[7] Initially, he did not know what he wanted to do after graduation, so he took a leave of absence to backpack around the world, which he says helped set his life trajectory.
However, when a professor suggested journalism as a profession, he scoffed at the notion, saying "That was the dumbest idea I had heard... who wants to work for a boring newspaper?".
After a stint as a reporter for the paper's Metro desk in 2004, he became a foreign correspondent in July 2006 for the Nairobi-based East Africa bureau of The New York Times.
He has focused the majority of his work on events in Congo, Kenya and Tanzania in East-Central Africa, where he has reported on atrocities involving rape, mutilation as well as ritualized murders of albinos, among other issues.
His often straightforward, non-cynical approach toward such difficult stories has been colloquially dubbed the "Gettleman method" by Jack Shafer.
According to Gettleman, the pair were eventually released because he had successfully posed as Greek and concealed his passport in Addario's trousers, where he had guessed his captors would not search.
[14] In 2024, Gettleman co-wrote a series of articles with Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella describing sexual violence during 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel.