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Journalist

Barbara Fischkin began her career as a professional journalist in 1975 when she freelanced stories for the Kings Courier in Brooklyn, New York where she was born. Back then she delivered her copy by bicycle.
In the ensuing years she has written for numerous national and international publications, reporting stories at home - and abroad from Latin America, Asia and Europe. She was on staff at Newsday during most of the 1980s and has freelanced for that newspaper, as well as for the New Yorker, the New York Times, WigWag, the International Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe and many others. During her journalism career Barbara Fischkin covered school boards, town boards, murders, mayhem and local, state, national and international politics. In 1986, while pregnant with her first child, she won the Livingston Award for International Reporting for the Newsday series that would later be expanded into her first book Muddy Cup: A Dominican Family Comes of Age in a New America.

More recently, her online presence can be viewed at the Huffington Post, where she has written many blogs, most under the heading "An Autism Mother Rages." In the earlier days of the Internet, she wrote a political column entitled Not Calm, for Fox News Online and developed a reputation as the site's "token liberal."

As a postcript Barbara Fischkin, would like to toast the now defunct and wonderful Knickerbocker News, the scrappy Hearst afternoon daily in Albany, New York, where for four years beginning in late 1975 she cut her cub reporter's teeth with the help of many mentors, including her former journalism professors at Albany State. She came to the Knick News with the experience of a bicycle-riding freelancer and left after rising from editorial clerk to reporter in the newspaper's state Capitol bureau - left, indeed, for that job at Newsday.

Copyright © 2008 Barbara Fischkin
Photography by Christopher Zach