Pulitzer Center

The Pulitzer Center is an award-winning non-profit, dedicated to supporting independent international journalism. Follow Field Notes for dispatches by Pulitzer Center journalists in the field, or visit us on Instagram. Visit our website here.

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Twins (both IDPs) goofing around like the good toddlers they are. 

Image and caption by Misha Friedman, via Instagram. Ukraine, 2016.

To see more of Misha’s reporting, look out for his upcoming project, “Ukraine War Affecting the Most Vulnerable.”

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More from Misha and other Pulitzer Center journalists in the field on @pulitzerfieldnotes !

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The view of the Khumbu Range. Peaks visible: Mt. Everest, Lhoste, Ama Dablam.

Video and caption by student fellow Jeremy Rellosa. Nepal, 2016.

Jeremy and ten other students from the College of William and Mary participated in our annual Sharp Seminar where they developed their writing and reporting skills. 

To read Jeremy’s reporting, as well as the articles of the other participating student fellows, visit the project, “William & Mary 2015-2016 Sharp Reporting Projects.”

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Shanta Basnet sends her grandson off to school as her daughter and daughter-in-law look on in the remote village of Amppipal, Nepal. Just 15 miles from the epicenter of the 2015 earthquake, the Nepali village was badly damaged. The Basnet family now lives in a temporary shelter they made out of corrugated metal sheets and salvaged wood where they will be spending their second monsoon season. Reconstruction is slow as the government has stalled in distributing aid to both Kathmandu and the villages damaged near the epicenter.

Image and caption by Ann Hermes. Nepal, 2016.

For more of Ann’s reporting with journalist Michael Holtz and a broadcast for @pbsnewshour​ by Fred de Sam Lazaro and Richard Coolidge, visit the project, “Brick by Brick: Reforming South Asia’s Brick Kilns.”

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Mansa Devi starts molding bricks at 2 a.m. at a brick kiln in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India, to beat the sun. Spring temperatures here can reach 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat forces many brick makers to work early mornings and late afternoons. With the help of Ms. Devi’s husband and mother-in-law, the family can make 2,000 bricks a day, which earns them about $12. The money is barely enough for them to buy food and other essentials.

Image and Caption by Ann Hermes, India 2016.

For more of Ann’s reporting with journalist Michael Holtz, Fred de Sam Lazaro, and Richard Coolidge visit their project, “Brick by Brick: Reforming South Asia’s Brick Kilns.”

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TORTURE AND TORMENT IN SYRIA In an important and deeply disturbing report for The New Yorker, Pulitzer Center grantee Ben Taub tells the story of a secretive organization called the Commission for International Justice and Accountability that has spent the last four years painstakingly documenting war crimes and other atrocities perpetrated by the Syrian government.   Ben is a stellar young journalist who produced his first piece forThe New Yorker the same day he graduated from Columbia Journalism School last year. As a new round of peace talks gets underway in Geneva this week, his story gives voice to some of the torture victims, and stands as a powerful indictment of the international community’s wholly inadequate response to the crisis in Syria. KENYA’S WAR ON AL SHABAAB Kenya is supposed to be one of the bulwarks of stability in Africa and a key U.S. ally in the fight against Islamic radicalism in the region, but as Pulitzer Center grantees Nick Schifrin and Zach Fannin report in their three-part series for the PBS NewsHour, Kenya’s war on the Somalia-based terror group Al Shabaab may be creating a new enemy. A heavy-handed security crackdown in northeastern Kenya, home to many ethnic Somalis, has created mistrust and hostility. Rampant corruption along with a chronic lack of infrastructure and opportunity has made these borderlands a fertile recruiting ground for Al Shabaab extremists. “Until Kenya stops breeding its own enemies, the country will remain divided and Al Shabaab will continue to exploit these differences to wage war,” says Nick.   If you are a teacher, and you would like to use the NewsHour's reporting in your classroom, click here for a lesson designed by our education team. Or you can use the Lesson Builder to design your own, drawing from our growing archive of reporting from Africa. It's easy to use—and it's free. PANAMA PAPERS, CONTINUED Last week, we highlighted the work of Pulitzer Center grantee Carrie Ching, who created a video animation for theInternational Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ ground-breaking probe into a shadowy Panamanian law firm that enabled politicians, business leaders, celebrities and others to hide billions in assets from tax authorities. The investigation, triggered by the leak of some 11.5 million documents, has already resulted in the resignation of one head of state. As it continues to gather momentum and media attention, another one of our grantees, Uri Blau, gives Nieman Reports an insider’s peek on how this massively complex investigative project took shape. CELEBRATING OUR TENTH: VIDEO HIGHLIGHTS Last week we marked our first decade with the announcement of a $12 million endowment challenge grant from Emily Rauh Pulitzer and a $1 million contribution toward that challenge from Katherine Moore. A dinner in New York featured talks by Judy Woodruff of PBS NewsHour, Kathy Im of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and our journalist grantee Jason Motlagh. A short highlights video captures a memorable night. On the following night we did a joint presentation with thePulitzer Prizes Centennial that featured talks by Pulitzer Prizes Administrator Mike Pride, Jon Sawyer of the Pulitzer Center, and three two-time Pulitzer Prize winners now associated with the Pulitzer Center: Paul Salopek, Larry C. Price, and David Rohde. The talks tell a powerful story of what the Pulitzer Prizes mean—and what it means to live the Pulitzer legacy. Until next week, Tom Hundley Senior Editor

