United States

By Mark Rosen-Molina, PBS MediaShift

Whenever news breaks, the first people on the ground, before reporters arrive, are ordinary folks with cameras. Citizen journalists have played an important role in getting us the first glimpses of developing news, from the London transit bombings to the Southeast Asian tsunami to the Virginia Tech massacre. With the advent of YouTube as a hub for video-sharing, there's finally a venue outside the mainstream media where amateur journalists can distribute their videos to a wide audience.

Anthony Shadid, a journalist for The Washington Post, is one of six Advisory Council members for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Shadid won the Pulitzer Prize for his covergage of the Iraq War. He is author of Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War.

Pulitzer Center Executive Director Jon Sawyer at the Global Health Council's annual media awards. Sawyer discusses the multi-media aspects of the Pulitzer Center's work with the council's Director of Publications and New Media Annmarie Christensen.

The fourth round of the Pulitzer Center-Helium Global Issues/Citizen Voices contest was a study in contrast. Two of the four essay questions engaged issues that have lingered in the national spotlight for the past year: the 2008 presidential election and Iran. The other two pressed readers to consider lesser known conflicts in the jungles of Ecuador and in the Caucasus mountain region of Eurasia. All the issues - the overexposed and underexposed - received a diversity of responses ...

In July 2008, The Pulitzer Center partnered with Helium to produce its forth round of the Global Issues/Citizen Voices Writing contest. Contestents chose from multiple writing prompts related to international issues and Pulitzer Center reporting projects to sculp their winning essays. Read the winning essays below.

The following is an excerpt from Jon Sawyer's remarks delivered to the Southeastern World Affairs Institute on July 27, 2008. Download the full address by clicking the PDF below.

The interactive Pulitzer Center website, Heroes of HIV: HIV in the Caribbean, was nominated for a 2008 Flashforward Film Festival award.

The festival highlighted the best and most recent advances in Flash, a multimedia animation and interactivity software. "Heroes" was one of five Flash websites nominated in the Navigation/Experience category, which recognizes "Flash work in which the navigation is exceptionally usable, clever or original and plays a key role in delivering an exceptional user experience."

The June 24 episode of PBS's The News Hour with Jim Lehrer discussed the impact of non-profit journalism groups on the American media.

The program cited the Pulitzer Center as a media center with "an international focus, looking at stories it believes have been underreported, misreported, or not reported at all."

As news executives seek larger audiences, the art of investigative journalism is slowly giving way to more profitable, less controversial content. This trend is certainly a crisis for traditional journalism, but it also marks an opportunity for non-profit news organizations like the Pulitzer Center.

In June 2008, The Pulitzer Center partnered with Helium to continue its third round of the Global Issues/Citizen Voices Writing Contest. Contestants chose topics for their essays from prompts related to different Pulitzer Center reporting projects. Find their winning essays below.

How does stigma and discrimination, as witnessed in Jamaica, perpetuate the global HIV/AIDS epidemic?
Read winning essay by Glynnis Hayward

Thanks to dotSUB, a browser based tool enabling subtitling of videos on the web into and from any language, Pulitzer Center now offers many of its short documentaries in multiple languages. Once a video is translated, anyone can then embed the video virtually anywhere on the web, enabling the Pulitzer Center to reach an even wider audience with issues of global importance.

Want to help translate?

The Virginia Quarterly Review's 2007 fall issue, "South America in the Twenty-First Century," which includes reporting from Pulitzer Center grantees on Peru, Columbia and Argentina, has won the National Magazine Award in the single topic issue category.

Included in the issue:

• Phillip Robertson's "The Octopus in the Cathedral of Salt," an article stemming from his investigation of paramilitary power in Columbia