Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting in African countries by American journalists has been a latecomer within the award category for international coverage. It took close to two decades after the establishment of the awards that reporting about the Italian-Ethiopian crisis was declared prize-worthy by the Pulitzer Prize jurors. During World War II, prizes were given for the coverage of the North African battlefields. Since the 1960s, inner-African conflicts, like unrest in the Congo, impressed the jurors, as well as writings on the Apartheid system in South Africa. This book contains a selection of the Pulitzer Prize-winning articles and photographs by news journalists in Africa. (Series: Pulitzer Prize Panorama - Vol. 8)
Michael Holman's eye-witness reports on the state of sub-Saharan Africa for the Financial Times and other media provide rare insights into the region’s post-independence successes and setbacks. From his accounts of the atrocities committed by Rhodesian forces in the 1960s to his interviews with those who would lead Africa into its own future and assessments of how they actually performed—often in obituaries—Postmark Africa brings together a lifetime of running commentaries on a continent he grew up in, knows acutely and loves dearly. Written with the benefit of unique access, Holman’s writings still hold out hope for Africa, in spite of decades of disappointment at the structural mismanagement of the nations themselves, the destructive policies of donor countries and other funders, and the hateful legacy of colonialism.
This book systematically examines the challenges that confront foreign correspondents in covering Africa for an international audience in the digital era. It explores factors that influence how Africa is reported in international news and the challenges of journalism practice in Africa, including how foreign correspondents carry out their job. The book takes a thematic approach to understanding the contemporary international news environment in context and in flux, and addresses international journalism practices in Africa, particularly the factors that influence how the continent is reported. The book is inclusive and truly international in scope because it looks at issues that are rarely considered when examining how Africa is reported.
Foreign News gives us a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look into the practices of the global tribe we call foreign correspondents. Exploring how they work, Ulf Hannerz also compares the ways correspondents and anthropologists report from one part of the world to another. Hannerz draws on extensive interviews with correspondents in cities as diverse as Jerusalem, Tokyo, and Johannesburg. He shows not only how different story lines evolve in different correspondent beats, but also how the correspondents' home country and personal interests influence the stories they write. Reporting can go well beyond coverage of a specific event, using the news instead to reveal deeper insights into a country or a people to link them to long-term trends or structures of global significance. Ultimately, Hannerz argues that both anthropologists and foreign correspondents can learn from each other in their efforts to educate a public about events and peoples far beyond our homelands. The result of nearly a decade's worth of work, Foreign News is a provocative study that will appeal to both general readers and those concerned with globalization.
International news has long been studied and understood as produced by outsiders – foreign correspondents working in exotic, international locales. This book challenges this established view by putting the spotlight on the insiders working in their own countries producing news for international audiences. Western male foreign correspondents who report from areas affected by crises and conflicts for an ‘audience back home’ have long stood in as visible metaphors of international news production. But the understanding of who produces international news is starting to shift as scholars come to take into account the often-invisible role played by locally based, non-Western news-workers who have always been part and parcel of international news production. The roles and responsibilities of these professional, specialised locals within the global flow of news have only increased as falling news industry revenues have meant reductions in non-local staff in foreign news bureaus. Available research shows that the involvement of local journalists and fixers, as well as NGOs, as sources of news and information in international news production is marked by economic, socio-cultural and practice-related tensions. To shed light on these growing yet relatively less investigated changes happening in international news-making, this book brings together the latest of studies conducted on this form of journalistic labour around the world. This book will contribute to both the breadth and depth of our future understanding of local news-work that benefits distant audiences, and also help cement the place of such journalistic work as a vital topic of analysis in its own right. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journalism Studies.
For twenty years an acclaimed correspondent on PBS's The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and the winner of two Emmys and two Peabody Awards (the latter two for her coverage of Africa), Charlayne Hunter-Gault was until recently the Johannesburg Bureau Chief for CNN. In New News Out of Africa, this eminent reporter offers a fresh and surprisingly optimistic assessment of modern Africa, revealing that there is more to the continent than the bad news of disease, disaster, and despair. Blending personal memoir with sterling reportage and astute analysis, Hunter Gault presents an Africa we rarely see. She looks first at South Africa, contrasting the country she first encountered as a young reporter--when she personally witnessed the brutality of apartheid--with the black-led, multiracial society of today, a nation undergoing one of the most radical social and economic experiments in modern times. She acknowledges the great imbalance in income in modern South Africa (where upwards of 30 to 40 percent of blacks are unemployed) and describes the ravaging effect of AIDS on the nation, but she also underscores the nation's commitment to affirmative action, describes how South African universities have opened their doors to black students, and debunks many of the myths about the violence of South African society. Likewise, Hunter-Gault looks at the continent-wide efforts to promote "an African Renaissance," illuminating the political and economic conditions in Rwanda, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Angola, and Sierra Leone. Finally, the book describes the challenges of reporting on the much-maligned continent and the efforts of African journalists to tell their own story. A compelling book on a topic of vital importance, New News Out of Africa promises to re-define what is news about this vast and complex continent.
This book is the first to address the tenor of the journalistic coverage of Africa, using multiple case studies of news production processes conducted in Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Mali and South Sudan.
