Pulitzer Center Update

Pulitzer Center Recognition at Overseas Press Club Awards

The mother of a missing garment worker stares at the ruins of Rana Plaza in August 2013. Image by Jason Motlagh. Bangladesh, 2013.

The Overseas Press Club Foundation honored multiple Pulitzer Center grantees this year for their in-depth and courageous journalism.

Jason Motlagh and photographer Atish Saha were awarded the Overseas Press Club (OPC) Madeline Dane Ross award for best international reporting in the print medium showing a concern for the human condition for "The Ghosts of Rana Plaza." The Spring 2014 Virginia Quarterly Review article is part of Motlagh's Pulitzer Center-supported project, "Bangladesh: The Real Cost of Fast Fashion," which investigates the systemic problems that led to the deadly Rana Plaza garment factory collapse. The project also includes an interactive timeline presentation of this story, produced by Pulitzer Center and VQR. The VQR story also recently won this year's Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for magazine writing in national circulation.

Nick Miroff was awarded the Whitman Bassow Award for best reporting in any medium on international environmental issues for his Washington Post series “Pushing South.” The Pulitzer Center supported Nick and videographer Gabe Silverman's travel to Colombia as part of their project "Colombia: Palm Oil and Paramilitaries."

Pulitzer Center Board member David Rohde of Thomson Reuters received the President’s Award in recognition of his journalism career and his historic effort to craft a code of conduct for safely reporting global news.

Additionally, former grantee Marcus Bleasdale was awarded OPC's Robert Capa Gold Medal award for best published photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise for his Human Rights Watch-supported "Central African Republic Inferno." And another former grantee, Matthieu Aikins, won the Ed Cunningham Award for best magazine reporting on an international story for his Medium/Matter article produced with Sebastiano Tomada-Piccolomini, "Whoever Saves a Life."

See the complete list of OPC award winners at opcofamerica.org.

Join Motlagh and Bangladeshi photographer Atish Saha on Monday, May 4, for Talks @ Pulitzer: What Next for the Bangladesh Garment Industry? They will provide an update on the people trying to recover in the wake of the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse and discuss whether anything has changed for industry workers.