Anthony Shadid in Baghdad, 2003

Anthony Shadid died this week of an asthma attack while reporting from Syria.  The world has lost one of the greatest journalists of his generation and certainly one of its finest human beings.  Without Anthony Shadid we will all know far less about the Middle East and the Arab world.

“The people he wrote about were never subjects. They each were a world, in which he became engrossed for the entirety of the length of his relationship to them, whether it lasted an hour or a year,” wrote Thanassis Cambanis in The Atlantic online (a friend of Shadid’s and  a regular contributor to The New York Times).   Cambanis calls Shadid the least selfish reporter he’s ever known, sharing contacts and insight, happy to help make other reporters work better.

I am no Anthony Shadid, but I am inspired by his life and dedication to deep contextual reporting – and my hope is to leave behind a for a legacy of dedicated international journalists that I’ve  had a part in training.

And so, here I am in Morocco, living in 2 rudimentary rooms  in Rabat’s ancient Oudaya, teaching 12 enthusiastic, aspiring journalism students from the U.S.  along with their Moroccan journalism student partners. This week we travel into the Sahara desert through the Atlas Mountains and on to the coast, meeting and writing about girls who’ve left their mountain villages to seek an education, single women who’ve formed a cooperative to produce the newly trendy oil called Argan, and painters who are part of a Moroccan artistic renaissance.

Stories should not be about the journalist reporting them and that’s something (along with 2 Pulitzer Prizes) that set Anthony Shadid apart from your run of the mill celebrity- journalist.  To report like Shadid, to live like Shadid and to write like Shadid – that’s what I’m trying to teach my students.

“He outlined before he wrote, and then poured out the words in one fluid swoop,” says Cambanis. “He almost always seemed delighted by what he was doing. We teased him and honored him through affairs like the Anthony Shadid contest, in which friends tried to top one another with ever-more absurd Shadidian turns of phrase that piled history upon olfactory sensation upon narrative upon character. When we tried it, it was an uproarious joke. When Shadid did it, it was poetry.”

To read Cambanis’ entire piece, which my friends who knew and loved Shadid tell me is a remarkable and accurate tribute, click here.