Pulitzer Center Reporting Sweeps 2025 SOPA Awards

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Laos Myanmar (burma) Thailand China India Malaysia

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Alexandra Waddell
Pulitzer Center Staff

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In 2012, Malaysiakini traveled to the remote Indigenous village of Kampung Kelaik, located within...

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Bags of synthetic fertilizer are scattered across the ground among banana trees — Bags of synthetic fertilizer are scattered across the ground among the banana trees on Jin Yao’s plantation in Laos’ southern Attapeu province. Image by the Rainforest Investigations Network.

The Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) has announced the winners of the 2025 awards. Among the 106 winners are four projects supported by the Pulitzer Center. Each year, former and current journalists and academics from around the world form the pool of judges that chooses the winners.

This year’s Pulitzer Center-supported winners focused on underreported stories from across Asia. Their investigations involved intrepid on-the-ground reporting, collaboration with scientists and health professionals, cross-border collaborations, and immersive storytelling.

Azlan Ahak providing a blood sample for testing for heavy metals. Image by S Vinothaa. Malaysia, 2024.

Judges took note of Malaysiakini’s use of interactive storytelling in its reporting on iron ore mining in Kelantan state, in rural Malaysia. Community members believed they were poisoned by the mining. After noticing symptoms, the reporting team led by grantees S. Vinothaa and Aidila Razak took blood samples from members of the Orang Asli tribe. They also took water samples from ore mines operating upstream from the community. The results showed a dangerous amount of heavy metals in the water and in blood samples.

The team worked with health and water quality experts to interpret the results and draw a picture of the effect of runoff from mines whose use of legal loopholes allowed them to discharge effluent exceeding legal health limits. This, as well as what the SOPA judges described as "perseverance, commitment, and courage” of the reporters, led SOPA to award the team with the Award for Excellence in Human Rights Reporting (Regional/Local category).

The town of Shwe Kokko, notorious for its cyber scam operations, in Kayin State’s Myawaddy Township, is seen from the Thai side of the Moei River in November 2022. Image courtesy of Frontier.

For their story on the scourge of organized cyber scam and human trafficking crimes in Myanmar, published in Frontier Myanmar, Rainforest Investigations Network (RIN) Fellow Emily Fishbein and her team won the SOPA for Excellence in Technology Reporting (Regional/Local). The team, which included journalists Ya Nwe, Naw Betty Han, and Andrew Machemson, coordinated across borders to find out how hundreds of thousands of people have been lured into scamming syndicates that depend on forced labor. By speaking with survivors and survivors’ advocates, they pieced together a picture of the brutal conditions of victims' confinement on the Thai-Myanmar border.

A farmer sits in a rice paddy — Thiep, a rice farmer in northern Laos’ Oudomxay province, continues to sow his new crop on contaminated land, despite having little hope for a good harvest. He says he has no other choice. Image courtesy of Mekong Eye.

The RIN project Fruits of Spoil received an honorable mention for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment (Regional/Local) award. The project was produced with support from RIN and Internews’ Earth Journalism Network as part of Ground Truths, a cross-border collaboration that covered the accelerating problem of soil degradation in Asia. A pair of stories, published in Mekong Eye, explored the consequences of a boom in the fruit farming industry in Laos.

Using satellite imagery from Planet Labs, Mekong Eye and RIN discovered Chinese- and Vietnamese-owned plantations on deforested land, and compared them with on-the-ground observations, local testimonials, social media posts, and public documents. Many of these plantations are nestled near southern Laos’ biodiverse primary forests. The project also documents how local farmers are suffering from the effects of Chinese entrepreneurs’ monocropping practices.

Video and images by Shamsheer Yousaf, Monica Jha, and Sriram Vittalamurthy/The Wire. India, 2024.

Taking away two SOPA awards was the team behind Breaking the Nets, a massive multimedia undertaking led by grantees Shamsheer Yousaf, Monica Jha, and Sriram Vittalamurthy for The Wire. The project immersed audiences in the lives and struggles of fisherwomen in India and the systemic struggles they face in their profession, as a caste, and as women. The team won both the award for Excellence in Reporting on Women’s Issues (Regional/Local) and the award for Excellence in Journalistic Innovation. SOPA judges called the project “truly absorbing,” lauding how the web design of the multimedia experience went “beyond what traditional media can achieve.”

The Pulitzer Center is proud to have supported these ambitious and courageous projects. Our reporting grants are open to journalists across Asia and the world, and we review applications on a rolling basis. Visit our Grants page to learn more.