84th Annual Overseas Press Club Awards

Contact: Patricia Kranz, executive director, Overseas Press Club of America

patricia@opcofamerica.org – (917) 971-0746

84th Annual Overseas Press Club Awards Honors the Finest International Reporting in 22 Categories; The New York Times Leads Winners for the Fifth Straight Year; CNN’s Christiane Amanpour Receives OPC President’s Award

NEW YORK, March 22, 2023 – The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing war crimes are the leading storylines among the winners of the 84th Annual Overseas Press Club Awards.

America’s oldest journalist association dedicated to international news announced the winners in 22 award categories. They will be honored April 27 at a dinner in New York.

The OPC President’s Award will honor CNN’s chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour, a former OPC Award winner, for her numerous contributions to international journalism and human rights.

“The power and scope of this year’s winning work is awe-inspiring,” said Scott Kraft, OPC president and editor-at-large at the Los Angeles Times.

“We are thrilled to honor so many brave and skilled journalists for their indispensable work, including reporting that bore witness to atrocities in Ukraine and the daily terror on the streets of Haiti, deeply human stories from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and compelling investigative work from Mexico, China and Brazil. Taken together, it is powerful proof that international journalism remains as crucial to our society as it has ever been.”

A total of seven OPC Awards relate to coverage of the war in Ukraine, including four awards involving civilian murders and war crimes by Russian forces.

Three OPC awards focused on stories involving post-war Afghanistan, including the plight of oppressed women under the Taliban, the murder of Afghan migrants on the Greece-Turkey border and scrutiny of the deadly night raids by American forces during the U.S. occupation.

Two awards were given for investigative pieces on corporate hypocrisy over questionable claims of ethically certified coffee grown in Mexico and the business practice of exploiting carbon offsets.

Two honors were given for stories from Haiti on the dangers surrounding the country’s surge in migration, in addition to a groundbreaking review of President Jovenel Moise’s 2021 assassination. 

The New York Times led all outlets with three awards, marking the fifth straight year the paper topped the field. The Times staff earned the Joe and Laurie Dine Award for human rights reporting with a landmark series on Russian war crimes in Bucha, Ukraine.

Laetitia Vancon’s feature photography-winning essay showcased defiant Odesa citizens amid the country’s destruction. And Li Yuan captured the Flora Lewis commentary prize with her insight into the personal impact of China’s zero Covid policies.

Four media outlets won two awards each: The Associated Press, CNN, ProPublica and FRONTLINE PBS. There were two joint efforts among the dual winners. 

The AP collaborated with FRONTLINE to share the Roy Rowan Award for investigative journalism with its detailed stories on Russian war atrocities.

ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists combined forces to win the Malcolm Forbes Award for business reporting with a global investigation on corrupt and dangerous honorary diplomats.   

Marcus Yam of the Los Angeles Times won the prestigious Robert Capa Gold Medal Award for photography requiring exceptional courage with a series of thoughtfully curated visuals covering the first 30 days of war in Ukraine. The Wall Street Journal’s Justyna Mielnikiewicz took the Olivier Rebbot Award for best news photography with images that revealed intimate looks at Ukrainian people as well as the larger implications of war.

The OPC also awarded runner-up citations in 21 of the 22 award categories. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times each won three citations. Associated Press, Bloomberg, PBS and Reuters earned two citations apiece.

The keynote address at the April 27 dinner will be delivered by Reuters editor-in-chief Alessandra Galloni, a former OPC Award winner.  

The OPC Press Freedom Candle honoring journalists who have been killed, injured or imprisoned in the past year will be lighted by Oksana Markarova, Ambassador of Ukraine to the United States.

The OPC Awards judging process is led by John Daniszewski, vice president and editor-at-large for standards of The Associated Press. The entries are reviewed by more than 100 jury members from across the profession with deep experience in international journalism.

For a full list of award winners, see below. To see citation (runner-up) winners, click on this link. A list of all our awards judges is posted here. Biographies of people whose names are on the awards are listed here.

OPC 2023 Awards (for work in 2022)

Newspapers, News Services, Print or Digital

THE HAL BOYLE AWARD

Best newspaper, news service or digital reporting from abroad

Sponsor: Norman Pearlstine in memory of Jerry Flint

Mstyslav Chernov, Evgeniy Maloletka, Vasilisa Stepanenko, Lori Hinnant and Staff

The Associated Press

Erasing Mariupol

Judges: The AP team bore witness to atrocities that would have otherwise gone untold, shocking the international community, and putting paid to Russian propaganda efforts aimed at convincing global opinion of the Kremlin’s altruistic intentions. In the view of the judges, the AP’s coverage was courageous, harrowing and indispensable, and serves as a model of what the best war reporting should aim to achieve.

