03/14/07

Deborah Seward named special editor for innovation, training for AP

NEW YORK -- Deborah Seward, executive producer at the Central Newsroom at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the former international editor of The Associated Press, will return to the AP as a special international editor for innovation, training and restructuring.

AP International Editor John Daniszewski announced her appointment to the new position March 14.

Seward will be based in Paris and work with staffers around the globe on training, planning and developing a more online-oriented international news product. She also will help oversee issues related to current and planned non-English language services.

"She has been among our most creative and effective news executives and I know she will play a major part in fostering innovation and moving the AP's international report and people to new heights of accomplishment," Daniszewski said.

"I'm honored and proud to be back," Seward said in an e-mail message after her appointment was announced to AP colleagues. She is scheduled to assume the new duties on June 15.

The world's largest and oldest news-gathering organization, founded in 1846 and headquartered in New York, the AP maintains 240 worldwide bureaus in 97 countries.

Seward is an expert on European affairs who speaks French, Russian, German and Polish in addition to English. She first joined the news cooperative in 1988 in Warsaw, Poland, where she helped cover the rebirth of the banned Solidarity trade union.

She transferred to Berlin in 1990, reporting on the unification of Germany. A year later she joined the Moscow reporting team that covered the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath, before being named news editor in the Russian capital in 1994.

A Nieman Fellow in 1996 at Harvard University, she joined AP's Paris bureau in 1997, where she spent three years as news editor. In 2000 she was named bureau chief in Moscow and then became AP's international editor in New York from 2003-2005.

As executive producer at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's newsroom in Prague, the Czech Republic, Seward supervised convergence of that organization's broadcast and English-language Web site operations, and produced a news report and features for its many national language services broadcasting to parts of Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East.

Early in her career, she worked at Newsweek magazine, in Paris, New York and Bonn, Germany.

A Connecticut native, Seward earned a bachelor's degree in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1978, followed by graduate studies at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris.

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Contact: Jack Stokes, AP Corporate Communications, 212.621.1720