Journalist Luciana Grosso Talks Freelancing and Foreign Reporting
Luciana Gross - a member of the Association Foreign Press Correspondents (AFC-USA) - is an accomplished Italian journalist that has been reporting for the past 14 years. Over the course of her career, she’s worked for major brands including Condé Nast Italy, National Geographic Italy, Business Insider, and more. Early in her career, she put her degree in Cinema Theory to use while she covered movies and entertainment for three years at Yahoo. After getting a post-graduate diploma in journalism, she began covering foreign politics and economy.
In an interview with the AFC-USA, Grosso revealed that she jumpstarted her foreign journalism career when she landed an internship working with the Foreign Affairs minister at the Italian embassy in Bosnia. During her fellowship, she tried to write articles for Italian newspapers but ultimately ended up writing for a now-defunct website that focused on war regions called BizReporter. Once that internship was completed, she picked up another at what she described as ‘the most important Italian newspaper’, Republica. Grosso’s professional career has been widely made up of long-term freelance contribution work at the companies she’s been associated with.
“In Italy, it is very uncommon to be a resident journalist,” Grosso said. She compares being a resident journalist to the likes of winning the lottery. When detailing what it means to be a freelance journalist, Grosso said it requires a lot of discipline when getting up in the morning and going out to look for stories. She mentioned she has had several different bosses for different assignments and that there’s a lot of alone time. Even though she said it’s more difficult as a freelance journalist, Grosso noted she prefers to stay freelance.
To write about foreign politics means that Grosso covers stories on countries in which she’s not a native. She made it clear that there is a lot of work that goes into becoming an expert on foreign stories. Grosso told AFC that she would compile a list of people and associations that she wanted to interview and actually schedule the interviews before booking a trip. “As a freelance, I did a lot of travel, on my own, where I paid,” she said. “Every time I came to the U.S., for example, I’d spend maybe 2,000 Euros. So, I had to be sure that when I came to the U.S., I would find some stories just to gain enough money to compensate that expenses.”
For the majority of her career, Grosso has been covering foreign politics – specifically U.S. politics. She’s been able to see and report about the transition between the Bush administration, the Obama administration, and the recent Trump administration. She described the 2016 U.S. election as a ‘nightmare’. Grosso noted that she is aware she’s supposed to be neutral between parties but also knows that it is always her job to remain on the side of the truth. “My job during the election was to try to write about the big danger the U.S. was going into and that’s why during the election, I was a little bit partial,” Grosso said.
Luciana Grosso
Given the state of the United States during and after the Trump Administration, how it dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic and police brutality, and the raiding of the Capitol, Grosso was asked as an outsider looking in if she believes other countries still see America as the ‘leader of the free world’. She responded: “I think that the U.S. is still the leader of the world.” Grosso mentioned that hers and like-minded Italians’ opinion of the U.S. hasn’t changed regardless of the president.
When reflecting on her journalism career, Grosso listed her worst work experience as a columnist at a local paper. She said that because she always wanted to write about foreign countries, she didn’t find satisfaction in writing about local happening. In contrast, she mentioned that her best experience as a journalist was when she began traveling as a freelance journalist. Her advice to upcoming journalists was to be very patient as it could take a while to get to your goal in this industry.