Q&A With Paulo Prada

Paulo Prada is a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal. For the past year, he has covered airlines and the South for the newspaper from its Atlanta bureau. Before that, he covered business in South America for The  New York Times and worked as a Brazil-based stringer for various other U.S. media including The Boston Globe, the Miami Herald, and Marketplace, the public radio show. He began his career as a foreign reporter in Europe, where he worked for The Wall Street Journal from Madrid and Brussels. His move to Atlanta is a homecoming of sorts: Prada grew up in Middle Georgia. Bulletin editor Aimee Rinehart spoke with Prada recently via e-mail.

qa_prada.jpgOPC: What sparked your interest in being a journalist outside of the United States?

PRADA: I’m the son of Colombian immigrants, but I grew up in the deep South. The contrast, then, between the town around me and my home life, where we spoke Spanish and remained close to our family back in South America, was always huge. That drove me to be really curious about everything beyond my small hometown in middle Georgia and even more so about issues beyond the U.S.

OPC: How did you end up actually landing a job as a foreign reporter?

PRADA: I always planned after college to move to a Spanish speaking country and try my hand at freelancing. So, when a study abroad program took me to Europe during my last few months of college, I decided Spain was a good place to begin. I knocked on the doors of all the wire services and most of the correspondents I managed to track down. Luckily, The Wall Street Journal’s correspondent at the time was swamped with work and was willing to give a 23-year-old with very little experience the chance to work as an intern. I stayed there for three years and learned a lot of the basics of reporting. The Wall Street Journal Europe at the time was expanding rapidly and lots was happening in Spain, so I was fortunate to be in a position where I could do lots of stories, ranging from Spanish investment in Latin America to what happens to bull carcasses after a bullfight (the meat gets sold to butchers!).

OPC: In 2002, you left Europe and went to Brazil. What inspired the move?

PRADA: I always planned to work in Latin America, but I wanted to go somewhere that would be both compelling as a journalist and new to me culturally. So, Brazil it was. For a reporter it’s a hard place to beat, considering the size and diversity of the country, not to mention the heft of its economy. Plus, it’s a fun and interesting country. I could walk outside my house in Rio de Janeiro and stumble across constant fodder for stories.
Once, after jogging around the big lagoon in the middle of town, I ran across a capybara, a giant rodent that I heard had been living in the water there. These things are the size of pigs. To me, it always sounded like a Loch Ness myth, but a capybara did actually live in the lagoon, for some reason. Eventually it escaped, wound up at the beach, and prompted a day-long pursuit by the fire department, who rescued the animal and took it to a game reserve outside town. That caused a big uproar from Rio residents who wanted her back in the lagoon. It made for a weird and enjoyable story and a nice break from lots of the business and financial reporting I did to make a living.

OPC: What were the challenges of securing freelance work?

PRADA: Papers everywhere are cutting back on their foreign coverage. Most U.S. papers now leave international news to the wires, if they choose to cover foreign issues at all. So it was a real challenge to find editors who were interested in good stories from abroad. That said, if you’re persistent enough, you do find those few editors who are still looking for copy that not everyone else will have.

OPC: What advice would you give to someone who picks a country and takes the plunge in freelancing overseas?

PRADA: Keep an open mind about the type of work you will cover and hone your skills in just about every type of reporting. Beggars cannot be choosers, and sometimes as a freelancer, you really will go through dry spells. Luckily, my early days at the Journal taught me how to do business stories. The days when papers were hungry for foreign political and social coverage are gone, so the one area where a competent freelancer can find a steady appetite for stories is business and financial news. And luckily, every now and then, a capybara will still cross your path.

OPC: You recently returned to the WSJ as a reporter in the Atlanta bureau after living outside of the U.S. for nearly a decade. How has the transition been?

PRADA: Not bad at all. When I was finishing college, I couldn’t wait to leave the South and the U.S. itself. The country changed immensely during the time I was gone, though, so in many ways I was coming back to an entirely new place. It felt almost as if I were a foreign reporter here, initially, seeing the place for the first time through the eyes of a working journalist. Sure, that novelty faded fast, but it’s still a pretty interesting time in the U.S. The economy is in a very weak spot, compared with the boom of the ’90s, and the politics in the U.S. these days feel make-or-break. We’re at a crucial point as a country and having watched the last few big elections from afar, I’m thrilled to see this one up close.