By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, 2012
In February 2012 FishbowlLA marked the loss of one of the finest foreign correspondents of his generation, dead at 43 while reporting inside Syria.
Then
Anthony Shadid, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter, died of an asthma attack while on assignment in Syria. He was 43.
FishbowlLA quoted the staff memo from NYT editor Jill Abramson, who called Shadid a ‘brilliant and beloved colleague.’ He had been reporting inside Syria with photographer Tyler Hicks and was heading toward the Turkish border when he suffered the attack; Hicks carried him out of the country.
Shadid had once been a news editor at the Associated Press bureau in Los Angeles. He joined the Times in 2009 after a long run at the Washington Post, where he won two Pulitzers, and the Times had nominated him again that year for his coverage of Egypt and the Arab Spring.
Now
Anthony Shadid’s reputation has only grown. His memoir House of Stone, about rebuilding his family’s ancestral home in Lebanon, was published shortly after his death in 2012 and became the work many readers came to know him by.
He is remembered as a model of a particular kind of journalism — deeply reported, humane, attentive to ordinary lives caught in conflict — and his death became part of the wider, sobering record of the dangers correspondents faced covering the Syrian war.
Jill Abramson, who wrote the memo announcing his death, served as the New York Times’s executive editor until 2014. The Arab Spring that Shadid had been nominated for covering gave way to a far longer and darker decade in the region than the hopeful early reporting had imagined.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.