David Hume

David Hume is a journalist with more than 30 years of experience as a reporter, editor, foreign correspondent and newsroom trainer. He is the president of MEDIAMERICAS, a training and consulting firm. He holds a Master’s degree in Journalism and Public Affairs from American University in Washington, D.C. He is fluent in English, Spanish and Portuguese. Mr. Hume has been a reporter, foreign correspondent and editor with several newspapers, magazines and radio networks in the United States, Great Britain and Latin America. He began his journalism career at newspapers in Argentina, Brazil and Panama. He was a freelance foreign correspondent in Latin America for the Chicago Sun-Times and London’s Daily Telegraph and Daily Express, and for ABC Radio and the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC). In addition, he wrote spot news articles and features for The New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor and many other newspapers. In 1978, he was awarded a Fellowship by the World Press Institute at Macalester College. A year later, he joined the Key West Citizen and later The Miami Herald as a general assignment reporter. In 1981, Mr. Hume became a correspondent with the Reuters news agency in its Washington, D.C., bureau, covering the State Department, Congress, international organizations, and occasionally the White House and the Pentagon.

Mr. Hume also was associate director of the Inter-American Press Association, and the International Center for Journalists, where he developed, administered and conducted training workshops for journalists in developing countries. He left ICFJ in 1991 to become an independent journalism trainer. As such, he conducted training workshops in Hungary for the International Media Fund and the University of Maryland’s College of Journalism, and in West Africa and Latin America for the U.S. Information Agency and the Latin American Journalism Center. In 1995, Mr. Hume became senior public information officer at the Organization of American States.

In 1997, he joined the American Press Institute as associate director to work in the development of online training seminars delivered through the Internet to U.S., Canadian and Latin American newspapers. Two years later, he established MEDIAMERICAS, a consulting and training firm to advise newspapers in Latin America on how to improve their content and newsroom operations, and in April 2000 he was appointed executive editor of the newspaper La Prensa, in Managua, Nicaragua, a post he held for two years.

Mr. Hume is a member of the board of trustees of the Foundation for American Communications (FACS), and a member of the board of directors of the World Press Institute, a member of the World Editors Forum, of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and the Society of Professional Journalists. Most recently, he was interim Editor-in-Chief of El Diario/La Prensa in New York, the oldest Spanish-language newspaper in the United States.