Indira Lakshmanan, an award-winning journalist who has reported from more than 80 countries, is joining The Associated Press to lead the global enterprise team.Indira, who was most recently the senior executive editor and vice president for news and features at National Geographic Media, will lead AP’s multimedia global enterprise team and collaborate with bureaus and verticals around the world, including data, investigative and beat reporters, to produce deeply reported narratives, ambitious accountability journalism, visually arresting magazine-style packages, surprising immersive storytelling and sophisticated explainers and analyses for all platforms.She starts on Jan. 9 and will be based in Washington.
Indira Lakshmanan.
Indira has reported from six continents and Washington for newspapers, a wire service, magazines, radio, television and podcasts. For The Boston Globe and Bloomberg News, she interviewed and profiled newsmakers from Fidel Castro and Benazir Bhutto to Hillary Clinton, hit the campaign trail with four U.S. presidential candidates and crisscrossed the world with three U.S. presidents and two secretaries of state. She has covered elections, coups and crises from the fall of the Taliban and the Bosnian War to the SARS epidemic in China, embedding with pirates in the Philippines, Maoist rebels in Nepal and Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. As The Boston Globe’s regional bureau chief in Asia and then Latin America, her reporting exposed child labor in Bolivian mines, illegal logging in Brazil’s Amazon and collusion between Philippine authorities and Abu Sayyaf terrorists, and helped end the incarceration of innocent children in Nepal. She was also a columnist for the International Herald Tribune and The Boston Globe.Most recently, Indira led National Geographic’s award-winning newsroom, overseeing reporting on topics from climate change and pandemics to migration and trafficking. Previously, she was executive editor at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a journalism nonprofit that funds under-reported topics, promoting high-quality international reporting and creating platforms that reach broad and diverse audiences.Indira was the inaugural Newmark chair in journalism ethics at the Poynter Institute, served on the PBS editorial standards committee and is the host of the News Literacy Project’s lessons on understanding bias in news, used in schools across the U.S. She started her career on the foreign desk at NPR, and has guest-hosted national NPR shows, including “1A,” “Here and Now” and “Weekend Edition.”A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Indira graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in history of art and architecture, did graduate work in Latin America studies at Oxford University as a Rotary Scholar and was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard.