Eastern alumnus Cam Simpson is living in a more dangerous environment today than when he lived on campus as a journalism student in the late 1980s.

The street he lives on in Jerusalem used to be lined with barbed wire and was known as the Green Line, a street that separated Israel from its Arab neighbors until 1967.

Simpson has lived and worked in the center of Middle Eastern conflict as the Jerusalem bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal during the past 11 months.

“You’re literally living in the middle of 60 years of unresolved conflict,” Simpson said. “It’s a very challenging place to live.”

But he’s taking a break from the Middle East and returning to the U.S. for a vacation and will be making at stop at Eastern to speak with journalism students.

He’ll be on campus today through Friday and will speak at the Illinois Community College Journalism Association’s dinner Thursday night.

“I just want to be a resource I guess for students and/or faculty,” Simpson said. “I try to come down once a year just to keep in touch with Eastern and to try to encourage kids who are interested in journalism.”

He values the education he found at Eastern, which he continues to use as a foundation for his growing career.

“Eastern was obviously very important to me,” he said. “It’s where I got my education and my formative years.”

Simpson has worked as a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune and now works for the Wall Street Journal, just to name few.

In 2004 he received the George Polk Award for International Reporting for a two part series named “Pipeline to Peril”, a story he wrote for the Chicago Tribune about 12 Nepalese men who were murdered by an extremist Islamic group while traveling to work for a U.S. military camp.

His story was later turned into a 30-minute program as part of EXPOSE: America’s Investigative Reports on PBS. “Blame Somebody Else” won a News and Documentary Emmy for Outstanding Feature Story in a News Magazine and had previously received a CINE Golden Eagle award.

All of his success is encouraging for students who want to follow in his footsteps.

Time at Eastern

Always knowing he wanted to be a journalist, Simpson was attracted to Eastern because The Daily Eastern News had won the Pacemaker a few years before he started college.

“It was the top award for student newspapers; the top student newspaper in the country,” Simpson said.

The cost of tuition was also something he could manage since he was paying his own way through school.

He started out double majoring in journalism and political science with a focus on international relations because he was interested in current affairs and wanted to be a foreign correspondent.

Simpson started writing for The Daily Eastern News as a staff reporter and later held positions as both senior reporter and editor in chief.

But to help with the bills he was also a freelance reporter for The News-Gazette in Champaign.

“At the end of every month I think (the editor) would just give me whatever he had in his budget for a stringer,” Simpson said.

He still keeps in touch with people from the journalism department and other friends at Eastern.

Journalism instructor Dan Hagen and Simpson talk through e-mail every week, Hagen said.

“I know him not really as a teacher but more of a friend,” Hagen said.

Hagen wasn’t working as a professor when Cam was at Eastern but as a reporter for the Charleston Times-Courier. They would meet with friends for drinks and talk about journalism.

“I was always confident that he would be a really good reporter,” Hagen said. He always tried to encourage Simpson because he knew he had potential.

“Young people don’t know their own talents and capacities. I must say I think I always knew it.”

After Eastern

Simpson’s career right out of college didn’t seem as bright as it does today. He was hired on at The Cincinnati Post a few months before he was scheduled to begin, but ended up getting laid off before his first day on the job.

“To get cut from the job before I even started,” Simpson said. “That was a pretty big deal.”

But Simpson soon found himself back in Champaign covering Danville for the News-Gazette.

Focusing on local news in his everyday job, Simpson lost sight of his plan to cover world news.

“When you’re covering Danville, you’re not really thinking about U.S. policy and foreign politics,” he said. “You have to focus pretty intensely on the world that’s right around you.”

Then, Simpson spent time working for The Evansville Courier and The Indianapolis Star covering state news and doing investigative reporting.

Later, he found himself closer to his hometown of St. Charles working for the Chicago Sun-Times covering organized and federal crime as a daily beat. He then moved to the Chicago Tribune where he covered similar stories but from a more investigative perspective.

Then Sept. 11 came and Cam remembered why he originally got into journalism.

“It reawakened in me my interest in international affairs and reminded me why international affairs was always so important to me,” Simpson said.

In 2002 he moved to Washington, D.C., still working for the Chicago Tribune where 90 percent of his stories had to do with terrorism for the first three years following Sept. 11.

“There were a handful of guys like me around the country who were investigative reporters and had FBI sources. Sept. 11 and Al-Qaeda just became our full time jobs,” he said.

He began traveling to the Middle East for the Chicago Tribune and traveling with Secretary of State Colin Powell and then Condoleezza Rice on occasion.

In 2004 he decided he wanted to live and work overseas permanently.

“Living in the Middle East is a much greater opportunity, and it’s a lot more interesting and a lot more fascinating than sitting in Washington and trying to figure out what a good story might be,” Simpson said.

The Wall Street Journal gave him that opportunity in 2006 and he took it.

Now he lives in the middle of conflict everyday.

“It’s really intellectually engaging and every day is interesting,” Simpson said. “To be in a place where there’s been this really contentious conflict; it’s kind of ground zero of that conflict everyday.”

Simpson is only 11 months into his 3 to 5 year commitment in Jerusalem.

His job takes him all over the Middle East and it’s hard for him to describe a normal day because outside of walking his dog in the morning and running 6 to 8 miles a day, each day is different.

“There’s no typical day,” Simpson said. “I could be almost anywhere.”

Success and the future

Simpson said he never really made it a goal to work for large newspapers like The Wall Street Journal. He was more focused on doing a good job wherever he was at.

“I just always enjoyed what I was doing as a journalist,” he said. “I always just kind of was trying to do good journalism, trying to do stuff that was interesting to me, trying to make a difference.”

He doesn’t like to put himself or the successful “Pipeline to Peril” series in the spotlight.

“I did it because I thought it was a good story and I thought it was worth telling,” Simpson said. “The recognition is nice and everything but it’s not why you do the work. If it was, you wouldn’t get very far.”

He prefers to stay behind the scenes like he says a good print journalist should do. He found the documentary that was made about his story a little embarrassing.

“I’m a print journalist and you learn from the first day that you’re not the story,” he said. “I’m a story teller, I’m a writer, I’m a journalist. I want to tell stories about characters, not about myself.”

He’s happy the documentary was done because it raised awareness about the story, but he doesn’t think he’d do it again if he got the chance.

Once his time is up in Jerusalem, Simpson isn’t sure where he’ll take his career. He is interested in writing a non-fiction book and has a few ideas in mind.

“That’ll be one of the next challenges for me,” he said.