UAlbany professor recognized for international reporting

University at Albany journalism professor Rosemary Armao has covered stories from Mongolia to Uganda.

She has unearthed corruption from Cleveland to Sarajevo to Herzegovina.

Rosemary Armao, a journalism professor at the University at Albany, was recently part of a group called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which won the Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting for a piece entitled "Off Shore Ink."

The piece provides a look at how organized crime and shady businesses have used corruption procedures in places like the Caribbean and Cyprus to elude accountability.

She has accomplished all of this during a career, which began its course as a result of a compliment received by another classmate in the sixth grade.

"My teacher was Ms. Zelnick," said Armao, now 61 years old and long since removed from the sixth grade. "She was a Russian immigrant and I absolutely adored her. I remember her saying to Carol Luft, whom I'm still in touch with, that she was a good writer, and in a fit of jealously I knew that I would be a writer."

Armao has turned that jealously into a career that has spanned 40 years, beginning at the Gloversville Leader-Herald in 1972, following her graduation from Syracuse University.

"I covered the YMCA, the YWCA and the Jewish community center. I did that for three months and then got hired by the Knickerbocker News here in Albany," she said.

Since then, Armao has written and edited for papers all over the country, including newspapers in Florida, Virginia and Ohio. It was in Ohio where she said the most exciting story she has covered occurred.

"There was this completely corrupt judge in a suburb of Cleveland, who along with his son, a county supervisor, had committed many crimes," she said.

"Our reporting led to the exhuming of a body, the son's secretary. He was indicted for murder, and during the course of the trial it came out that he dressed up as Pam, the dead woman, wearing her dresses, her lipstick, everything. We weren't allowed back in the suburb for some time."

Armao eventually moved on to editing stories instead of just writing them. In 2001, as the managing editor for a paper in Sarasota, Florida, she responded to a letter regarding a story published in the paper.

The letter was about Katherine Harris, then Florida's secretary of state who is most famous for overseeing the controversial recount of votes in the 2000 presidential election.

"The letter accused us of writing a puff piece in favor of Harris," Armao said. "I responded that while the story did show her as hard working and in a good light, it wasn't a puff piece. And besides, I wouldn't even be voting for her."

The response caused controversy because it could be perceived that Armao could not write about Harris objectively due to the fact that she stated she would not cast a vote in Harris' favor. Under pressure from her superiors, Armao resigned.

"It's one of the worst things that has happened to me," she said. "I didn't see it as a terrible offense then and I still don't. It was a job I loved in a place I loved. I still don't like talking about it."

Following her resignation, Armao moved on to a job in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Sheer boredom caused her to seek a Knight International Press fellowship, which allows journalists to help create a free press in developing countries around the world.

"I got the fellowship in 2004, and I ended up teaching in Kampala, Uganda, for six months. After that a friend contacted me and requested that I come to Bosnia to help develop that country's press," she said. "I thought I would just be there for a few weeks. I ended up staying there for three years."

In addition to Uganda and Bosnia, she has traveled to Mongolia, Japan, Bulgaria and Ukraine.

Despite her many trips abroad, Armao has never been able to grasp speaking a foreign language.

"If I had to do it all over again, I'd learn another language," she said.

Upon returning from Bosnia, Armao took up a teaching job at UAlbany in January 2008.

"What I like best about teaching is when you get a paper from a student that just sings," she said. "I've found these can come from someone who has not spoken up in class or distinguished him or herself in any way and then, zing, there it is: wit or insight or sweet writing."

Armao also receives great joy from teaching at UAlbany.

"I once had a student who didn't come to class a lot and when she did she seemed to sleep through lessons. I had a talk with her and discovered she was trying to work full-time and also be a student and become a writer and was just wiped out," she said.

"So we agreed she would tell her story by reporting on other students like her trying to excel while also paying the bills. She did a presentation for the class that was positively riveting. Students were mesmerized by her expression of her story. So that's the kick, I figured out. You help students tell powerful stories, sometimes their own."

Regarding her winning the Daniel Pearl Award, Armao made it clear that she was just a part of a team. Armao helped to edit the reporters' work.

"It was the reporters who did all the work. They posed as businessmen and talked with a Romanian guy who had written a book on how to avoid paying taxes and getting away with it," she said.