Reporting Around the World

Reporting around the world from Newhouse School J-Camp on Vimeo.

By Molly Naef

A love of journalism is hard-wired in Maureen Sieh’s DNA.

“My passion for journalism will never go away,” Sieh says.

Maureen Sieh is the urban affairs editor at The Post-Standard. She is a native of Liberia, in West Africa. She came to America fleeing her country’s civil war in 1990. In Liberia, she grew up in a newspaper family and covered the war for her uncles’ paper.

Sieh describes herself as very opinionated about social issues and uses her journalism skills to help bring change. “I hope to continue to be a voice for communities who can’t speak up for themselves,” Sieh says.

When she came to the U.S., she earned a scholarship to study journalism at Indiana University. She worked at several newspapers before settling in Syracuse at The Post-Standard.

As the paper’s urban affairs editor, she blogs, reports and edits. “I have my hand in a little bit of everything that has to do with journalism,” Sieh said. She describes the job as “perfect.” As Sieh says, “This job is so cool.”

“I write about urban and ethnic communities¬ – anything that you can think about that’s happening in urban America,” she says.

At The Post-Standard, Sieh has followed the Lost Boys of Sudan since they came to America in 2001. The Lost Boys are a group of refugees from Sudan who were separated from their families whey they were 5 and 6 years old.

She also paid her own way to China to cover Lopez Lomong, a Lost Boy, who competed in the 2009 Olympics.

“I’m so proud of the Lost Boys of Sudan,” Sieh says.

Although Sieh said she loves her job, some stories are more difficult to write than others. For example: the Imani Jennings child abuse case. Imani was an infant that was beaten to death by her mother’s 15-year-old boyfriend.

“The Imani Jennings case is the hardest story I’ve ever covered. It is the result of a broken system and a broken community. The cycle needs to stop,” Sieh said.

Sieh recognizes both the good and the bad things in the community.

“I believe in celebrating the community. You can’t always focus on the problems,” Sieh says. For example, she covered the Juneteenth festival, a festival acknowledging the struggles African Americans went through to win freedom and other community events.

Sieh got into journalism when she was a child growing up in Liberia.

“I used to sell newspapers on the street corners of Liberia,” she recalls.

Her uncles ran newspapers that criticized the government during the Liberian civil war. The paper was banned and burned several times.

“One of the burnings was for a story I wrote about a woman’s husband who was arrested and killed,” recalls Sieh.

People urged her to stop writing about controversial issues, but Sieh would not be silenced. She was adamant about covering the war and insisted on throwing herself in the line of fire to get a good story on her native Liberia’s civil war.

When she finally left, she caught one of the last flights out before the airports shut. Sieh didn’t want to leave Liberia: “I kept staying for extra months.”

For the future, Sieh has big plans.

“My goal is to join the U.S. Peace Corps. I’ve always wanted to do international relief work,” Sieh says.

“I have mixed feelings about leaving journalism at this time,” she says. “But I hope to bring the same passion to whatever my new adventure is going to be.”

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