Jon Sawyer, Pulitzer Center
Earlier this month we posted the first letters from Africa by Bill Freivogel, director of the school of journalism at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and a former colleague of mine at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Bill and a group of SIUC colleagues met with journalists in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda on a tour sponsored by the State Department.
I was struck by Bill's fresh perspective, as someone making his first visit to Africa. His Letter from Ethiopia is equally vivid, not only on the feel of Addis Ababa's street scene but also on what it's like to struggle for press freedoms in an authoritarian society (and with a government, as it happens, closely allied to the United States).