Simon Shuster gave a talk at the Department of Media Studies on Thursday. Photo: JMK © Feb. 15, 2024

PUBLISHED: February 16, 2024

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Shuster spoke in personal terms about his career, sharing his early attempts to achieve his goal of becoming a foreign correspondent. He lacked journalism training but spoke Russian, which made him employable for media outlets in Moscow in 2006, first at the Moscow Times and then Reuters. He subsequently built specialist knowledge on Russia, Ukraine and other regions of Eastern Europe by traveling in the area and freelancing from there. It led to assignments during larger news events, when it was more economical for news outlets in the US to hire Shuster who was on site rather than to send a reporter. 

Shuster is currently Time Magazine's senior correspondent with a focus on Ukraine and Russia. He also has personal connections through a Ukrainian father and Russian mother and relatives in the region. Shuster was born in Moscow in 1983 and emigrated with his family to the United States in 1989. 

Shuster also talked about working on his biography of Volodymyr Zelensky and answered several questions from the audience: About Zelensky as a leader, international politics and the state of the conflict, how Shuster works as a reporter and how he handles source criticism, and intricate questions about Ukrainian politics. 

Simon Shuster and his upcoming book The Showman. Photo: Debora Mittelstaedt/Norstedts

Asked how he got the unique access to Zelensky and his circle to write his book, he explained that they already knew him as a journalist and had read his reporting on Ukraine. Shuster first interviewed Zelensky when he was running for president in 2019, before he was internationally known, and then stayed in touch with the team and continued to cover Zelensky's government. 

Writing a book during an ongoing war is different from writing after the fact with hindsight. Shuster explained that his goal was precisely to capture "history in the making," and that many interviews took place during ongoing crises, such as during the first weeks when the government was working in a bunker. In those quotes, readers get to experience people's feelings and perspectives in real time. 

Simon Shuster gave several tips to the journalism students in attendance: Learn foreign languages, deepen your knowledge, become a specialist in an area or on a topic, talk to everyone, not just one side, and be open about it. He concluded by saying that journalism is the "best job in the world", because you get to seek out and ask questions of anyone, which puts you in a position to be "a witness to history."

By
Maria Nilsson