David Crouch
About David Crouch
David is on leave from his job as a foreign news editor at the Financial Times in London. He is teaching at JMG while contributing to the FT and other newspapers as a freelance reporter.
Teaching
David is teaching on the Master's programme in investigative journalism (MIJ).
Presentation
David is on leave from his job as a foreign news editor at the Financial Times in London. He is teaching at JMG while contributing to the FT and other newspapers as a freelance reporter.
David's first job in journalism was on Neva News, a tiny, English-language newspaper for tourists in St Petersburg, Russia, in 1992. He worked on various publications in Russia until 1998, including the daily Moscow Times. After living through the collapse of communism, a brief flowering of democracy, and the rise of the far-right, he developed a fascination with the history of nationalism in Russia in the 20th century.
David then worked in health service journalism in London, where he wrote about problems such as allergy, diabetes and constipation, before going freelance in 2004. He had the amazing good fortune to be in Ukraine when the "Orange Revolution" broke out later that year — at that time, most British newspapers didn't even know where Ukraine was on the map, and they certainly didn't have correspondents in the country.
He started at the FT in July, 2005, in the week of the terror attacks on London transport. Soon after he arrived at the paper it stopped losing money, although people say this is just a coincidence. David also became the spokesman for the National Union of Journalists at the newspaper, and last year he was elected to the union's national executive council.
He has a long-standing interest in media coverage of war, and for the past three years he has been a member of the steering committee of the Stop the War Coalition. His book on the British media and the war on terror will be published in 2014.
David became interested in Sweden thanks to his girlfriend, who comes from Gothenburg. In May 2013 he happened to be in the country when the Stockholm riots began — and just as the FT's Sweden correspondent had gone on holiday to Legoland. So for three days he attempted to cover the riots in the Stockholm suburb of Husby.
It seems that wherever he goes there are riots, terror, wars, and revolutions. And constipation.
David has a bachelors degree in physics and completed a Ph.D. in sociology of science at Sussex University in 1988.
He tweets @davidgcrouch and blogs far too infrequently here http://davidcrouchwords.wordpress.com