Grantees Win Overseas Press Club Awards

The Overseas Press Club of America (OPC) announced the winners of its 83rd annual awards, honoring the international reporting of Pulitzer Center grantees and other journalists.

Grantee Jane Ferguson’s reporting on the fall of Kabul, Afghanistan, won the Peter Jennings Award. This reporting was in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center and PBS NewsHour. The Peter Jennings Award, named for the legendary ABC News anchor, recognizes the best of video news content with a runtime of more than 30 minutes. The judges said of Ferguson:

“In years to come, students of history will be able to look back at these PBS NewsHour segments from Afghanistan by Jane Ferguson and team to understand what happened in the final year of America’s longest war. Throughout 2021, as most Americans’ attention had turned away, the team returned again and again to capture the final arc of the story.”

The OPC also awarded grantee Sandy Tolan with the Morton Frank Award for his investigation into human rights violations by sugarcane industries in the Dominican Republic. Tolan was recognized alongside his local reporting partner, Euclides Cordero Nuel, and his partner at Reveal, senior producer Michael Montgomery. The Morton Frank Award honors the best of international business news reporting. Reveal is a podcast produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting. In recognizing Tolan's work, the judges wrote:

“This comprehensive investigation by Sandy Tolan and Euclides Cordero Nuel took listeners deep into the sugar cane harvesting camps manned by Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic. The reporting, which has prompted scrutiny from Congress and the Department of Labor, documented workers enduring $4 a day wages, staggering debt, substandard housing and woeful medical care while enhancing Central Romana Corp.’s profitability.”

Pulitzer Center Board Member Azmat Khan’s reporting on airstrikes in Afghanistan also won an award. She and her team at The New York Times won the Roy Rowan Award, which covers the category of international investigative reporting. The judges commented:

“A powerful investigation that revealed how a highly touted and ostensibly sophisticated remote warfare system developed by the Pentagon was riddled with flaws and beset by faulty decision-making, leading to the bombing deaths of innocent civilians in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.”

Runner-ups for an OPC award included Rainforest Investigations Fellow Jessica Brice and her reporting partner Michael Smith, for their story “The Amazon Is Fast Approaching a Point of No Return,” published in Bloomberg Businessweek.