Didrik Schanche
Chief International Editor
Didi Schanche is NPR's chief international editor. Her team of correspondents, based around the world, is on the scene for breaking news and specializes in coverage of issues of international policy and national security. NPR's award-winning international coverage is consistently recognized for its excellence.
Schanche also serves as NPR's Africa and Latin America Editor.
A journalist since 1981, Schanche landed her first reporting job as freelance correspondent for The Jerusalem Post in Cairo, Egypt. She returned to the United States and got a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1982. With the ultimate goal of becoming a foreign correspondent, Schanche spent several months banging on doors and was hired by the Associated Press as a reporter based in Montgomery, Alabama. After two years, she was transferred to the foreign desk at AP headquarters in New York. Two years later, she was sent to Nairobi, Kenya, to cover East Africa.
Schanche was East Africa Correspondent for the Associated Press for seven years, producing news stories and features from Sudan and Ethiopia in the north, to Zimbabwe and Zambia in the south. Much of the news in the region then, as now, concerned ethnic conflicts, civil war, drought, hunger, AIDS, and wildlife. She then transferred to Cyprus to edit AP's Middle East coverage. In 1995, she returned to the United States. She joined NPR in 2001.
