JURIST Journalist in Residence Program

Vivian Salama is the JURIST Journalist in Residence for the 2024-2025 academic year. Salama is a national politics reporter for The Wall Street Journal. She has covered US foreign policy and national security for nearly two decades, reporting from more than 85 countries.

Since moving to Washington in 2016, Salama has covered the White House and national security for The Wall Street Journal, CNN, NBC News, and the Associated Press, with a focus on foreign policy. During that time, she has broken a number of major stories involving the Trump White House, including details on the president’s first White House phone call with the Mexican president, details on the administration’s controversial travel ban, and President Trump’s interest in buying Greenland. More recently, she covered the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Russian invasion in Ukraine, often from the front line in southern and eastern Ukraine, and the war in Gaza, traveling frequently to Israel and elsewhere in the region.

She currently covers former President Trump’s 2024 bid for the White House.

Over the course of her career, she has called Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, and the United Arab Emirates home. Before moving to Washington, Salama was Baghdad bureau chief for the Associated Press, covering the rise and fall of the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, as well as Iran’s growing influence across the region. She also covered the refugee and IDP crisis spurred by the violence, visiting camps across the Middle East. The experience inspired Salama to write a children’s book—The Long Journey Home—about an innocent Syrian boy who is forced to flee his home because of the war.

Prior to her posting in Iraq, Salama had covered the Arab Spring uprisings—and their fallout—writing extensively about the political, economic and social implications of the protests. She also wrote at length about US foreign policy in the region, as well as its evolution with the new regimes that came to power following the protests. Salama has also spent time in Yemen investigating the US targeted killing program, traveling repeatedly to al-Qaeda strongholds in the country documenting civilian casualties.

Prior to that, Salama was a correspondent for Bloomberg News in the Persian Gulf, based in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. While there, she reported on the impact of the global financial crisis on the Middle East’s financial hub, as well as on the Obama administration’s efforts to get Iran to the negotiating table over its nuclear program.

Salama is a fluent Arabic speaker and has working knowledge in Spanish. While the bulk of her experience has been in the Middle East and South Asia, she has also reported in North Korea, the Balkans, and across East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and South America. She began her career working for television networks in New York City and Providence, Rhode Island.

Salama has a law degree from Georgetown University, a Master’s from Columbia University in Islamic Politics and a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from Rutgers University. She authored a lengthy study, published in a book entitled Radicalization, Terrorism and Conflict, which examines the ways in which radical militant organizations use the Internet to promote their ideologies to a wider audience and recruit potential followers around the world.

She is a native of New York and currently lives in Washington, DC.

Jon Decker was the JURIST Journalist in Residence for the 2023-2024 academic year. He is the White House Correspondent and Senior National Editor for Gray Television and has been a member of the White House Press Corps since 1995. In 2015, he was elected by his colleagues to the Board of the White House Correspondents’ Association. Decker serves on the faculty of Georgetown University, GW Law and the UCLA School of Law where he is an Adjunct Professor. He also serves as a Media Fellow at the McCain Institute. Decker, a member of the Washington, DC Bar and the US Supreme Court Bar, is the only lawyer in the White House Press Corps.

Steven Herman was the JURIST Journalist in Residence for the 2022-2023 academic year. He is Chief National Correspondent for the Voice of America in Washington, DC, and was formerly VOA’s White House Bureau Chief. He spent more than a quarter of a century in Asia, including years of reporting from Tokyo and subsequently as a VOA correspondent and bureau chief in India, Korea and Thailand. Herman also served in 2016 as VOA’s Senior Diplomatic Correspondent, based at the State Department. His travels have taken him to approximately 75 countries, doing on-scene reporting from combat zones, civil uprisings and areas struck by major natural disasters.

Professor Toni R. Locy was the JURIST Journalist in Residence for the 2021-2022 academic year. She is a Professor of Journalism at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. For 25 years, she reported for many of the nation’s largest news outlets. She covered the US Supreme Court for AP, federal courts in Washington, DC, for the Washington Post and the Massachusetts State House for the Boston Globe. She also worked on an investigative team at US News & World Report, and she covered criminal justice for The Philadelphia Daily News and the US Justice Department for USA Today. She began her career as a journalist at The Pittsburgh Press. While earning an MSL degree at Pitt Law, she served as a student editor for JURIST. She is the author of Covering America’s Courts: A Clash of Rights, a journalism textbook on covering the courts and the law. Professor Locy served as chair of W&L’s Department of Journalism and Mass Communications from 2017 to 2019.

Professor Jane Singer was the inaugural JURIST Journalist in Residence for the 2020-2021 academic year. She joins JURIST from the City University of London, where she is currently research lead and Professor of Journalism Innovation in the Department of Journalism. A former print and online journalist, she has been studying journalists’ responses to digital technologies since the mid-1990s. Singer is especially interested in the impact of digital media on journalists’ roles, norms, practices and products. Her previous academic appointments have been at the University of Central Lancashire (UK), the University of Iowa (USA) and Colorado State University (USA). Prior to earning her PhD in journalism at the University of Missouri (USA), she served as the founding news manager of the first national online service in the United States. She also has experience as a print newspaper reporter and editor.