Departing Paris chief salutes George Short 'for taking a gamble'

After 17 years of adventure, Reuters’ chief correspondent in Paris Catherine Bremer (photo)​, has left to take up a job in the OECD’s media relations department.

“It’s been an incredible 17 years and I am forever indebted to the late and legendary George Short for taking a gamble on recruiting a gawky Leeds University maths graduate to a trainee scheme mainly reserved for Oxbridge linguists and thankful to the many among you who guided my career through four foreign postings that earned me bylines in, coincidentally, a total of 17 countries,” she told colleagues in a farewell message on Friday.

Bremer reserved special thanks to her former Mexico City bosses Kieran Murray and Alistair Bell “who gave me the best time of my life, sending me on countless reporting trips through the wilds of Mexico and Central America, travelling by six-seater plane, helicopter, speedboat and scooter and filing stories from offshore oil platforms, Mexico’s drug gang badlands, the mountains of Nicaragua, the backstreets of Havana, a Caribbean coral reef, the awful ruins of the Haiti earthquake and from Beijing Olympics stadiums. I will always miss the days when (thanks to political risk still being in fashion) I was paid to sleep in a car by an exploded coal mine in three-day-old clothes and just tequila and crisps for supper, hide in the back of an army truck to beat the BBC to a story, roam around El Salvador with an armed driver, catch bed bugs in Guatemala, hitch rides on army planes, etc.”

She thanked Paul Taylor “for being such a generous editor, mentor and generally enthusiastic presence as I landed back in Paris three years ago.”

Bremer added: “Here’s hoping Reuters can find a way forward out of today’s troubled times so that we can restore our reputation for being the best there is and a place where the world’s most talented journalists are queuing up to work.” ■