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ALUM Spotlight Matt Moore '93

Auburn journalism graduate Matt Moore '93 lives in Frankfurt, Germany, with wife Alicia and 18-month-old son Jerry. Matt works as a foreign correspondent and business writer for the Associated Press, covering news in Germany, central Europe and beyond. The former Plainsman reporter says his Auburn experience and education got him where he is today.

Q. What have you been up to since graduation?

A. Once graduated from Auburn, I hit the road and went straight to work. In the more than 13 years since, I’ve only managed to pull off the highway once or twice to take a short break from doing anything.

I worked in Washington, D.C., covering congressional health care reform (which failed), moved to the "wiregrass" area to write features and cover farming and business in and around Dothan, and then headed south to Panama City to work for a newspaper and a magazine covering the Panhandle’s business community.

I spent nearly five years in northwest Florida, but in 1999 I saw an opportunity to join the Associated Press in Mississippi and jumped as fast as I could to do so.

After just more than a year in Jackson, I was promoted to the national business desk in New York, where I lived for two years (2000-2002) and joined the international news desk.

After about three months, I was posted abroad to Stockholm, Sweden, and I’ve only been back to the states from Europe two or three times since.

Q. Please describe your current position as foreign correspondent, and share the highlights and challenges.

A. For most people, the main challenge is the fact that you’re in a place where English isn’t the dominant language. Luckily I’ve got a knack for languages, always have. I’m not totally fluent in any (including English, my college-professor wife likes to say) but I have more than enough to get just enough and then some to maintain a conversation and keep myself from getting killed.

I’ve got Swedish, German, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish and some Arabic. The latter proved helpful during my two stints covering Iraq in 2003 and 2004, along with the Israeli-Hezbollah fighting in the summer of 2006. But I’m also learning Spanish and French. The former will prove useful if and when I ever return to the states, and the latter, well, it’s a beautiful language.

The other challenge about being abroad is learning to adapt to the cultures--the quirks, traditions and mores--that separate Americans from everyone else on the planet.

In Europe, for example, the first floor of a building is actually the second floor. In Sweden, when you visit a friend’s house, you leave your shoes in the foyer or outside. In Germany, you can take your dog into the restaurant. And there’s no shopping on Sundays, save for drink stands or snack shops at the train stations, in most cases. That’s nice because it truly means a day spent with the family visiting a park or strolling through a museum.

Q. What has been the most unusual story you've reported or the most unusual place you've traveled to for work?

A. The stories I’ve done run the gamut of subject and detail. I’ve covered the annual announcement and awarding of the Nobel Prizes since 2002; focused on political movements and elections in the Nordics and Baltics (in Lithuania, for a time, it seemed like they changed governments as often as some people change hair color); and of course fighting in Iraq and Israel. Memorable stories included the July 7 bombings in London in 2005 and then the allegedly foiled airliner plot there earlier this year.

I’ve seen amazing things in this line of work, from snowfall on the Jordanian desert, to an entire country choked up with grief when Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh was mortally injured in a knife attack while she shopped at an upscale department store in Stockholm, to young kids from California broken down and in tears after the death of a comrade while on patrol in Tikrit. I’ve seen wicked men die, the wonder of a child’s smile, and the best and worst that makes humanity what it is.

For purely juvenile purposes, my best dateline so far has been Shaq, Iraq. I was heading back to Baghdad from the Sunni Triangle town of Tikrit and saw an oil pipeline explode. My driver and I immediately took off across the desert in his late-model BMW to the site and took photos and video and then talked to people nearby to get details. I got a lot of smirks back the bureau, and from colleagues abroad, when they saw the dateline, too.

I’ve been quite fortunate in that I get to travel for my job as much as I do. My passport is only five years old, but it’s near to brimming with extra pages and border stamps and visas from Jordan, Estonia, Iraq, Norway, Britain, Switzerland, Tunisia, France, Hungary, Greece and others. There’s no Israeli passport stamp though because I requested not to have one. At most Arab borders, if they see that stamp, they bar you entry. There’s not one from Syria, either, because I crossed into that country from Iraq at night.

Q. How do you and your family like living in Germany? How was your experience living in Sweden?

A. Living abroad is great fun and we’ve taken advantage of our proximity to the great and historic capitals whenever possible. Frankfurt is a transportation nexus, meaning that it’s literally possible to fly anywhere in the world. We tend to take advantage of the European rail network and have traveled throughout Germany and explored nearly every nook and cranny of the Nordic and Baltic countries, along with neighboring Austria, Switzerland and France. Britain is a favorite, too, and we’ve gone seven times in less than 18 months, always staying in a small apartment in Islington near the Angel tube stop.

Having children is a blessing here, too. In Sweden, since we paid Swedish taxes (about 50 percent or so, one of the highest in the world) we got to take advantage of the free medical care. My wife’s first pregnancy resulted in expert care at literally no cost, save for the couple of bucks spent to take the bus to the midwife. In Germany, it’s quite similar, and our second child (due in late July) will hopefully be like the first, foreign-born. Of course that doesn’t mean either has foreign citizenship. But if we happen to be in France when my wife goes in to labor, the laws are different there, and French citizenship, and an EU passport, is automatic!

Q. Why AU?

A. There really wasn’t any other choice. Sure, I applied at several other universities and got accepted, but given the family connection with Auburn--mom, dad, aunt, uncle, grandparents, several great-aunts and great-uncles--it was a foregone conclusion that I’d attend. Plus, given my dad’s status as an active-duty U.S. Army officer, Auburn was kind enough to give me in-state tuition.

I’m glad I went, too. Years after graduation my baby sister, who’s taken degrees from Iowa State and the University of Arizona, visited with my folks to Auburn and was amazed by the experience. “I wish I’d visited before I had decided on where to go,” she said.

Q. How was your Auburn experience?

A. My more than four years at Auburn was sheer joy. I’d grown up hearing the songs, the stories, listening to scratchy AM-radio broadcasts of football games on Armed Forces Network. The first place I ever lived was in Caroline Draughon Village, born about six months before my dad graduated in 1970 and two years after my mom graduated. I went to my first fraternity party with my dad. When I was two months old, he took me to his fraternity house, Theta Xi, over on West Magnolia. Eighteen years later, as a freshman, I pledged the same fraternity and remained an in-house brother until graduation.

My three closest friends are all Auburn alums, two of them fraternity brothers and the third a former little sister. We keep in touch via e-mail and talk about the past, but mostly about the present and the future.

I honed my journalism abilities at Auburn thanks to the tutelage of instructors like Ed Williams, Jack Simms, Gillis Morgan, Mickey Logue and, of course, Jerry Brown. They ran me through the ringer and made me want to give up on journalism at times. I emerged, scarred but smarter, and the things they imparted have stayed with me.

I spent countless hours at the Plainsman, writing, reporting, even a stint in the business office designing advertisements. It was all good, grounded experience and it’s part of what has gotten me where I am today.

And there was the football. I loved being able to finally go to Auburn games, see Jordan-Hare, hear the crowd, the spirit, the yells, the sighs, the exclamations of frustration and howls of glee.

I can’t get the games on the radio anymore, and they’re not televised in Europe. I used to listen online until they started charging for it, so now during football season, the first thing I do on Sunday mornings is cross my fingers and log onto the Opelika-Auburn News Web site and hope for a win. I’m seldom disappointed.