LARA LOGAN
Successful Female Journalist
About Lara
Who is Lara Logan you might ask? Well the simple answer is that she's one of the most popular and successful female journalists currently working in the field of television reporting and has based a career on her fearless excursions into troubled and war torn countries and territories. In a field that is traditionally male she has proved herself as capable as any man and her career has surpassed many who thought she might not make it.
Born in Durban, South Africa in 1971, Lara aside from being exceptionally smart and charismatic is quad-lingual, speaking English, French, Afrikaans and basic Portuguese. Her higher education was based at the University of Natal, Durban, South Africa (1992) and the Universite de L'Alliance Francaise, Paris, France where she studied for the journalistic qualifications that have helped her launch her highly successful media career.
Her ability to speak a handful of languages has indeed been an advantage to her not only in getting career breaks but also in being able to communicate in countries where she has been posted. Whilst her resume would list her as speaking four languages the truth is that she probably has a basic command of a good deal more having been posted for long periods on so many overseas assignments. It's hard to imagine Lara fumbling her way through a phrasebook in order to find out what's going on as the bullets are whizzing overhead. It's more likely that she swotted up on her journey out there and would be more than capable of asking unaided by the time she arrived and found herself in such a situation.
The early career of Lara
When she was only 17 years old Lara got a job reporting on the anti-apartheid struggle for a South African newspaper. Lara experience with the paper stood her in good stead and hence following her graduation from university with a Bachelor of Commerce degree she walked with some ease into a job with Reuters Television where she spent five years in the foreign affairs department.
This position prepared her well for her current position as war correspondent since she had to report on the violence in South Africa and on the wars in Angola and Mozambique. Despite this being her first position in television she was given a great deal of responsibility handling such tasks as covering feature stories, breaking news and big events such as the 1995 World Cup, the South African elections and the Queen's first visit.
But Lara didn't want to stay in South Africa forever and once her feet got itchy she relocated to London, England where she was employed by ABC news as a Foreign Assignments Editor. Before long though she grabbed an opportunity to step up the career ladder again and quit from ABC to take a position at Fox/Sky presenting a series about the environment. This was perhaps one of Lara's most rewarding positions taking her to Australia where she lived on a boat and spent her days scuba diving with Great White sharks and later to Siberia where she got to live with the Chukchi people for six weeks.
Lara's career today
Lara currently works for CBS News the American station owned by Viacom. She has been there since 2002 and during that time she has reported from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where for a time she was the only correspondent of a major U.S. news network in Baghdad. She has also reported stories from Europe and Africa.
Her work has not gone unnoticed by those who dish out the accolades and consequently she has received two American Women in Radio and Television Gracie Awards. The first was in 2000 for Best News Story for her CBS Radio News coverage of the violence in the Middle East and the second was in 2002 for Best News Story for her CBS Radio News coverage of the war in Afghanistan.
Lara also currently works as a correspondent for the CBS documentary show '60 Minutes II' where she works alongside such famous names as Dan Rather, Scott Pelley, Vicki Mabrey, Charlie Rose and Bob Simon. One of her most recent assignments was to report on an update on the struggle in Nepal to protect the rare Asian one-horned rhino.
While Lara's success has brought her awards and fortune it has also brought her some bad publicity from the gutter press. On Wednesday May 22nd 2002 the UK's Sun newspaper put Lara on the front page with an accompanying headline that read "Put those Bazookas away". The story claimed she had been inappropriately flirtatious with British marines while on assignment in Afghanistan.
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Moving up the career ladder
Never one to let the dust settle Lara was always looking for new opportunities to push her career in the right direction. Following her stint at Fox she decided that a spell as a freelancer was required in order for her to have more creative direction over the kind of work she was doing, the subject matter she would cover and the style in which she would cover it.
So she began reporting for ITN and for the international station owned by Time Warner known as CNN. In the position as reporter for the latter she covered many topics including the UK farmer protests and the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi and Tanzania. When the Serb v Croat war began in Yugoslavia Lara was on the front line reporting from war torn Montenegro and later from Albania as the Kosovan refugee crisis was at its height.
Spending so much time amid so much misery put many things in perspective for Lara and she decided her career was definitely secondary to the plight of those suffering the daily effects of a civil war. Consequently she resigned from her position with CNN and spent four months living in Kosovo working for the humanitarian aid agency, the International Medical Corps. Whilst in this position she was faced with such difficult tasks as dealing with emergency medical evacuations, land mine victims, mass graves etc. It was a harrowing time for Lara but she hadn't expected it to be a holiday.