THE BOB CONSIDINE AWARD

Best newspaper, news service or digital interpretation of international affairs

Sponsor: William J. Holstein and Rita Sevell

Nicolas Pelham

1843 magazine, The Economist

MBS: Despot in the Desert

Judges: The jury was impressed by the combination of on-the-ground reporting and analysis. With three decades of reporting experience in the Middle East, Nicolas Pelham produced a story that was both authoritative and highly personal.

THE ED CUNNINGHAM AWARD

Best magazine-style, long-form narrative feature in print or digital on an international story

Sponsor: Michael S. Serrill

Lynzy Billing

ProPublica

The Night Raids

Judges: In an astounding piece of storytelling that is, simultaneously, a personal history and a revelatory work of current events reporting, Billing skillfully introduces the readers to a series of unforgettable characters and fills in the human drama that comprised one of the darkest legacies of the US occupation of Afghanistan.

THE MALCOLM FORBES AWARD

Best international business news reporting in newspapers, news services, magazines or digital

Sponsor: Forbes Magazine

Debbie Cenziper, Will Fitzgibbon, Eva Herscowitz and Delphine Reuter

ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with more than 50 international media organizations and Northwestern University

Shadow Diplomats: The Global Threat of Rogue Diplomacy

Judges: The judges noted the project’s ambition and scope, noting the sheer force of reporting necessary to connect court records, news reports, public policy documents and government reports from points around the globe. They also cited the impact and change the project drove, including moves from Paraguay, Finland, and Brazil to investigate the consuls and the systems that had long protected their power.

THE MADELINE DANE ROSS AWARD

Best international reporting in the print medium or digital showing a concern
for the human condition

Sponsor: Linda Fasulo

Sarah Souli

The Atavist Magazine

A Matter of Honor

Judges: With scant clues and ironclad determination, reporter Sarah Souli set off on a yearslong investigation into the execution-style killings of three Afghan refugee women on the Greek-Turkish border. Like the characters she encountered, Souli refuses to give up until the mystery is solved and the slain women receive some measure of justice.

THE KIM WALL AWARD

Best story or series of stories on international affairs using creative and dynamic digital storytelling techniques

Jacqueline Charles, Jay Weaver, Antonio Delgado, Michael Wilner and Staff

The Miami Herald

Made in Miami: How a Plot to Oust a President Led to a Murder in Haiti

Judges: The Herald’s richly illustrated account relied on extensive interviews, police records, court filings and more to create an interactive graphic that allowed readers to click and see how and where suspects were connected. For showing how to use digital storytelling in investigations, the judges decided to give the Kim Wall award to the Miami Herald.

TV, Video, Radio, or Podcast

THE LOWELL THOMAS AWARD

Best radio, audio, or podcast coverage of international affairs

Sponsor: Deborah Amos

Ike Sriskandarajah, Neroli Price, Brett Myers and Andy Donohue

Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

My Neighbor the Suspected War Criminal

Judges: The scope was at once both human and global; it had compelling characters and a personal connection for the reporter, Ike Sriskandarajah. Among the highlights was an interview with federal officials who were asked whether the government had ever charged anyone with a war crime. Their stumbling response is a great example of journalists holding public officials to account.

THE DAVID KAPLAN AWARD

Best TV or video spot news reporting from abroad

Sponsor: ABC News

CNN Worldwide

CNN

Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Judges: The CNN Worldwide team of numerous correspondents and producers, photographers, and translators, took us live into the depths of the horrors unleashed by Russia’s army from the very moment the first shots were fired – a front-line seat as we watched the tanks roll and artillery rounds land, villages and families torn apart.

THE EDWARD R. MURROW AWARD

Best TV, video or documentary interpretation of international affairs with a run time up to 30 minutes

Sponsor: CBS News

Jeremy Young, Femi Oke, Laila Al-Arian, Neil Brandvold, Jeremy Dupin, Abdulai Bah and Warwick Meade

Al Jazeera English

Al Jazeera Fault Lines – No Country for Haitians

Judges: Al Jazeera ventures into the perilous anarchy in Haiti to report a sorely under-covered story, one with high political stakes for the U.S. administration. In one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists, the correspondent succeeds in capturing the daily terror and trials of her characters. With deep humanity, she shows them caught in a Kafkaesque immigration trap, which she contrasts with the outpouring of support at that time for Ukraine’s refugees.

