Kiplinger Speaker Series to feature Christine Spolar on April 11

Christine Spolar, a veteran, award-winning journalist, whose reporting has run the gamut of wars, pandemics, cybercrimes, financial wrongdoings and climate change, will be the next featured speaker in the Kiplinger Speaker Series.

Spolar will give a talk to the Ohio University community on Tuesday, April 11, in Baker Center 240. The talk begins at 6:30 p.m. Her topic will be to discuss the role journalists play in democracy when reporting from a war zone. 

Spolar was a 1980s fellow of the Kiplinger Fellowship and currently reports from London, England. She’s been reporting on wars and economic upheaval, while also directing and editing investigations from London to Washington to Beijing to Tokyo. She is also the current climate/labor editor at the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

Spolar’s newsroom stints include being the international business editor of the New York Times, in London; executive editor of Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit news organization based in Washington and San Francisco; and investigations/special projects editor at the Financial Times. 

In her career, she has garnered awards from the Overseas Press Club, Society of Professional Journalists/Sigma Delta Chi, SABEW, European Newspaper Awards, British Press Awards, Society of Publishers in Asia, British Magazine Editors, Society for Business Editors and Writers, and Editor & Publisher.

Spolar has been nimble in web, print and television news. She was a correspondent for the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune, based in Washington, Los Angeles, Warsaw, Jerusalem, Cairo, Baghdad, London and Rome. Spolar covered the Bosnian wars in the 1990s for the Post. She was the Chicago Tribune’s bureau chief in Jerusalem, beginning in 2002, and in Baghdad, during the first year of the Iraq war. She reported from Iran in 2007 and 2008.

In 2016, she worked in Tokyo as an editor for Nikkei, the parent company of the Financial Times. She has also worked in start-ups – as senior editor at the Huffington Post Investigative Fund in 2009 – as well the business site, Bloomberg News.

In television, Spolar was an award-winning producer at CBS’s 60 Minutes II. One broadcast on the loss of a Navy pilot in the Iraq War of 1991 won an Emmy and honors from Investigative Reporters and Editors in 2001. A report on The Lost Boys of the Sudan, and how they settled in the US also won an Emmy.

Spolar is a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School. She was a Fulbright lecturer in Slovenia at the University of Ljubljana. She was a Kiplinger Fellow at Ohio State University, where she earned a master’s degree in journalism. In 2015, she completed masters-level digital journalism/computing/mapping  classes at Goldsmiths University in London.

Spolar’s talk follows one by three-time Pulitzer winner Walt Bogdanish of the New York Times who spoke on campus in October. He was a 1975 Kiplinger Fellow. 

The Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2023 and has been affiliated with the Scripps College of Communication and E.W. Scripps School of Journalism since 2019. Its mission is to provide training to professional journalists on a global scale.