This article is an autobiography or has been extensively edited by the subject or by someone connected to the subject.(September 2021) |
A. Craig Copetas | |
---|---|
Nationality | Greek/American |
Citizenship | Greek, American |
Education | Ohio University University of East Anglia Harriman Institute |
Occupation(s) | Author, journalist |
A. Craig Copetas is a dual national Greek-American journalist.
Copetas attended Upper St. Clair High School in Pittsburgh, where he was a writer on the school's newspaper, The St. Clairion. He also played in the band Karl Ottoman & the Empires.[ citation needed ]
Copetas held various summer jobs, including layin natural gas pipelines in Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia and clerking at Eckert, Seamans, Cherin & Mellott, a law firm. [1] This led to him becoming a researcher on The Scranton Commission on Campus Unrest in the summer of 1970, following the Kent State and Jackson State killings in May 1970. [1]
Between 1969 and 1972, he studied journalism and history under the tutelage of American poet Stanley Plumly and creative writing at Ohio University, where he was a Cutler College Honors Program student. Copetas spent his senior year at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, where he studied political and Russian history and got to know fellow student Ian McEwan, [2] [3] [4] and American Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs. [5]
Copetas began his journalism career in 1973 at the London bureau of Rolling Stone . "He was a cocksure American fresh from J school," [6] said RS bureau chief Andrew Bailey, who hired Copetas as a reporter after being introduced to him by Tony Elliott. During his time at Rolling Stone Magazine, he shared a house on Stoneleigh Street with fellow employees such as Lanny Aldrich, who at the time managed Rolling Stone's Straight Arrow Books distribution joint-venture Quick Fox in Europe, and later became a literary agent and author of "The Western Art of Charles M. Russell" and "Mallorca, The Art of Living". Visitors to the house on Stoneleigh Street included Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson, [7] British filmmaker Peter Whitehead and Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. They frequented the nearby Julie's Wine Bar, [Notes 1] [6] socialising with neighbours such as Sally Moore [8] and the (then aspiring) photographer Richard Young who at that time was working in a bookshop. [9]
Copetas' first big story came in 1974 when Rolling Stone sent him to find J.Paul Getty III shortly after he had been kidnapped in Italy. [10] Copetas worked [Notes 2] [6] with fellow Ohio University journalism graduate Joe Esztheras to interview him for the magazine [11] and enabled Richard Young, who photographed Getty, to secure his first published photograph. That same year, Copetas also interviewed his friend David Bowie and William S. Burroughs for the magazine. [12]
Copetas went on to serve as foreign correspondent for Alternative Press Syndicate, based in Quito, Ecuador, and Bogota and Colombia, and as news editor for High Times magazine [13] where he worked with Tom Forcade. [14] In 1976, Copetas broke the paraquat poisoning story [15] which highlighted the aerial spraying of Mexican marijuana fields with the lethal herbicide paraquat in the Mexican-American war against marijuana. His articles led Daryl Dodson, an intern on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, to research further and ultimately the Senate Subcommittee investigation [16] which resulted in Government testing of contaminated Mexican marijuana. Copetas was also responsible for maintaining a cooperative and mutually beneficial relationship with NORML, [17] the non-profit public-interest pro-marijuana advocacy group.
His other roles have included contributing staff writer at the New York Daily News, New York Times, [18] Harper's Magazine [19] and columnist for Inc Magazine. [20]
In 1978, he joined Associated Newspapers where he served as associate editor and staff writer at Esquire magazine. [21] At the magazine, Copetas worked with writers [22] such as Graham Greene, Norman Mailer, [23] Hunter Thompson, William Buckley, James Baldwin, Anthony Haden Guest and Jesse Kornbluth. [24] His fellow editors included Peter W. Kaplan, Marilyn Johnson, [25] Rob Fleder and Dominique Browning. They were the last group to be trained and mentored by those who had edited the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wolfe. That group included Arnold Gingrich, Harold Hayes, Byron Dobell, Rust Hills and Don Erickson.
Copetas went on to work at ANG's SoHo Weekly News [26] before moving to London for the Mail on Sunday and helping to create the paper's Sunday Magazine supplement.
During the 1980s, he also wrote for The Village Voice [27] and Regardie's Magazine. [28]
By then, he was based in Moscow where he also became on-site director of media company Kommersant, [29] During one of his trips back to London he visited his friend Tony Elliott, founded of Time Out, during a labour strike at the publication. He persuaded Elliot to accompany him on a trip to Cairo [30] which they took alongside James Horwitz.
