Dele Olojede, Fronting Black-Journalist Team, Wins
Dele Olojede, the former Newsday foreign editor who took a reporter’s look at the effects of the Rwanda genocide 10 years later, was named co-winner of the Pulitzer prize for international reporting today.
Olojede, a native of Nigeria, produced his series with the assistance of an African American photographer, J. Conrad Williams, while working under Deputy Managing Editor Lonnie Isabel, an African American who was then assistant managing editor for national and foreign coverage (and is a 1977 graduate of the Maynard Institute’s Summer Program for Minority Journalists).
Olojede was cited “for his fresh, haunting look at Rwanda a decade after rape and genocidal slaughter had ravaged the Tutsi tribe.”
It was “a black team,” the current foreign editor, Roy Gutman, told Journal-isms. “I’ve never seen anything like it. This is a newspaper in suburban New York, and a lot of people have the attitude that a newspaper like this does [its] local job well, and that’s true. But the thing about this paper is, he came here out of Columbia [University] directly. He spent 15 years here. He’s a Newsday person and Newsday opened everything up to him, and he took it and ran.”
Olojede had been covering South Africa when the Rwanda genocide took place in 1994, though he reported on the plight of Rwandan refugees from Goma, Zaire, starting in July of that year. “You always regret the story you didn’t cover,” said Gutman.
“It starts with one of those fundamental questions: How after the [genocide] can they live together? If you start with a theme like that, and you have a reporter like that with unfinished issues, and a gifted photographer who’s worked with him before, and gifted editor . . . This is a place where collaboration does happen.”
“Announcement of Olojede’s prize was greeted in Newsday’s newsroom by several rounds of applause,” Newsday’s own story said on the paper’s Web site. Olojede, who now lives in South Africa, “arrived at Newsday’s Melville newsroom late this afternoon,” the story said.
Olojede, 44, took a buyout offer from the paper late last year. He told the newsroom today that the only higher point in his life was when, as foreign editor, he received word that Middle East bureau chief Matthew McAllester and photographer Moises Saman were freed from an Iraqi prison in 2003 under the Saddam Hussein regime. He wrote about it in the Columbia Journalism Review.
Howard Schneider, editor of the paper when the Rwanda series ran, returned to the newsroom for the first time since he left the paper late last year after 35 years there.
Gutman could think of no other African-born journalist who had won a Pulitzer, at least in the international category.
Sharing the international reporting prize was Kim Murphy of the Los Angeles Times, “for her eloquent, wide ranging coverage of Russia?s struggle to cope with terrorism, improve the economy and make democracy work.”
The prize for public service went to Los Angeles Times reporters Charles Ornstein, Tracy L. Weber, Steve Hymon and Mitchell Landsberg and photographer Rob Gauthier “for a five-part series on the government neglect at King/Drew Medical Center, the hospital created in South Los Angeles after the Watts riots of 1965,” as the Los Angeles newspaper reported on its Web site today.
The staff of the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., won in the breaking news category “for its comprehensive, clear-headed coverage of the resignation of New Jersey?s governor after he announced he was gay and confessed to adultery with a male lover,” the Pulitzer announcement said.
NABJ Lauds Black Journalist Cited Among Winners of 2005 Pulitzer Prizes (news release)
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Rice Acts on Skinhead Beating of Black Diplomat
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice contacted her counterpart in Ukraine when she learned that a black U.S. diplomat was beaten there last month by skinheads because of his race, she said today, adding forcefully that the Ukraine government is “deeply embarrassed by the incident” and that “they are not just aware of it, they are trying to do something about it.”
“It’s not an unknown fact about Eastern Europe that this kind of behavior by skinheads” takes place, she said. It’s “an area I know really well both as a specialist and as a person of color.”
Rice made the comments about what she called “a very ugly incident” today in response to a question from Journal-isms at a State Department briefing for the National Conference of Editorial Writers.
“The United States has its first black woman as secretary of state, and in recent elections in Ukraine the United States and Russia were accused of pulling strings on opposite sides, attesting to its strategic importance. In that election, the winning presidential candidate was poisoned, which became a front-page story,” the column said March 5.
“So why so little coverage this week for the account of a black American diplomat saying he was attacked and severely beaten there by a group of skinheads?”
“I was attacked because I am African American. They did not touch my friends who were there with me but were not black,” Robert Simmons, serving at the U.S. Agency for International Development in Uzbekistan, was quoted as saying at the time. He added, “They beat me in turns. It looked like training for them.” The attackers were “a well-organized group of more than a dozen skinheads wearing combat boots,” according to an Associated Press dispatch.
Rice arrived at the State Department briefing after appearing with President Bush and Ukrainian leader Viktor Yushchenko, a populist whose Orange Revolution forced out Ukraine’s pro-Russian government last year, as the Associated Press described him.
A State Department spokeswoman said that she was not certain exactly when Rice contacted her counterpart, Foreign Minister Borys Tarasyuk, about the skinhead incident, but that the department believed the country was taking it seriously and increased police patrols where the incident took place. The United States is keeping in close contact with the investigation, she said.
The BBC reported March 17 that Rice told members of Congress who had questioned official Washington’s reaction to the beating: “We had a very tough talk with the Ukrainian government about the need to conduct an investigation and punish the people that committed this crime,” but Rice’s words appear to have gone unreported in the American news media.
“Such attacks are not common in Ukraine,” the original AP dispatch said, “but a November warning posted on the Web site of the U.S. Embassy in Kiev warned Americans of ‘reports of racially motivated incidents against non-Caucasian foreigners.'”
The BBC report said, “According to some information, there may be up to 10,000 skinheads in the capital at present.”
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Richburg Named Washington Post Foreign Editor
Keith B. Richburg, a Washington Post reporter who has traveled the globe for the Post and wrote a controversial book about his tour in Africa, Monday was named the Post’s foreign editor, the no. 2 foreign news position.
“Few reporters have seen more of the globe than Keith since he first left us for Haiti in 1986 with a Radio Shack Model 100 and some spare batteries tucked under his arm. His subsequent tours took him to Manila, Nairobi, Hong Kong, Jakarta and Paris. These were waystations for a correspondent who covered some of the most trying conflicts of recent years, and he came to embody all that we admire about a steady hand under fire,” David Hoffman, Post assistant managing editor for foreign news, told the Post staff.
“In Somalia, Rwanda, East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Palestinian territories, Keith earned a reputation for reaching some of the world’s most remote and dangerous locations and getting the story.”
More recently, Richburg has covered Europe, where he integrated coverage of racial problems and immigration conflicts into his overall reporting of developments on the continent.
His 1997 book, “Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,” published after a tour that included coverage of the Rwanda genocide and the crisis in Somalia in which U.S. troops were dragged through the streets, was controversial. “I am terrified of Africa. I don’t want to be from this place. In my darkest heart here on this pitch black African night, I am quietly celebrating the passage of my ancestor who made it out,” he declared.
It prompted a full page of letters when it was first published as a Washington Post magazine piece in 1995, and later was discussed in public forums.
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