Q. and A. With Jina Moore: Giving Africa A Voice Through Her Words

Jina Moore is a freelance multimedia journalist whose work focuses on human rights, foreign affairs and Africa. Jina moved to Rwanda in 2008 and has since worked extensively in and around Burundi, Kenya, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She recently moved back to Brooklyn to receive a reporting fellowship from New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Jina will be spending a year in Zambia and DRC investigating “vulture funds,” distressed debt-investors who purchase the delinquent debt of foreign countries.

Prior to working as a full-time journalist, she helped run the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism at Harvard University. She holds master’s degrees from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the School of International and Public Affairs.

Jina is the editor of Dart Society Reports, an online magazine covering trauma, conflict and human rights. She is also a regular print and multimedia correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor. Her work has appeared on Foreign Policy, Newsweek, Mother Jones, The Walrus and on the National Public Radio’s World Vision Report.

Below is a Skype interview conducted with Jina Moore on Feb. 20.

Q:  How did you get into journalism and secure your first assignment in Africa? Why did you choose to report from Africa?

A: They are both kind of the same question for me. I got into journalism essentially because I wanted to be working from Africa. I was really interested in questions of conflict reconciliation. I worked a lot with Holocaust survivors and Holocaust education before I became a journalist, and so that was my pathway. I moved from one specific historical example of mass human atrocity. Journalism seemed the quickest way to get over there and talk to people. I might, in another life, have gone for a PhD in sociology or political science, but I was a bit impatient so I became a journalist.

Q:  I guess you are doing all of that as a journalist. Journalism has all of those disciplines rolled into one. Did you start off with any particular publication in Africa or did you just start as a freelancer?

A: I’ve always been a freelancer. But when I moved over there, I did already have a relationship with the Christian Science Monitor for whom I do most of my work. I had been an intern with them when I was studying journalism in graduate school. When I moved to Rwanda in 2008, I had a network of contacts there, and I had already talked to people and tried to get them interested in what I wanted to do.