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A year ago, Steve Elfers and I began a project focusing on the global crisis of groundwater depletion. That Desert Sun, @usatoday series was published in December, and today the video component will be on the big screen at the American Documentary Film Festival in Palm Springs. I’m going to be sharing more photos from the project, including this one taken in India in June. Check out the project at groundwater.desertsun.com.

Image and caption by Ian James, via Instagram. California, 2016.

To see more of Ian and Steve’s reporting, visit their project, “ Pumped Dry: The Global Crisis of Vanishing Groundwater.”

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The Panama Papers: An Introduction

Behind the email chains, invoices and documents that make up the Panama Papers are often unseen victims of wrongdoing enabled by the shadowy offshore industry.

One of our grantees, and one of the few lucky journalists allowed to peruse some of the over 11.5 million of leaked documents, has made a great video explaining The Panama Papers.

Visit ICIJ to learn everything about The Panama Papers.

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The Panama Papers: An Introduction

Behind the email chains, invoices and documents that make up the Panama Papers are often unseen victims of wrongdoing enabled by the shadowy offshore industry.

Our grantee was one of the lucky few to look at the over 11.5 million leaked documents. She created an animation to explain why it is such a big deal.

Visit ICIJ for all info on The Panama Papers.

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The Panama Papers: An Introduction

Behind the email chains, invoices and documents that make up the Panama Papers are often unseen victims of wrongdoing enabled by the shadowy offshore industry.

Check out our grantee’s video on The Panama Papers! She was one of the lucky few able to sift through the millions of leaked documents.

To read full reports about The Panama Papers, and stories about specific leaked documents visit ICIJ’s website. (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists)

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The Panama Papers: An Introduction

Behind the email chains, invoices and documents that make up the Panama Papers are often unseen victims of wrongdoing enabled by the shadowy offshore industry.

One of our grantees, and one of the few lucky journalists allowed to peruse some of the over 11.5 million of leaked documents, has made a great video explaining The Panama Papers.

Visit ICIJ to learn everything about The Panama Papers.

