Ronald Koven, French media freedom activist and journalist, Died at 80

Ronald Koven was born on August 11, 1935, in Paris and died on October 30, 2015.

He was a French media freedom activist and a journalist for the Washington Post, Boston Globe.

Ronald was the “De Gaulle watcher” at The Herald Tribune in Paris through most of the 1960s.

Koven was also a copy boy at “Time magazine” and at “The New York Times” while he studied at Columbia University.

Ronald then joined “The Washington Post,” where he was successively the Diplomatic Editor, the Canada correspondent, and the Foreign Editor.

On returning to Paris in 1977 as The Post’s correspondent, he was in charge of covering Latin Europe and the Maghreb.

Ronald reported extensively in the Middle East and Iran, Since the start of the Islamic revolution.

From 1981 to 1991, Ronald was also the Paris correspondent of “The Boston Globe.”

Ronald has published numerous magazine articles on a wide variety of subjects.

For the World Press Freedom Committee, he covers and acts as a spokesman on press freedom concerns at UNESCO, the UN Human Rights Commission, the Council of Europe, European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Starting from the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ronald undertook an extensive program of aid to the emerging independent press in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, this includes organizing and leading conferences and seminars, publishing training manuals, legal aid projects and providing targeted material help to news outlets and journalists unions and associations of the region.

Ronald Koven passed away at 80 yrs old due to cancer.