Jane Ferguson

Jane Ferguson is an Irish-British journalist covering war, politics and US foreign policy. She is currently a special correspondent for PBS NewsHour, contributor to The New Yorker, and a professor of journalism at Princeton University. Among other honors, Jane has received a George Polk Award for Foreign Television Reporting, an Emmy Award for News and Documentary, a Peabody Award, and two Alfred I. duPont Columbia Silver Baton Awards.

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After graduating from York University in the UK, Jane’s career as a journalist began in Dubai in 2008 as a reporter at Gulf News. Jane subsequently joined CNN International in 2009, and covered Al Qaeda franchises in some of the most dangerous but underreported hotbeds of terrorism in the region, such as Somalia, Yemen and the African Sahel.

 

Over the course of her career, Jane has accomplished many firsts and had the courage to venture where many have not gone in the pursuit of truth.

 

• In 2010, she became the first foreign journalist working for a US TV network to report from inside Somalia since the UN pulled out in the 1990s when she traveled to Mogadishu for CNN to embed with African Union forces fighting the Al Qaeda-linked group Al Shabab.

• In 2011, Jane was the only foreign journalist on the ground inside Somalia as famine was declared.

• In 2012, Jane was among the first foreign journalists to be smuggled into rebel-held Homs city in Syria, where she reported on the Assad Government's brutal crackdown against protestors.

• In 2016, she led PBS NewsHour’s coverage of the military offensive against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

• A highlight of Jane’s reportage was when she gained exclusive access to the rebel-held part of Yemen in 2018. Her reporting uncovered the depths of the humanitarian crisis caused by the war, including the starvation of tens of thousands of children and babies.

• In August 2021, Ferguson and her cameraman were in Kabul as the Taliban entered to took control of the city. They were the only US journalists to remain at Kabul Airport throughout the subsequent evacuations and mass airlift.
   

Jane also recently authored a memoir, No Ordinary Assignment, which was published by HarperCollins in July 2023.

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She currently resides in New York City.