Joseph B. Treaster
Professor, Journalism
John S. and James L. Knight Chair for Cross-Cultural Communication
Joseph B. Treaster serves as the Knight Chair for Cross-Cultural Communication and is a senior member of the School’s journalism faculty.
Treaster is a former foreign correspondent and international reporter for The New York Times, covering wars, politics, diplomacy, disasters, business and every day life throughout the world. His assignments for The Times and national magazines have taken him to Asia, Africa, Australia, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and throughout the United States.
Treaster was a financial news reporter for The Times for over ten years, concentrating on the insurance industry. He was heavily engaged in reporting on all aspects of hurricanes in the last few years and was the only reporter from a major newspaper in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck.
To make the transition from foreign correspondence and general news, Treaster studied at the Columbia University Business School on a Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in 1995 and 1996.
For the five years before business school, Treaster’s primary assignment at The Times was writing about drug trafficking and illicit drug use in the United States, Europe and Latin America.
The assignment was an outgrowth of his previous work in the cocaine fields of Colombia, Peru and Ecuador and the trafficking center of Panama as the newspaper’s Caribbean correspondent, responsible for parts of Latin America as well as the island region.
While based in New York and writing about illegal drugs, as in previous stints in New York, Treaster was often sent to cover breaking foreign news. He reported from Jordan, Iraq and Kuwait in the build up to the Persian Gulf War, for example, and returned to Kuwait in the fall of 1994 when Saddam Hussein threatened another invasion. That summer he had reported from Guantanamo Bay on a surge in Cubans trying to make their way to a new life across the Florida Straits. Earlier he had traveled to the Baltic States for several business articles. More recently, Treaster reported from Mexico, Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates.
Treaster is the author of Paul Volcker: The Making of A Financial Legend and a co-author of a book on the experiences of the Americans taken hostage in Iran, Inside Report on the Hostage Crisis: No Hiding Place. A third book, Hurricane Force, In The Path of America’s Deadliest Storms, was published in June 2007.
A graduate of the University of Miami and Columbia University, Treaster learned French at the Sorbonne and Spanish at a language school in Guatemala. He has received more than a dozen journalistic awards, including three from the Overseas Press Club of America for work in Africa and Latin America. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Miami and a Master of Science degree from Columbia.
Treaster has been a Poynter Fellow at Yale University and at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. and is currently a Visiting Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. In recent years he has taught at Baruch College in New York and in China, South Korea, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates in an international journalism program of Georgia State University. Treaster is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the East and Who’s Who in Finance and Business.
