Elaine Monaghan: Journalist
Elaine was profiled by Craig Coley for Bloom Magazine.
As a foreign correspondent, Elaine Monaghan witnessed Northern Ireland’s 1998 Good Friday Agreement, covered the Kosovo War, and traveled with two U.S. secretaries of state. Today, she is a professor of practice at The Media School at Indiana University. “I never thought that I would find a job that I loved as much as being a journalist for Reuters,” Monaghan says, “and it turns out I find it right here in Bloomington.”
Reuters, for whom Monaghan worked from 1993 to 2002, is a wire service that distributes syndicated news as it breaks. “At Reuters I never had a deadline,” Monaghan says. “The deadline was always now.”
When news broke, Monaghan would call the office and dictate an 80-character “bulletin” to be sent over the wire. The practice was similar to the “insane online environment” that Monaghan prepares students to work in now. “Tweets to me are just another version of a bulletin,” she says. “It’s a lesson in how nothing changes.”
