result of the September 11th terrorist attacks. After doing editorial work at both The Washington Post and The Washington Monthly, she began at The New York Times as a metro desk reporter in 1997, covering New York City. In response to 9/11, Waldman collaborated on a December 2001 project called “Portraits of Grief,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning series that profiled each of the 1,910 people who perished in the World Trade Center attack. “The scale of 9/11 was so hard to grasp, so working on ‘Portraits of Grief’ made the losses individual, and personal,” Waldman recounted in an email interview with this reporter. The little details of people’s lives, such as a man who worked on Wall Street and “made horror movies in his free time,” said Waldman, created a personal connection between readers and the people who died that day.

Soon after 9/11, she began covering issues surrounding the United States’ War on Terror. Her insight, tenacity and quick thinking earned her a position as foreign correspondent reporting from Afghanistan, where her empathetic reporting conveyed the anxiety of civilians living in the midst of war.

This approach caught the eye of readers and editors alike. “Amy Waldman scooted straight in—moving ably, filing quickly, with a lot of insight,” Alison Smale, deputy foreign editor of The Times told Times Talk in March 2002.

Waldman cultivated her empathetic style while still an undergraduate student at Yale University. Drawn to issues of human rights and apartheid in South Africa, she did extensive research on non-violent resistance. Soon after graduating magna cum laude in 1991 with a BA in English, Waldman traveled to South Africa, where she spent two years teaching at the University of Western Cape and working as a freelance journalist.

Intrigued by the prospect of being present at historical flashpoints, Waldman decided to become a professional journalist. “There was so much happening there—from 1992 to 1994, when the transition from apartheid to democracy was taking place,” she told this reporter. “It was like observing history in real time.”

Waldman has continued to report on historical global flashpoints and their impact on individual lives. Since February 2006, she has been a Los Angeles-based national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, most recently reporting on Islam and the war on terror. In her October 2006 article, “Prophetic Justice,” she discusses preemptive prosecution of Islamic terrorism, and identifies “a profound cultural gap” between American jurors and the Muslim experience.

Now at Atlantic Monthly, Waldman is faced with her first departure from newspaper reporting, but appears to be embracing the change. “After eight years at a newspaper, I found myself drawn more and more to long-form narrative journalism—just being able to go deeper on a subject,” Waldman told this reporter over email. “The Times gave me some great opportunities to do that, in Harlem and South Asia, but it’s a form that magazines are made for, so it seemed the right time to make the transition. I loved working at The Times, but was ready for a new kind of challenge.”

Whitney M. Dipollina is a senior at NYU, majoring in Spanish and Journalism.

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