Nate Thayer: periodismo, crowdfunding y autopromo

• A much appreciated note of support from the Spanish language journalists website Globorama.es for my efforts to fund the publication of my my book “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalist’s Memoir From Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge” http://www.globograma.es/nate-thayer-periodismo-crowdfunding-y-autopromo/

How to Be Buddy-Buddy With a Guerilla General

How to Be Buddy-Buddy With an Guerilla General

It is always a pleasure when someone has positive things to say about ones work. So thanks to scholars-stage.blogspot.com for their generous comments:

How to Be Buddy-Buddy With an Guerilla General

Posted by T. Greer in Dogs of War, Media, Southeast Asia

Far Eastern Economic Review (2 August 1997) with Thayer’s investigative work featured as its cover story.Image Credit: Wikimedia

If you read one thing this weekend, this should be it.

Nate Thayer was the Far Eastern and Economic Review‘s man on the ground in Cambodia for most of the 1990s. One of his editors at the Review described his achievements in the following terms:

“Nate broke the story in 1997 that Cambodia’s ex-dictator, Pol Pot, was still alive and had been purged from the Khmer Rouge. He followed up a few months later with the first interview with Pol Pot in 18 years, shedding light on how utopian leftism translated to genocide back in Cambodia…. In an era of instant communication, when scoops are matched in hours and sometimes minutes, the Pol Pot stories went unmatched for months. That’s because Nate had spent years developing contacts within the Khmer Rouge, Thai intelligence, and elsewhere to gain this access” [1]

Mr. Thayer is currently writing a book that tells how he was able to build a network of contacts in an insurgent controlled jungle and gain the trust of the Khmer Rouge’s top leaders. This week he published a meaty excerpt from his truly remarkable story:

How–And Why-The New York Times Didn’t Interview Pol Pot

How–and Why– The New York Times Didn’t Interview Pol Pot

By Nate Thayer

January 23, 2014

After I interviewed Pol Pot in July and October 1997, my excellent magazine, the Far Eastern Economic Review–the sister publication of the Wall Street Journal and both owned by Dow Jones–nominated me and the story for a Pulitzer Prize.

It was a long shot as the Pulitzer is eligible only to correspondents for American media organizations, and the Review was incorporated in Hong Kong. However the story did run the same day on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, so the WSJ asked me to write a bried outline of how the story came about for the Foreign Editor, John Bussey, to formally draft a letter to the Pulitzer committee. Here is one such exchange of letters I wrote to my editor, the extraordinarily talented in his own right Nayan Chanda of the Far Easter Economic Review: