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Atika Shubert: CNN's storyteller
Courtesy of CNNFor CNN correspondent Atika Shubert, connecting one part of the world with another through her stories is what makes her journalistic life interesting
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Courtesy of CNN
For CNN correspondent Atika Shubert, connecting one part of the world with another through her stories is what makes her journalistic life interesting.
In her job, Shubert travels to places to hunt for the greatest stories, digging deep into the lives of people to send their messages out to the world.
'At first I thought I liked writing, talking to people and they paid me to travel around to do journalistic work. But over time, the thing that appeals to me the most is that I like talking to people, and getting their stories out,' Shubert told The Jakarta Post during her recent visit to Jakarta for a holiday.
Nevertheless, Shubert never thought that she would run on the press track.
Born in Washington DC, the US, Shubert moved to Jakarta when she was about 4 years old, before moving to Bangkok when she was 8.
Since she was very young, her life has always been surrounded by the news as her Indonesian mother was a journalist.
'My father always encouraged me to do journalism, but I think that's just because my mom was a journalist, and as a sulky teenager, I did not want to do what my parents did,' she said.
Upon completing her bachelor's degree in economics from Tufts University, Boston, she returned to Jakarta.
'I was living with my mother and she was like, 'you can't hang around here and do nothing. Get out, and work',' she recalled.
Shubert then became a freelance correspondent in Indonesia for some foreign publications, starting her life as a journalist with the New Zealand Herald.
Jumping into journalism for the first time was apparently not too difficult for her as she already had some basic journalistic knowledge from her mother, Yuli Ismartono.
Back when she was in junior high school, she said, her mother told her to clip articles from the newspaper, highlighting the bits that she thought were important and explaining to her why it was an important story.
'It was actually a very helpful thing for me, but at the time I didn't see it as training, I just saw it as a chore that I had to do,' Shubert said.
In 1998, Shubert worked freelances for the Washington Post, covering the May riot that led to the fall of former president Soeharto, and going to the morgue to talk to the victims' families.
'The moment I opened the door at the morgue, I remember thinking, 'whoa, I wanted to be in this business'.'
She also covered Soeharto's resignation, this time freelancing with CNN, joining protesters on the streets and marching toward the legislative building.
'Those two were my first big stories to cover; it was a big part of my development, not only as a journalist but also as a person, seeing an incredible event happening,' she said.
Shubert officially joined CNN when she was asked to become CNN bureau chief in Dili, East Timor, where she covered its transition to independence in 1999.
She also interviewed former president Abdurrahman 'Gus Dur' Wahid in 2001 just before his impeachment, and covered stories out of the Philippines and Singapore.
In 2004, she moved to Japan and started reporting from Tokyo. But when the Indian Ocean tsunami hit Aceh, Shubert immediately went there, becoming one of the first journalists on the ground.
There, she said people kept coming up to her, asking why the world wasn't helping them. She did not have all the answers, and all she could say was that she was just trying to get the story out.
Up until that point, she added, she managed to keep things together.
'Then one day a woman came up to me, showing a picture of her daughter, asking me to help her to find her,' she recalled with teary eyes. 'I looked at my producer, she looked away crying and I started to cry too.'
Shubert stayed in Aceh for a few months in total, and has been back once since the disaster.
'It has been rebuilt; it's really encouraging when you see this kind of story ' people being able to rebuilt despite such loss. That's really uplifting,' she said.
After Tokyo, she moved to Jerusalem for two-and-a-half years, reporting on Israeli and Palestinian peace negotiations, Palestinian militant rocket attacks into Israeli towns as well as fighting between Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah within Gaza.
The biggest threat to her in Jerusalem was not from gunfire, but more about kidnapping as at that time, a BBC correspondent had been kidnapped and held hostage.
'We went in, and it was about making sure that you were secure, keeping your profile as low as you could. But that made it a challenge to try to do a story when you're a target,' she said.
Another highlight of her career was when she became CNN's lead reporter on the Wikileaks scandal, the largest leak of classified US government documents in US history.
She became one of the journalists who was given data by Wikileaks' founder and editor, Julian Assange. She had exclusive interviews with him several times ' one of which resulted in him walking out when Shubert asked him about his personal life.
'I was as surprised as everybody else when, he decided to walk out of the interview,' she said.
'The tsunami was the most difficult story I've ever covered, but the Wikileaks story was probably equally difficult, although it was a completely different kind of story.'
Shubert just recently moved to Berlin, Germany, after spending seven years in London.
Among her busy schedule covering stories around the world, she always tries to spend as much of her time as possible with her little family.
She enjoys going to the park with her 6-year-old son and musician husband, or watching concerts.
'I also get free concerts at home, listening to my husband and my son when he decides to pick up an instrument,' she laughed.
Having worked in the media for almost two decades, Shubert, now in her 40s, says no to quitting ' at least not in the near future.
'There's something new in digital media. I could make something that I wouldn't be able to do on TV and it's quite nice to have this new element,' she said.
'And I don't want to leave now, when things are getting really exciting.'
