Susan Linnee

Linnee began a job as a radio stringer with NBC News in Buenos Aires after answering an ad in a newspaper in 1973. She filled in for chief correspondent Tom Streithorst, giving live radio reports while he was undergoing treatment for an illness.^[1]

Linnee joined the AP in 1976, working first in Jackson, Mississippi – where she was the only woman reporting for AP in the state – and then in Houston and New Orleans.^[1][3] She worked briefly for the International Herald Tribune in Paris before returning to the AP in 1980 as a correspondent from Abidjan, Ivory Coast. From Ivory Coast she was responsible for coverage of 22 West African countries.^[1]

Linnee became AP's Madrid bureau chief in 1982. She was the first American woman to head a bureau for the AP in Europe.^[4] During her 14 years as Madrid Bureau chief, she led coverage of the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona and worked as a correspondent in Sarajevo during the Balkans War.^[1] In 1996, she became AP bureau chief in Nairobi. At that post, she oversaw coverage of terrorism in Somalia, Rwanda after genocide, and the 1998 embassy bombings in the region.^[1]

Linnee retired in 2004 after eight years as Nairobi bureau chief. She continued to live in Nairobi, where she worked with the International Crisis Group as their East Africa specialist.^[4] She also served as a consulting editor and mentor for young journalists at Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper.^[5] Through her work at Daily Nation, she expanded her mentorship to many East African newsrooms, including Uganda's Daily Monitor.^[6]

Linnee returned to the United States in 2015, moving back to Minneapolis to be near her family.^[1] She got involved with the East African immigrant community and continued to write, including book reviews for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.^[4] She died in Edina, Minnesota in 2017 after a brain cancer diagnosis.^[1]