In 1991, foreign correspondent Bernie Krisher was visiting Cambodia from his home in Tokyo, and Prince (later King) Norodom Sihanouk invited him to dinner. When Krisher told Sihanouk that he wanted to start a newspaper in Cambodia, the Prince replied, “Please don’t do that, it is dangerous. You may get killed. Please do something else.”
PHNOM PENH: In 1991, foreign correspondent Bernie Krisher was visiting Cambodia from his home in Tokyo, and Prince (later King) Norodom Sihanouk invited him to dinner. When Krisher told Sihanouk that he wanted to start a newspaper in Cambodia, the Prince replied, “Please don’t do that, it is dangerous. You may get killed. Please do something else.”
Krisher ignored the warning, and in 1993 he founded the English-language Cambodian Daily that publishes local and international news and trains young Cambodian journalists. International news is provided by The New York Times, Washington Post-Los Angeles Times News Service, Dow-Jones News Service and wire agencies in Germany and Japan – and Krisher persuaded all of those organizations to serve his paper free! Now celebrating its 15th anniversary, The Cambodian Daily annually provides a reporting internship to a winner of an OPC Foundation Scholarship.
Krisher, 77, also has collected several million dollars to build more than 400 elementary schools in Cambodian villages that lacked educational facilities. Continuing as publisher of the Cambodia paper with his daughter, Deborah Krisher-Steele, as deputy publisher, Krisher started the Burma Daily this year. His wife, Akiko, converted to Judaism, a rare act in Japan. The family lives in Tokyo and travels frequently to Cambodia.
A former Tokyo-based correspondent for Newsweek and later Fortune, Krisher’s persistence won him an interview with Emperor Hirohito, only the second granted by the late Japanese sovereign. After months seeking the interview, the Imperial Household Agency finally agreed but said a New York Times correspondent should participate. Horrified, Krisher replied by saying that in America people wrapped fish in their newspapers and surely Japan would not want fish wrapped with their Emperor’s words. Krisher alone got the interview.
When he worked for the New York World Telegram & Sun before going to Asia, Krisher won friends and supporters (including this columnist) by clipping byline stories from the paper and mailing them to the writers even though he didn’t know them. Krisher and his parents fled Nazi Germany in 1937 and settled in New York when he was six years old.