Webinar On-Demand: ‘How I Did It’: Nadja Drost Reveals how she Reported on Migrants Crossing the Darien Gap

On February 3, 2022, Pulitzer Center Executive Editor Marina Walker Guevera joined ProPublica Senior Editor Kit Rachlis for a conversation with grantee Nadja Drost on her award-winning reporting on migration in the dangerous Darien Gap. The talk focused primarily on Drost’s report “When Can We Really Rest?” in The California Sunday Magazine. The article won her a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

Drost talked about how she found the story, her collaboration with her editor, Rachlis, and keeping her energy up during a long reporting period. She also discussed knowing when to interview migrants and how joining the migrants’ journey gave her more credibility and trust. Her reporting focused on the perilous journey that migrants take along the Panama-Colombia border on their way to the United States. She highlighted the migrants behind the journey and the importance of telling their stories.

Drost and her collaborator, cinematographer Bruno Federico, won numerous awards for their work.

Walker Guevera is executive editor at the Pulitzer Center and is a member of the Board of Governors at the Overseas Press Club. Prior to joining the Pulitzer Center, she was deputy director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, managing two of the largest collaborations of reporters in journalism history. The Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers involved hundreds of journalists using technology to unravel stories of public interest from terabytes of leaked financial data.

Prior to his senior-editor job at ProPublica, Rachlis spent seven years as a senior editor at The California Sunday Magazine, where he oversaw Drost’s Darien Gap story. Rachlis was also a senior editor at The Atlantic and served as editor-in-chief of LA Weekly, Los Angeles magazine, and the American Prospect. He was also a senior projects editor at the Los Angeles Times.