Leadership

Director
International Reporting Project
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland

John Schidlovsky is the founding director of the International Reporting Project (IRP) in Washington, D.C., a program he began in 1998 to encourage more in-depth international news coverage in the U.S. media. The IRP is based at The Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and has enabled more than 300 U.S. journalists, including senior editors, to report from overseas for a variety of leading news organizations.

A veteran international correspondent, Schidlovsky served four years as director of The Freedom Forum Asian Center in Hong Kong from 1993 to 1997, monitoring media changes during the transition of Hong Kong to Chinese rule and organizing media-training programs and conferences for journalists from more than 20 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Previously, from 1990 to 1993, he was the curator of the Jefferson Fellowships program for journalists at the East-West Center in Hawaii.

Schidlovsky was a reporter for nearly 20 years, including 13 years with The Baltimore Sun. He was The Sun’s Beijing bureau chief from 1987 to the end of 1989 and closely covered the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and government crackdown. Earlier he served as The Sun’s New Delhi bureau chief and covered events throughout the Indian Subcontinent and more than 12 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Before joining The Sun in 1977, he was a freelance reporter in Beirut and Cairo, covering the Middle East and North Africa for NBC, ABC and Newsday. Schidlovsky began his career in journalism as a reporter at The Union in Springfield, Massachusetts. He has written extensively on media issues for the American Journalism Review, the Media Studies Journal, Nieman Reports, IPI Reports and other publications. Schidlovsky was awarded a Gannett Foundation Fellowship in Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii and has served as journalist-in-residence at the East-West Center. He studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo and received a B.A. in English from Columbia University.