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I’d like to introduce you to a new journalist in town.

He is Eric Pape, whose career has taken him to several continents where’s he’s covered presidents, kings and dictators, politics and pop culture, terrorism and technology.

Eric is fresh off the plane from Paris, where he’s lived with his wife, a radio journalist, and two young sons. He spent much of the last decade as Newsweek‘s special correspondent in the Paris bureau.

Eric has lived the kind of professional life that many journalists would love to have lived. His experiences should serve Hawaii well where many cultures blend in a multi-ethnic society that is second nature to him.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, he has a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a master’s from City University in London. He was a John S. Knight innovative journalism fellow at Stanford University.

After college, he walked across the border from Arizona into Mexico with a backpack and a guitar. He ended up in Bolivia where he became a drug policy analyst and a budding journalist.

He turned to journalism fulltime in 1996 where he worked for the Cambodia Daily and Phnom Penh Post, covering dictatorship and democracy issues.

In 1998, Eric returned to the U.S. as a freelance investigative reporter for a dozen national media outlets. He was a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine focusing on immigrant exile issues, genocide and the origins of extremism.

His writings for magazines like Spin and Vibe focused on the nexus of war/urban strife and pop culture.

In 2003, after writing about a war crimes tribunal from Sierra Leone for Newsweek, he was hired full-time in its Paris bureau as a special correspondent. He focused on Western Europe and much of Africa, covering everything from politics, terrorism, and technology to wine, mercenaries, and film.

He’s also worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Niger and Lebanon.

More recently, he’s been a frequent contributor to Foreign Policy magazine, The Daily Beast and the Los Angeles Times. His writings have also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Cicero, South China Morning Post Magazine and Courrier International.

So what’s a guy like that doing in Honolulu?

“The idea of returning to the U.S., and being on a bridge between the U.S. and Asia, in a diverse place with such remarkable richness all sounded very tantalizing,” Eric says. “This is a place that actually embodies a whole bunch of places that I’ve been — in some ways isolated, in some ways very worldly. It’s a crossroads.”

“I like places with a good quality of life but also lots of layers, where there are injustices and things to unravel and to try to improve them.”

That’s certainly what we’re all about, too. Since we started Civil Beat in 2010 we’ve fine-tuned our focus on public affairs reporting, beefing up our staff with journalists who have an affinity for investigative and watchdog reporting. We’ve always seen our role as sort of an informed friend, who encourages thoughtful public debate on issues of importance to our community.

We need journalists who can lead that effort, and I know you will find Eric an excellent friend to help you along that civic pathway.