About Me
Griffin Shea is a journalist for Agence France-Presse (AFP), the world's oldest news agency, whose client news outlets reach a worldwide audience of more than one billion people.
Shea is currently working in AFP's Bangkok bureau as the news editor/deputy bureau chief for countries of Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar (formerly Burma). He arrived on the job just days after the Indian Ocean tsunami. He coordinates a multinational and multilingual staff of four reporters in Bangkok, as well as two in Yangon and two in Phnom Penh, assuring coverage of everything from insurgencies to Miss Universe to international sports.
Before arriving in Asia, Shea lived and worked in Zimbabwe for more than two years, until the Mugabe government forced him to leave in September 2002. Zimbabwe's information minister accused Shea of spying for the U.S. government and attempting to undermine Mugabe's regime, giving him only one week to leave the country.
Shea's expulsion came as the Zimbabwe government was forcing out all foreign journalists, and drew protests from press rights advocates such as Reporters without Borders and the Media Institute of Southern Africa. In 2002 the U.S. State Department made note of Shea's forced departure in its annual report to Congress on human rights abuses around the world.
During his time in Zimbabwe -- a period in which the Committee to Protect Journalists named the country one of the ten worst places in the world to be a journalist -- Shea became recognized internationally as an expert on the country's political, social and economic turmoil. His dispatches for AFP appeared in newspapers from Toronto to Taipei. He reported on Zimbabwe for CNN's international and domestic services, as well as for South Africa's Mail & Guardian, one of that country's leading newspapers known for its investigative work. He wrote about the country's AIDS crisis for Poz magazine in New York. South African radio stations, including the national broadcaster, SABC, and the Johannesburg station Highveld FM, frequently telephoned Shea for reports when their own reporters had difficulty gaining access to Zimbabwe.
Shea has also spent four years working in Washington, DC, coordinating the editing and translation of stories from all of AFP's bureaus in North and South America. His time in Washington allowed him to cover presidential elections, Supreme Court cases, and Congress.
Shea earned a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1997, having completed part of his studies at the Universite Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal.