JOURNALISM
(From the Newsroom to the Zoom Room)
Laurie Nadel has been a journalist since 1968. After an internship with the London Daily Mirror, she worked at Reuters Television in London where she became the first woman news writer. Returning to New York, she became the first woman news writer-producer at ABC News, working with correspondents and cameramen around the world. A member of the Writers Guild of America, Nadel produced news about the Vietnam war and the anti-war movement, Watergate and the Nixon-McGovern presidential election when President Nixon won a second term. (Twenty years later, Nadel wrote The Great Stream of History: A Biography of Richard Nixon (Atheneum) for young adults. She drew on her 20 years of newsroom expertise for a young adult biography Corazon Aquino: Journey to Power (Simon & Schuster) and The Kremlin Coup (Headliners).
In 1973 she traveled to Peru where she started working as a photojournalist special assignment reporter for United Press International and Newsweek. She was the first reporter–and only woman–to cover American oil companies’ oil camps in the Amazon. Six months after a military coup overthrew the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende, Nadel traveled by bus and truck through the Atacama Desert to the Chilean capital where she worked for U.P.I. and Newsweek until a source who disliked American reporters informed on her to one of the generals. As she had been taken in by a Chilean family of one of Allende’s cabinet ministers who was in a hard labor camp in Antarctica, her life was in danger whether she showed up for her interview with the general or not. Her friends hid her until she could get a flight out of the country. That experience led her to get involved with several human rights organizations, eventually founding the Committee to Protect Journalists . (World Policy Journal)
(1978 – 2018)
A writer-producer for CBS News from 1978 – 88 Nadel produced obituaries of world leaders and celebrities and covered breaking news, including the American hostage crisis, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the Iran-Iraq war. In 1983 she produced a one-hour special on the 20th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination with Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. As the term “sexual harassment” did not exist when she entered the field in the 1960’s, Nadel’s initiation into the male-dominated world of the newsroom was rugged. She was subjected to verbal and physical sexual bullying by men who believed that women did not belong in the news business. However in England where she started her journalism career, the opposition to her working was based on entrenched Victorian attitudes. Women did not belong in the workplace. In the end, her editors promoted her to the writing desk as they felt sorry for her because she didn’t have a husband for whom she could stay home and cook.
When she joined CBS News in 1978, more women had entered the field of broadcast news. With ten years of experience under her belt, Nadel earned the respect of her colleagues. She is responsible for persuading Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather to join in the Board of Directors of the newly formed Committee to Protect Journalists and had the honor of producing a one-hour special on the 20th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination with Cronkite and Rather.
In 1988, after a long battle with chronic fatigue syndrome, Nadel was laid off while she was medically disabled. As she started to improve with the help of meditation, hypnotherapy and Chinese medicine, she rebooted her journalism career by writing for airline magazines (AUDREYHEPBURN) and Men’s Fitness. (THRILL SEEKERS and STRESS) Around this time, she returned to graduate school to earn two doctorates in psychology and clinical hypnotherapy. These credentials opened the way for her to focus on behavioral health topics and led to her writing several psychology books, including the four-time best-seller Sixth Sense: Unlocking Yor Ultimate Mind Power (Simon & Schuster/ASJA Press).
With a successful and fulfilling psychotherapy practice, Nadel missed the excitement of writing on deadline. She accepted an assignment to cover an Amazon jungle expedition for Maxim. After trekking through selva and swamp to meet with indigenous shamans, the adventure trip turned deadly when their group was taken hostage by the head-shrinking Shuar natives who had been hosting them.
As Contributing Editor to American Windsurfer magazine she interviewed the first sailors to windsurf across the Atlantic Ocean.
https://www.americanwindsurfer.com/articles/a-tribute-to-chri.stian-marty/
Later, filing for The New York Times, she covered the marine environment and extreme water sports
She later wrote “Long Island at Worship,” a monthly column on religion in the suburbs.
Laurie Nadel published more than 100 pieces in The New York Times, including a series on the psychological impact of the September 11th attacks. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/10/nyregion/9-11-balm-and-bane-of-relationships.html
Her Huffington Post story about the children of 9/11 was picked up worldwide:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/baseball-hope-and-the-chi_b_953075
David Bowie’s final track reached more than one-million readers in more than one dozen countries.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/to-be-love-david-bowies-f_b_9519030