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HELP FROM AFAR Even as nervous governments shut their doors to Syrian refugees, individuals have responded to the crisis with heroic acts of generosity. In Milwaukee, one such local hero is Dr. Tarif Bakdash, a Syrian-American physician who is leading a team of volunteers that will provide medical treatment to the refugees—especially children—in Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp. Pulitzer Center grantees Mark Johnson and Mark Hoffman are chronicling the efforts of Dr. Bakdash and his team for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. This will be Bakdash’s second mission to the region. The 51-year-old pediatric neurologist who grew up in Syria and works at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin told Johnson, “I feel 90 percent American. I belong here. But now we have a disaster. I was born there. I grew up there. I have a moral obligation.” MISSING OUT IN IRAN The new Iran nuclear agreement that went into effect earlier this year was supposed to open the door to the resumption of trade with the Islamic republic. But the U.S. government is maintaining an onerous set of unilateral sanctions that prohibit U.S. companies from entering this lucrative market. As Pulitzer Center grantee Reese Erlich reports for Vice News, “Chinese and European companies are scrambling to invest in Iran and bringing home multibillion-dollar deals—while U.S. corporations, barred from doing business with a newly-opening Islamic Republic, are forced to watch as their competitors tap into a market of 80 million people.” The big winners thus far: Airbus, the European consortium which assembles its planes in France and Germany, signed letters of intent to sell 118 jets to Iran at a list price of $27 billion; Italian companies signed memorandums of understanding to invest $3.5 billion to refurbish Iranian oil refineries and $6 billion to provide heavy machinery and France's Total plans to pump 150,000 to 200,000 barrels per day in Iran. Meanwhile China is formalizing plans for $600 billion in investments over the next 10 years. “China is building roads, dams and other major infrastructure projects. It has also flooded the Iranian market with low-cost consumer goods, including cheap cell phones,” says Reese. ON THE MOVE Last week was one of the busiest ever for the Pulitzer Center. Many thanks to our journalists and staff members who shared our recent reporting with schools and communities up and down the East Coast and out to Illinois. Ann Peters accompanied grantees Stephanie Hanes and Alisa Roth to William & Mary for the Sharp Writer-in-Residence Program, a semester-long course jointly administered by the college and the Pulitzer Center. Jon Sawyer was with grantee Emily Feldman at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, for a symposium on human-rights reporting and presentations by Pulitzer Center student fellows Kayli Plotner and Anna Spoerre. Photojournalist Matt Black discussed his "Geography of Poverty" project at Phillips Exeter Academy and at Boston University, where he was joined by Nathalie Applewhite and the performers and journalists associated with Circus Without Borders. Mark Schulte traveled with the Circus crew to Simmons College, Emerson College, La Salle College and six Boston-area secondary schools. Back in Washington, DC, grantees and filmmakers Ian James and Steve Elfers, Larry C. Price, and Sharron Lovell shared their documentary work with an audience of 225-plus at the DC Environmental Film Festival. They reached hundreds more as they fanned out to sessions at Campus Consortium partner American University and, with Fareed Mostoufi and Lauren Shepherd, to eight DC-area secondary schools. After a discussion on displacement, one high school student was quick to make the global/local connection: "What sticks with me is the fact that many countries are alike and going through similar things," he told Fareed. "People in DC are being moved. The same thing is happening in China."  Until next week, Tom Hundley Senior Editor

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March 20, 2016 at the Zaatari refuge camp in Jordan about 15 miles from the Syrian border.  The girls has a congenital defect known as tethered spinal cord that limits  the movement of the spinal cord within the spinal column. As she grows it will cause paralysis. The girl is now suffering from incontinence and leg pain. The defect can be corrected by surgery, which will have to be done outside of Jordan.

Image and caption by Mark Hoffman.  Jordan, 2016.

To learn more about Mark’s reporting with Mark Johnson, visit their project, “The Healing.”

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Zinder, Niger—Idrissa Sani Malam (gang name: Baho), 32, is the best street fighter in Niger. Everyone says so, except for the ones who insist he is the best street fighter in all of West Africa. But Baho doesn’t win all of his fights without help. Whenever he suspects that he has a knife fight coming up, Baho visits a Nigerien malam, a spiritual leader who mixes traditional Quranic Islam with mystical cultural practices, to ensure his safety.

In this video, a malam writes a protective spell, based on verses from the Quran, on a slate. The malam then washes away the words with water, which he will give to whomever needs protection—in this case, Baho—to drink. Baho says this spell makes him impervious to knives.

It’s an emotional ritual. Despite the fact that Baho spent seven hours a day from age seven to age fifteen at a local Quran memorization school, he was never taught to read or write. Baho says that’s his greatest shame. (According to UNICEF, Niger’s total adult literacy rate is only 28.7 percent.)

But the end of this video has a lovely twist. Baho’s six year old son, who attends school, has a slate of his own—and he thinks what the malam is doing looks cool.

Video and text by Jillian Keenan.

To read more of Jillian’s reporting,visit her project “ Niger: Baho’s Last Fight.”

