Kim Gamel died last week. It’s taken me a few days to finally write those words because not only was Kim a top editor here at Civil Beat for the past six years, she was a close friend. I still can’t believe she’s not going to be coming back to the desk next to mine in the newsroom.

Kim was 57 years old when she lost a yearslong fight with lymphoma on Wednesday. She had been hospitalized in Boise, Idaho, near her mom’s house. It was the same hospital where she’d been born.

The week before last Kim was still editing op-eds and columns and building games for us. She’d recently come back to work part-time as our deputy managing editor even though the latest cancer treatment didn’t seem to be doing the trick. But that was quintessential Kim — her work as a journalist meant everything to her and she wanted to be part of it right down to the end.

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Kim had such a huge career, too, most of it as a globetrotting foreign correspondent working in exotic cities and conflict zones. It began soon after college, where she’d majored in Russian, and she landed a job at the English-language Moscow Tribune, covering the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. 

A couple years later, after earning a master’s degree in journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School, she began what would turn into 20 years as a reporter and editor with The Associated Press. Her assignments took her to Sweden, New York, South Asia and Cairo. She was the AP’s news editor in Baghdad for nearly three years where she trained Iraqi reporters, mentoring them even as she worked alongside them reporting and writing her own stories.

Kim took a break from daily journalism in 2014 to become a Knight-Wallace fellow, a prestigious program at the University of Michigan.

When she returned to work about a year later it was as a correspondent with Stars and Stripes based in South Korea. She had a particular interest in North Korea as well as the plight of servicemembers who faced difficulties overseas, including dealing with a global pandemic.

In late 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic was at its height, Kim joined Civil Beat as our deputy editor. But not before she’d found a home for the three feral cats she’d rescued from the alley outside her apartment building in Seoul, flying them to a posh cat sanctuary outside of San Francisco.

Kim’s dedication to those darn cats and her determination that they weren’t just going to get turned loose again in the streets of Seoul comes to my mind now. It says so much about who she was, as a human being and as a journalist. She was kind to a fault and determined to make sure people (and cats) were treated fairly — in stories as well as in person. She was an editor who really cared about her reporters and pushed them to do their best work.

“I always loved it when Kim edited my columns,” longtime Civil Beat columnist Denby Fawcett told me when I asked her to help me out with this piece about Kim. “She had a light touch that kept a writer’s voice intact while strengthening the prose, making it stronger, pithy and often more beautiful. Kim had a curious, probing mind. Editing gave her a way to learn from her writers’ stories.”

During her time at Civil Beat, Kim helped lead our ramped-up coverage of Covid-19. She oversaw reporting on education, healthcare and city government, and she put her own experience covering the military to good use supervising that coverage for us. She worked closely with our interns in the summers and was a Solutions Journalism trainer. Within days of the Maui wildfire in August 2023 she hopped a plane to Kahului and set up a makeshift bureau in a motel, directing our team of reporters and photographers on the ground — coverage that contributed to Civil Beat becoming a Pulitzer finalist. 

In 2024, Kim was diagnosed with lymphoma and started what would be a tough treatment regimen, including chemotherapy, infusions and, when the cancer proved difficult to stop, more aggressive therapies that included a stem cell transplant from her younger sister, Seana. 

Kim, worried that her editing team at Civil Beat would be strapped (which we were), continued to work with reporters and edit copy as much as she could, often taking her laptop with her to the infusion chair at her doctor’s office and even working from her room at The Queen’s Medical Center.

An obit prepared by her family and friends, all of whom are accomplished journalists, described Kim’s life this way:

“Outside the newsroom, Gamel was a globetrotting adventurer whose travels took her sand surfing in Egypt’s Siwa Oasis, crisscrossing Cambodia, paragliding over a canyon in Colombia, swimming in the Galapagos Islands and soaking in a centuries-old bathhouse in Budapest. She supported 826michigan, a tutoring program that coaches school-aged students in writing. She was fiercely competitive at Scrabble, vanquishing opponents even as her health declined. In Hawai’i, she soaked up the sun at Waimanalo Beach and enjoyed drinks on the lanai at the Elks Lodge in Honolulu.”

Kim and I joined the Elks together in 2021 and she loved showing off Hawaiʻi to her family and friends by hosting them as the waves crashed against the seawall out back. It became a favorite place to take visiting journalists and a reminder that Kim had landed in a spot that fed both her need for work that was meaningful and vital and her appetite for exotic locales.

Her longtime friend, Ernesto Londoño, a reporter for The New York Times, wrote the best remembrance of Kim. You can read it here and I wish you would because it’s such a perfect story of Kim even if you’d never met her. It will make you wish you had. 

Kim is survived by her mother, Bobbie Gamel; her sister, Seana Ruff; her brother-in-law, Lee Ruff; her niece and nephew, Alia and Eli; and a wide circle of friends and former colleagues around the world. She was preceded in death by her father, Patrick Gamel, in 2024.

In lieu of a traditional memorial service, Kim’s immediate family will gather for a private ceremony to bid her a final farewell on the Oregon Coast, a place that brought her much happiness and joy.  A celebration of life will also be held in the fall for family and friends. To accommodate her vast global network of friends and colleagues, a virtual gathering will be held. Details are forthcoming.

To honor her legacy, please consider a contribution in Kim Gamel’s name to the Overseas Press Club Foundation, which provides scholarships to the next generation of international correspondents. The foundation is a 501C3 charitable organization and all donations are tax deductible. The best way to donate is through this link but checks can be mailed to the OPC Foundation, in memory of Kim Gamel, at 40 West 45 St, New York NY 10036.