Simon Kruse Rasmussen

The short version is this: I grew up in the Danish port town of Aarhus, crossed the Ukrainian border in a rusty and very noisy Volkswagen and eventually wound up in Russia as Moscow correspondent for Danish newspaper Berlingske. I reported the revolution in Kyrgyzstan in 2010, the war in South-Ossetia in 2008 and two presidential elections in Russia, including regular contributions to public broadcaster Danish Radio.

The slightly longer version would pinpoint my addiction to foreign affairs to studying journalism in the Netherlands, European history in Denmark and Russian on the other side of the Baltic Sea, in St. Petersburg. I worked for a news magazine and regional newspaper in Denmark before setting out as a freelance reporter travelling from Estonia to the Aral Sea. Since 2006 I have been at Berlingske, a national daily, covering the post-Soviet space.

This has given me the privilege of meeting journalist colleagues from very different backgrounds and helped me realize that we have every reason to cooperate. So for the past 10 years, I have participated in, and contributed to organizing, the biannual conference on Global Investigative Journalism which aims to facilitate cross-border journalistic investigations.

This kind of cooperation may be key to rethinking the way we report from abroad. That is just one of the reasons why I am now cycling through Oxford. Another reason is, that the entire exhaust system of that Volkswagen is still lost somewhere in the Carpathian mountains.