Prior to that she oversaw and contributed coverage from at least 15 countries in Africa for the Associated Press and Newsday,[1] part of the over-five-fold trend in the increase of women war correspondents from 1970 to 1992.
[6] She was a Johannesburg-based correspondent until August 1993, covering the end of apartheid, the election of Nelson Mandela,[7] and township violence, in addition to doing features, when she became the Associated Press news editor for the country, reporting and writing on top of doing managerial work.
[9] In 1994, on her fourth trip to Somalia, and while reporting on U.S. peacekeeping troops leaving the country, Somali rebels outnumbered her bodyguards in Mogadishu,[5] dragged her from her car in broad daylight,[10] and held her for 20 days.
[2] However, the Associated Press had requested news organizations including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post suppress the story to discourage the emboldening of the kidnappers.
Susman stayed at her job at the Associated Press, focusing on the wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo (then known as Zaire, the shift happened while she was there), and political upheavals in Nigeria, Cameroon, and elsewhere.
[15] In 1999, Susman won her first in a series of awards, first prize for international reporting from the New York Association of Black Journalists for her coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone, including stories on a rebel attack on the capital, Freetown, and interviews with assault survivors.
With fellow Newsday writer, Geoffrey Mohan, reporting from South America, she won Sigma Delta Chi for Foreign Correspondence from the Society of Professional Journalists for another series on the use of children as soldiers in Liberia and Sierra Leone, efforts to rehabilitate them, and challenges to their recovery.
[19] She went to Pakistan in September and October of that year, to cover the situation there and in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks but was involved in a car crash while traveling in Kashmir and suffered two fractures in her right leg.
Her topics at the newspaper were breaking news, which ranged from the Westminster Kennel Club dog show to the Ferguson protests, the shooting death of Trayvon Martin and his killer's trial, the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements, the legalization of same-sex marriage, and various natural and man-made disasters.
[33] Two stories first reported by BuzzFeed News that Susman oversaw,[34] resulting in the firing of their subjects, a respected UC Berkeley professor and a high-ranking DC Comics editor, for sexual misconduct.