Megan Specia

Megan Specia is an international correspondent for The New York Times in London. Over her decade-long career, she has covered a major domestic and international stories from the Baltimore protests after the death of Freddie Gray, and turmoil in Ferguson the wake of Michael Brown’s killing, to the aftermath of the Paris and Brussels attacks and the refugee crisis.

She worked for Mashable as a breaking news reporter and editor, traveling to Jordan in 2015 to report from the largest Syrian refugee camp in the region, and Greece in 2016 to cover the stories of refugees living in squalid conditions in Idomeni as the European migration crisis began. She criss crossed the U.S. in 2016 reporting on the unprecedented presidential campaign, focusing on real-time coverage from the trail.

Later that year, she joined The New York Times as a video journalist, reporting breaking national and international stories using innovative digital formats. A year later, she joined the international desk of The New York Times as a reporter and editor. She was a finalist for the Livingston Award in 2017 for coverage of the siege of Aleppo and received a Picture of the Year award for the coverage.

In February 2017, she was selected by the International Women’s Media Foundation for a reporting fellowship in Rwanda to cover under-reported stories in the country. A year later, she returned to the region with the IWMF, this time traveling to South Sudan to report on the growing hunger crisis in the region, the risks for premature babies born in the midst of conflict and on the legacy of war in neighboring Uganda.

In 2019, she moved to London, and in 2021 was promoted to the role of correspondent, covering Britain and Ireland for The New York Times and has continued to participate in other breaking news coverage across Europe, including coverage of the war in Ukraine.

She previously spent years living in Dublin, Ireland, where she worked for Storyful, a news organization focused on open source investigations and verifying user-generated content documenting conflict and news across the globe. She grew up in New Jersey and graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a degree in journalism.