Mark Porubcansky

Mark Porubcansky speaks at a presentation for the Center for Politics and the People at Ripon College.

Class of 1977: Witness to the world

An awareness of the broader world outside of his rural Wisconsin home took Mark Porubcansky around the world as a news correspondent and editor of foreign news for more than 30 years.

For nearly 12 years, he was a foreign correspondent for the Moscow, Vienna and Hong Kong bureaus of the Associated Press. In Moscow, he covered Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In Vienna, he managed a team of journalists covering Central Europe’s post-Communist transition, and reported on the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. In Hong Kong, he reported on the immediate aftermath of the territory’s handover to Chinese rule.

He then worked for the Los Angeles Times newspaper as an editor of foreign news for 16 years, taking charge of the Times’ global coverage as foreign editor in 2013. He oversaw a team of correspondents on five continents, shaped coverage of major news events, and edited projects that won major U.S. journalism prizes. Times correspondents reporting to Porubcansky were finalists for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for their coverage of Syria.

Mark Porubcansky, standing at right, covers a meeting of Soviet refuseniks in Moscow in 1987 for The Associated Press.

“I’d always been intrigued by foreign correspondence,” he said. “I grew up watching reports on the Vietnam War and Watergate. It was an era where a lot of important things were happening in the outside world, and I wanted to be a part of it.”

Mark Porubcansky stands by his office at the Los Angeles Times.

Porubcansky is a native of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, born Nov. 25, 1954. At Ripon, he majored in philosophy and politics and government. He was editor of College Days and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. “As somebody who edits news stories, my experience writing papers at Ripon has helped,” he said. “You learn how to construct an argument, logically, consider holes and counterpoints. I would urge students now to think big. Just because you come from rural Wisconsin doesn’t mean you can’t see the rest of the world.”

He credits his mother, a Depression-era Wisconsin farm girl with an eighth-grade education, for his interest in journalism. “She was a news junkie well into her 90s,” he said. “I was always aware of the potential of journalism for good and intrigued by the possibilities of things one could do with it.”

In August 2014, he retired to Marine on Saint Croix, Minnesota, with his wife, Sarah Jenks Porubcansky, also Class of 1977. In Minnesota, he contributed to publications including MinnPost and Sahan Journal and taught journalism at the University of Minnesota as a curricular fellow.