Michael H. Cottman, an award-winning journalist and author, is a Senior Correspondent for BlackAmericaWeb.com, a division of REACH Media/Radio One, the nation’s largest black-owned media company. Cottman, a former reporter for The Washington Post, Newsday and The Miami Herald, is also a lecturer in the Department of Journalism at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Cottman is presently covering the 2008 Presidential campaign and also offers political commentary and news analysis for several national REACH/Radio One stations, which are owned by radio personality Tom Joyner and businesswoman Cathy Hughes. He was a 2007 recipient of a newly-created political journalism fellowship sponsored by the Knight Foundation and The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication.
Cottman also serves on a special advisory board for the National Geographic Society. Cottman was featured in a 2007 documentary by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) entitled “Moira Stuart: In Search of Wilberforce,” the story of the British involvement in trans-Atlantic slave trade. Cottman, the author of three books, has spent the past 27 years reporting about politics, social trends and America’s expanding multi-cultural society. Cottman has interviewed and written about some of the world’s most prominent news makers, including former South African President Nelson Mandela, the late John F. Kennedy Jr., former New York Mayors Ed Koch, David Dinkins and Rudolph Guliani, and former President Bill Clinton and 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama.
For several weeks in 2006, Cottman traveled to New Orleans to report a five-part series that examined the city’s rebuilding efforts and the housing crisis in the Lower Ninth Ward nearly a year after Hurricane Katrina. Cottman has worked for some of the nation’s top newspapers, including The Washington Post, Newsday, The Miami Herald and The Atlanta Constitution. In addition to writing for newspapers, Cottman also co-wrote a screenplay for Showtime Television Networks, and is presently researching his next book project. He has received numerous awards including journalism’s highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize, which he shared with a team of reporters at Newsday in 1992. Cottman also appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2000 to discuss his book, “The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie.” He has also appeared on CNN; NPR; PBS; C-SPAN Booknotes; ABC News and CBS News affiliates, The Learning Channel and The History Channel.
He frequently lectures about journalism, African-American history, contemporary social issues, the politics of race, underwater exploration and the African slave trade. Cottman also serves on a special advisory board of The National Geographic Society. His journalism travels have taken him across the United States reporting on social conditions in communities from Miami to Los Angeles. He has also reported from West Africa, South Africa, France, the U.K., Japan, Malaysia, Central America, and The Caribbean. In 1998, Cottman traveled to Dakar, Senegal to write about President Bill Clinton’s historic trip to Africa, the most extensive visit to Africa by a U.S. President. Cottman’s articles have also been published in The Washington Post Sunday Magazine; Essence; Black Enterprise, Odyssey Couleur, Emerge, Heart and Soul, and SkyWritings, Air Jamaica’s in-flight magazine, as well scuba diving and tourism trade publications. As a writer who enjoys creative diversity, Cottman also wrote a three-part series in 2005 about life, culture and scuba diving in Malaysia. In 2005, Cottman served as the keynote speaker for Great Britain’s annual Slavery Remembrance Day, held in Liverpool, England.
