Jane Ferguson is a New York City-based international correspondent, war reporter and national security and foreign affairs expert. Her award-winning journalism has spanned the US, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. She has also been a contributor to The New Yorker for five years, providing reporting and analysis on US foreign policy, counterterrorism, and conflicts in Ukraine, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq.
When Ferguson joined PBS NewsHour, she was a Middle East-based International Correspondent reporting and producing magazine-length, in-depth stories for the show. She went on to become the show’s main overseas reporter and the most award-winning journalist in the shows near 50-year history.
She has reported from Afghanistan extensively for the network, covering women's rights, ethnic tensions, the rise of militias in the years running up to the Taliban takeover. As Trump negotiated with the Taliban, Ferguson travelled exclusively to Wardak province to interview senior Taliban commanders on their plans for a return to power. Two years later, as they closed in on the capital, Ferguson once again filmed global exclusives with all sides of the war, from famed Tajik rebel commander Ahmad Massoud in the Panjshir Valley, to the Taliban’s elite ‘red brigade’ units just outside Kabul. In August of 2021 she was in Kabul as it fell to the Taliban and became the only US broadcaster at Kabul airport as the biggest mass evacuation of civilians since Saigon took place and US Marines struggled to cope with the dangerous crowds. Ferguson’s reporting from Afghanistan was recognized with an Overseas Press Club of America Peter Jennings Award, an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton, a Gracie and a Peabody.
In 2018, Ferguson was the first international journalist to gain exclusive access to the rebel-held capital of Yemen, where a US-backed, Saudi-led coalition was waging war against Iranian-backed rebels, and enforcing a strict blockade. By dressing in Yemeni women's clothing and traveling with a native family she was able to smuggle across the front lines, to the northern half of the country, where journalists were banned by Saudi-allied forces. Ferguson’s reports exposed the devastating extent of the famine and humanitarian crisis caused by the war, including the starvation of tens of thousands of children and babies. Her reporting from Yemen won an Emmy, an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton and a George Polk.
Ferguson led PBS’s coverage of the battle against ISIS in Iraq and Syria in 2016 and 2017, embedding with Iraqi special forces and US-backed Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters. Before reporting for PBS, Ferguson was one of Al Jazeera English’s leading international reporters covering the Arab Spring revolutions and subsequent conflicts. She was among the first foreign journalists to be smuggled into rebel held Homs city in Syria where she reported on the Assad Government's brutal crackdown against protestors in 2012. After that, she went on to report extensively for Al Jazeera across the globe, covering wars, revolutions and humanitarian stories in countries including Bangladesh, Israel-Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Kenya and Lebanon. During her time as Al Jazeera’s Afghanistan correspondent, from 2013 through 2014, Ferguson lived and worked in Kabul and secured the first ever media embed with Afghan Special Forces as US troops prepared for the Obama Administration’s drawdown.
From 2009 through 2011 Ferguson was a contracted international correspondent in the Abu Dhabi-based the Middle East hub. From there she reported from Somalia, Yemen and the African Sahel on Al Qaeda linked rebel groups and US military partnerships in the region. Ferguson was the first US broadcaster to report from inside Somalia since the UN pulled out in the 1990s, embedding with Ugandan and Somalia forces in Mogadishu as major offensives pushed militants out of the city. Before working in TV, Ferguson was a business print reporter based in Dubai and covering major markets and industries in the region. Before moving to Dubai in 2008 after college, she lived in Yemen where she studied Arabic, which she speaks fluently.
Since 2017, alongside her reporting for PBS, Ferguson has regularly contributed to The New Yorker, with features, analysis and field reporting as well as more personal reflections as a writer on the road. Her writing focuses on war crimes, humanitarian crises, US foreign policy and the diplomatic backchannels and context to conflicts today.
Her work is regularly supported by The Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and Ferguson often speaks at public events and journalism schools across the US on behalf of the Pulitzer Center about the importance of quality reporting and rigorous investigative journalism.
Ferguson is a regular guest professor of journalism at Princeton University. In 2020 and 2023 she was invited by Princeton to design and teach a semester-long course on war reporting.
In July 2023 her memoir, No Ordinary Assignment, was published by HarperCollins.
Ferguson attended The Lawrenceville School, near Princeton, New Jersey and holds a BA in Politics from the University of York in England.
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