Back in Moscow, Copetas met actor Brian Cox [31] who was there to direct a production of "The Crucible" [32] with students from the Moscow Art Theatre in 1989. Copetas agreed to the role of ersatz casting director for his friend and found Nora Ivanovna, a Black Russian singer, to play Tituba, the slave-woman from Barbados.
In 1989, Copetas was named Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism, [28] a program designed to provide formal business and economics training for journalists at mid-career.
He reported on the ground in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq during the First Gulf War and then the Balkan conflict in Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia during the late 1990s for the Wall Street Journal with colleague Daniel Pearl. Other long-term postings included China and Southeast Asia. He was later embedded with British forces during the Second Gulf War. [33]
In 1991, he became a staff reporter on the Wall Street Journal and went on to create and manage the sports section of The Wall Street Journal Europe, helping develop the first weekend section for the paper and extensively covering the Olympic corruption scandal. [34] [35] He was briefly arrested in Singapore based on an Australian hold-and-detain order that claimed he was a terrorist suspect. "The Great Olympic Swindle" [36] recounts the harassment that Copetas and his family subsequently suffered in the hopes that he would hold off publishing his story in the Wall Street Journal.
In 2001, he joined Bloomberg LP as a senior writer covering global financial news and events across all Bloomberg News platforms, including Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Television, Bloomberg Markets magazine and Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine. He held posts in Europe, Russia, Middle East and China.
In 2009, he was briefly detained in Dubai [37] while there as senior writer for Bloomberg News working [Notes 3] [38] on a story under former Associated Press Executive Editor William Ahearn. At the time, many foreign journalists were complaining that they had "been told to avoid writing negative stories" about the UAE's economy [39] and the UAE was on the brink of adopting a new media law which forbade the publication of stories that were deemed to be harmful to the national economy. Bloomberg pulled the story "because of the threat of losing their wire terminals throughout the Middle East, being barred from press releases and press gatherings, having their assets in Dubai seized" [38] Copetas was subsequently dismissed [40] from Bloomberg as was Ahearn. [41] In 2014 it was reported that a Bloomberg story about mass accumulation of wealth by China's ruling class was closed down and the journalist also dismissed by Bloomberg. [42]
For seven years, he was a World Economic Forum Media Leader, taking part in panel discussions at World Economic Forums in Davos, Switzerland. He was a representative on WEF's Summit on the Global Agenda, which formulates topics for discussion at WEF's annual meeting. He also held a similar position at OECDs Forum in Paris. [43]
He went on to host news talk shows on Bloomberg Television and represented Bloomberg LP on numerous global television and radio shows, including CNN, Fox News, CBS News, MSNBC, France 24. [44] He has also been a weekly columnist for International Herald Tribune. [45]
From 2010 to 2014 he was a regular panellist on The World This Week, [46] a weekly one-hour news and current affairs program broadcast globally in English and French on French public broadcaster France 24, working with Christopher Dickey. During that time, he was involved in the founding of Quartz and became its Editor-at-Large based in Paris. [47]
From 2015 to 2019 he was Editor-at-Large for TRT World, the English-language news network. He created and managed the Monday to Friday live-broadcast business and financial politics program Money Talks. [48]
Copetas has held various academic posts including Visiting Scholar at The Harriman Institute of Advanced Russian Study at Columbia University in New York, [49] Associate Professor of Narrative Journalism at the American University of Paris (2012–2014), [50] Visiting Lecturer on print, video and digital journalism and writing at University of Miami; Boston University; Harvard College; Tulane University; Ecole Jeannine Manuel; Sciences Po.
1990 New York University School of Journalism Olive Branch Award for Best Reporting from Soviet Union [49] (for his article on Soviet reform which appeared in Regardie's April 1989 issue)
1998 Wall Street Journal Awards (internal) for Best Leader "Familiar Rings" [51]
2000 Wall Street Journal Awards (internal) for Best Investigative Writing with co-writer Roger Thurow on a multi-part series on The International Olympic Committee corruption scandal
In 2001 he became the 2nd American journalist (after Art Buchwald) to be awarded Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
2003 National Headliner Award Best Feature Writer [52]
Copetas is married and has two sons with Marie-Céline Girard, a French television producer, the director of admissions at the Paris-based film school EICAR [53] and the daughter of the Academy Award-winning French film producer Roland Girard whose 1978 film Madame Rosa / Le Vie Devant Soi [54] won the 1978 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the French actress Virginie (Dupuis) Vitry.
Hunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author. He rose to prominence with the publication of Hell's Angels (1967), a book for which he spent a year living with the Hells Angels motorcycle club to write a first-hand account of their lives and experiences. In 1970, he wrote an unconventional article titled "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved" for Scanlan's Monthly, which further raised his profile as a countercultural figure. It also set him on the path to establishing his own subgenre of New Journalism that he called "Gonzo", a journalistic style in which the writer becomes a central figure and participant in the events of the narrative.
