Pulitzer Center Update

Week in Review: Pulitzer 2012 in Photos

Image by Sean Gallagher. China, 2012.

Earlier this month we featured the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel series “Paper Cuts,” on China’s audacious displacement of a timber and papermaking industry that had long been a staple of Wisconsin’s economy. This week The Guardian has published a series by Pulitzer grantee Kathleen McLaughlin that focuses on another instance of China’s influence abroad—in this case its role in the fight against malaria in Africa and disturbing evidence of its complicity in the manufacture and distribution of counterfeit drugs. This is an issue that goes beyond one disease and one supplier, as Kathleen makes clear in a separate story on the prevalence of counterfeit anti-retroviral drugs in Tanzania. China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded with an official denial, for the first time addressing the issue directly.

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We are pleased to announce that Linda Winslow, executive producer of PBS NewsHour, has joined the Pulitzer Center board of directors. She is no stranger, having worked with us on nearly 50 NewsHour reports that were produced or funded by the Pulitzer Center. She has embraced and championed our commitment to collaboration, supporting joint NewsHour-Pulitzer Center projects with The Washington Post, National Geographic, USA Today, and PRI’s The World. We are honored to have this strong journalism voice on our board.

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2012 has been a year of exceptional growth for the Pulitzer Center. The reporting projects we funded increased by 50 percent, to a total of 85, with over 250 external placements. The number of universities supporting our work through the Campus Consortium increased to 19 and we reached over 10,000 secondary school students through 220 classroom visits. We saw big growth on social-media sites like Tumblr and staked our claim in an e-books market that we believe is hugely important to journalists and public alike.

At the heart of everything we do, however, is the amazing work of the many talented journalists who have partnered with us, often at great personal risk, to cover stories that would otherwise go untold. We asked each of our staff colleagues to choose a photograph from one of our projects this year that especially moved them—and to tell us why. The result is just a sampler. We hope you’ll be tempted to explore further, through all the great journalism from the year just past—and to stay with us as we tackle even more in the months ahead.

Until next week,

Jon Sawyer
Executive Director

This holiday season, go on a journey and support journalism through our e-books. Meet the people of Haiti through stories, poetry, song, video, and original music. Travel for a year through Afghanistan by donkey with Anna Badkhen. Explore the global water crisis with Dan Grossman. See what it means to be without a country through the photography of Greg Constantine and the reporting of Stephanie Hanes on some of the estimated 12 million stateless people worldwide.