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EUROPEAN MUSLIMS Against a growing anti-Muslim backlash in this country and across Europe, Pulitzer Center grantee Nick Street travels to Malmo, Sweden, where young Muslim activists are trying to forge a Muslim identity that is compatible with Western culture and resistant to the blandishments of radicalization. For this story in the Los Angeles Times, Nick visits a madrasa where students study not only the Koran and sharia law, but also the Swedish language and social responsibility, which includes interreligious dialogue, especially with the Jewish community. "All our education programs have the effect of immunizing our youth against radicalization," the academy’s young imam, pictured above, told Nick. "They (ISIS) would never be able to recruit anyone from our group because we equip them with the knowledge and methodologies to counter any argument from groups like (ISIS). More than this, our youth are effecting positive change by stopping other youth from joining extremist groups." Nick is the senior writer with the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California, a Campus Consortium partner. We're eager for educators from secondary schools to universities to incorporate Nick's reporting into their courses using the Pulitzer Center Lesson Builder. Click here for a lesson designed by our education team. It's easy and free to design lessons, drawing from our growing archive of reporting on religion and public policy. THE GANGS OF ZINDER Niger is the poorest of the world’s poor countries. It ranks dead last on the U.N. Human Development Index. “Food, jobs, schools, infrastructure—the landlocked country, 80 percent of which is occupied by the Sahara, lacks it all,” writes Pulitzer Center grantee Jillian Keenan. “Military coups, political instability, and ethnic rebellions have hampered tourism, mining, and other economic sectors. Jobs are scant; less than 20 percent of the population is able to read.” Its teeming urban areas are fertile ground for gang violence, which can easily transmute into Islamic extremism. Boko Haram, the notorious extremist group from across the border in Nigeria, has come looking for recruits. Jillian, in a gripping dispatch for the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine, travels to the epicenter of Niger’s gang violence in the city of Zinder, where she profiles a gang leader named Baho who, after witnessing the extreme violence of Boko Haram, has had a change of heart and is beginning to reconsider his own violent ways. IRELAND’S FADED CHURCH The Catholic Church has been in a steep decline across Europe, no more so than in Ireland, a country that once thought of itself as “the most Catholic” of them all. Church attendance has plummeted from nearly 90 percent in the mid-1980s to less than 20 percent today. Michael Bodley and Meredith Stutz, two of our student fellows from Elon University, were in Ireland to look at some of the ways the church is responding to the crisis. In this story for the Huffington Post, they speak with a young man studying for the priesthood—a once common but now rare thing in Ireland—who understands the difficult road ahead and foresees a smaller church led by fewer priests. “You just have to be honest with people, not hide behind religious fronts,” the seminarian tells them. “People see if you’re being hypocritical—they can feel that. You need to be authentic.” Until next week, Tom Hundley Senior Editor

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Conservatives

A poor voter turnout among older and more conservative Iranians gave a large victory to supporters of centrist President Rouhani. Older men who attend Tehran’s Friday prayers tend to vote for conservative members of parliament.

Image and caption by Reese Erlich. Iran, 2016.

To read more of Reese’s reporting, visit his project, “The New Nuclear Agreement: How Does Tehran View Its National Security?”

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News Bite Lesson: Pedestrian Safety

More than 1.2 million are killed on the world's roads each year - and that number is increasing rapidly," writes Pulitzer Center senior editor Tom Hundley in the introduction to the project Roads Kill. Start a dialogue with your classroom about safety in your community's streets with this week's News Bite lesson from interns Elana Dure and Seiler Smith.

Featured Lesson: Analyzing Nuclear Arms Funding in the U.S.

How much should the United States be spending on its nuclear programs? This lesson from the Pulitzer Center education team uses video aired last week on PBS NewsHour, class discussion and writing to investigate the current debate around funding the nuclear triad.

Lesson Builder

With the Pulitzer Center Lesson Builder, you can quickly search through articles, videos, photos and multimedia from among our hundreds of reporting projects and create lesson outlines/classroom resources. You can also adapt already-prepared model lesson plans like the lessons featured in this week's News Bite.

A Review of What This Email is About:

We hope to support you and your classrooms each week by sending "News Bites," short lesson plans that relate to the news that week and utilize an article, photograph, podcast and/or short film by a Pulitzer Center grantee. We'll also feature an in-depth "Lesson of the Week" and highlight upcoming events hosted by the Pulitzer Center's Education Department.

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I’m told that ISIS survivors given refuge here in Germany have been struggling a lot with missing home. I’m thinking about this as I ride the train from northern Germany to the southern state of Baden-Württemberg, where many of the survivors now live. This place could not be more different from where they come from, in every way down to the landscape. Northern Iraq is all blue sky and browns; in southern Germany the palette is green. Just looking out at the horizon must be a constant reminder to them of how far they are from home.

Images and caption by Emily Feldman. Germany, 2016.

To read more of Emily’s reporting, visit her project, “The Yazidis: After the Trauma ”