Rolling Stone is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics, and popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, California in 1967 by Jann Wenner and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason.
Robert James Dell’Oro Thomson is an Australian journalist. Since January 2013 he has been chief executive of News Corp.
New Journalism is a style of news writing and journalism, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, that uses literary techniques unconventional at the time. It is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form non-fiction. Using extensive imagery, reporters interpolate subjective language within facts whilst immersing themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them. In traditional journalism, the journalist is "invisible"; facts are meant to be reported objectively.
Bloomberg Businessweek, previously known as BusinessWeek, is an American monthly business magazine published 12 times a year. Since 2009, the magazine is owned by New York City-based Bloomberg L.P. The magazine debuted in New York City in September 1929.
Kurt Loder is an American entertainment critic, author, columnist, and television personality. He served in the 1980s as editor at Rolling Stone, during a tenure that Reason later called "legendary". He has contributed to articles in Reason, Esquire, Details, New York, and Time. He has also made cameos on several films and television series. He is best known for his role at MTV News since the 1980s and for appearing in other MTV-related television specials. He has hosted the SiriusXM radio show True Stories since 2016.
David Weir is a journalist, author, and co-founder and former Executive Director of the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Norman Pearlstine is an American editor and media executive. He previously held senior positions at the Los Angeles Times, Time Inc, Bloomberg L.P., Forbes and The Wall Street Journal.
Mike Sager is an American author, journalist, and educator.
Jeff Sharlet is an American academic, journalist, and author. He is the Frederick Sessions Beebe '35 Professor in the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College. Throughout his career, Sharlet's work has focused on religion.
Daniel Hertzberg is a former American journalist. Hertzberg is a 1968 graduate of the University of Chicago. He married Barbara Kantrowitz, on August 29, 1976. He was the former senior deputy managing editor and later deputy managing editor for international news at The Wall Street Journal. Starting in July 2009, Hertzberg served as senior editor-at-large and then as executive editor for finance at Bloomberg News in New York City before retiring in February 2014.
Wil S. Hylton is an American journalist. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and has published cover stories for The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Harper's, Details, GQ, New York, Outside, and many others.
Matthew Winkler is an American journalist who is a co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, part of Bloomberg L.P. He is also co-author of Bloomberg by Bloomberg and the author of The Bloomberg Way: A Guide for Reporters and Editors.
"A Rape on Campus" is a retracted, defamatory Rolling Stone magazine article written by Sabrina Erdely and originally published on November 19, 2014, that describes a purported group sexual assault at the University of Virginia (UVA) in Charlottesville, Virginia. Rolling Stone retracted the story in its entirety on April 5, 2015. The article claimed that UVA student Jackie Coakley had been taken to a party hosted by UVA's Phi Kappa Psi fraternity by a fellow student and led to a bedroom to be gang raped by several fraternity members as part of a fraternity initiation ritual.
Noah Shachtman is an American journalist and musician. He was the editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone. From 2018 to 2021, he served as the editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. He previously was the executive editor of the site. A former non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution, he also worked as executive editor for News at Foreign Policy and as a contributing editor at Wired.
Nisid Hajari is an Indian-American writer, editor and foreign affairs analyst. He is the author of Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition, winner of the 2016 Colby Award.
Ricardo Baca is an American journalist best known for being the first full-time marijuana rights editor for a major American newspaper. He was an editor at The Denver Post, producing The Cannabist for over three years until December, 2016. He is the "central character" of the 2015 documentary film Rolling Papers. He also shares his name with the first person to be convicted for the possession of marijuana after the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was put into action.
Mark Schoofs is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and was the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. He is also a visiting professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
John Huey is an American journalist and publishing executive who served as the editor-in-chief of Time Inc., at the time the largest magazine publisher in the United States, overseeing more than 150 titles, including Time, People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly and InStyle. He previously served as the editor of Fortune, Atlanta bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal and founding managing editor, and later editor, of The Wall Street Journal Europe. He co-authored the best-selling autobiography of Walmart founder Sam Walton.
Robert Sam Anson was an American journalist and author. He was noted for his work as a contributing editor to Vanity Fair for over 20 years. He also wrote for other American magazines such as Esquire, Life, and The Atlantic. He authored six nonfiction books, including Gone Crazy and Back Again: The Rise and Fall of the Rolling Stone Generation, about Jann Wenner and his magazine.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link){{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)