Eyes on the Front Lines: A Conversation with Jane Ferguson

Join us on Tuesday, May 3, 2022 at 1:00pm EDT for a special Twitter Spaces conversation between award-winning grantee and PBS NewsHour foreign correspondent Jane Ferguson and Pulitzer Center executive director Jon Sawyer.

The Pulitzer Center has partnered with Ferguson and PBS NewsHour on in-depth projects that cover the causes and consequences of global conflicts, providing audiences with the kind of reporting needed to better understand critical moments in history—from Ferguson’s reporting on the Yemeni war in the series Inside Yemen; to chronicling the 2021 fall of Kabul in Afghanistan: After the Americans; to providing ongoing coverage from the front lines of the current war in Ukraine. Ferguson has also covered conflicts in South Sudan and Iraq in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

Ferguson has been recognized with numerous accolades for her Pulitzer Center-supported conflict reporting for PBS NewsHour, including an Overseas Press Club Award, Gracie Award, and a nomination for a Peabody.

Sawyer and Ferguson will discuss Ferguson’s coverage of the Ukraine conflict, contextualized by her previous reporting experiences. They also will touch on the challenges to press freedoms and the impact of information suppression, in recognition of World Press Freedom Day on May 3. 

Visit this link to get a reminder to join the conversation live on Twitter on May 3.

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* Jane Ferguson is a Polk, Emmy, and DuPont award-winning foreign correspondent for PBS NewsHour, a contributor to The New Yorker, and a 2020 McGraw professor of journalism at Princeton University, with over 13 years of experience living in the Middle East and reporting from the Arab world, Africa, and South Asia.

Her work focuses on U.S. foreign policy and defense, conflict, diplomacy, and human rights. With an emphasis on in-depth, magazine-length broadcasting, Ferguson's reporting is characterized by exclusive, ground-breaking access, thoughtful story-telling, and character-driven reporting.

She is now based in New York City.

* Jon Sawyer is executive director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a nonprofit organization that funds independent reporting with the intent of raising the standard of media coverage of global affairs and that also supports a broad range of educational initiatives. Sawyer became the center's founding director after a 31-year career with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Sawyer's projects for the Pulitzer Center have included reporting from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Bangladesh, China, Haiti, and the Caucasus. His work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera English, the Nieman Reports, To the Point, and PBS NewsHour. He was executive producer of LiveHopeLove.com, the Center's Emmy-award-winning website on HIV in Jamaica, and also of The Abominable Crime, a feature-length documentary on homophobia and stigma.

Sawyer was the Post-Dispatch Washington bureau chief from 1993 through 2005. He had been a member of the newspaper's Washington bureau since 1980 and before that worked in St. Louis, first as an editorial writer and then as a staff reporter. His assignments for the Post-Dispatch took him to some five dozen countries, with special projects ranging from southern Africa, Cuba, and Haiti to Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Israel, the Balkans, and China.