THE PETER JENNINGS AWARD

Best TV, video or documentary about international affairs with a run time over 30 minutes

Sponsor: The Jennings Family

Daniel Roher

CNN Films, HBO Max

Navalny

Judges: The judges found “Navalny,” which chronicles the efforts of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny to investigate his own poisoning, compelling from beginning to end. It captures, on film, an agent of Vladimir Putin revealing how Russian security apparatchiks attempted to murder Navalny by Novichuk poisoning. Along with Daniel Roher, the judges wish to honor Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist with Bellingcat, and Maria Pevchikh, who heads Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. In real time, the cameras filmed them as they pored over records to uncover the assassination plot.

THE MORTON FRANK AWARD

Best international business news reporting in TV, video, radio, audio or podcast

Sponsor: Marc Lemcke

David Scott, Cho Park, Evan Simon, John Carlos Frey, Cindy Galli, Candace Smith Chekwa and Eman Varoqua

ABC News

Impact x Nightline: Caffeine Jungle

Judges: Three Rainforest farms where ABC documented coffee picking by child labor lost their certifications. At Fairtrade farms, the investigation showed that even the hardest working farmers struggled to get fair prices for their coffee, despite Fairtrade’s efforts to establish a minimum price.  This story gave Americans a much better idea about the gap between selling consumers idealism and real life at the beginning of the coffee supply chain.

THE DAVID A. ANDELMAN AND PAMELA TITLE AWARD

Best international TV, video, radio, audio or podcast reporting showing a concern for the human condition

Sponsor: David A. Andelman and Pamela Title

Ramita Navai, Karim Shah and Eamonn Matthews

FRONTLINE PBS

Afghanistan Undercover

Judges: When the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in August 2021, the group said its government would respect women’s rights. In “Afghanistan Undercover,” a FRONTLINE documentary filmed over the subsequent year, correspondent Ramita Navai and director Karim Shah documented a very different – and harrowing – story. While much of the world’s attention has moved on from the story, “Afghanistan Undercover” documents the very real ongoing crisis for women inside one of the world’s cruelest totalitarian theocracies.

Any Medium

THE ROBERT SPIERS BENJAMIN AWARD

Best reporting in any medium on Latin America

Sponsor: Laurie Hays

Terrence McCoy and Washington Post Staff

The Washington Post

The Amazon, Undone

Judges: The  six-part series combines on-the-ground reporting with data journalism and satellite imagery to capture an array of destructive forces. We learn how beef illegally raised in the Amazon ends up on Americans’ dinner plates as ranchers and packers evade laws designed to protect the biome. McCoy vividly describes the lawlessness he encounters and the deadly consequences faced by those trying to stop it, among them his friend Dom Phillips, who was killed along with indigenous rights defender Bruno Pereira while investigating illegal fishing and logging.

THE ROY ROWAN AWARD

Best investigative reporting in any medium on an international story

Sponsor: Marcus Rowan

Erika Kinetz, Michael Biesecker, Richard Lardner, Beatrice DuPuy, Sarah El Deeb and AP Staff

Tom Jennings, Annie Wong and FRONTLINE PBS Staff

The Associated Press, FRONTLINE PBS

Putin’s Attack on Ukraine: Documenting War Crimes

Judges: Based on hundreds of hours of surveillance videos, audio recordings and interviews, this horrifying account documents in graphic detail atrocities committed by Russian troops on civilians in the suburban Kyiv town of Bucha. Supplementing the interviews, the Associated Press and FRONTLINE teams used cutting-edge open-source techniques – satellite and drone imagery, hours of CCTV footage and intercepted phone calls – to reveal the brutality of the Russian occupation.

THE FLORA LEWIS AWARD

Best commentary in any medium on international news

Li Yuan

The New York Times

The New New World

Judges: Li Yuan provided fascinating insight into how China’s zero-Covid policies affected the daily lives of people and the morale of a nation. Her clear-eyed reporting and interviews with different facets of life, combined with her astute commentary, offers an indispensable window into the consequences of a pandemic that changed the world, and has permanently altered Chinese society.

THE WHITMAN BASSOW AWARD

Best reporting in any medium on international environmental issues

Sponsor: Robert Serio

Max De Haldevang, Akshat Rathi, Natasha White, Demetrios Pogkas, Verity Ratcliffe, Ben Elgin and Sinduja Rangarajan

Bloomberg Green

Exploiting Carbon Offsets

Judges: The winning entry by Bloomberg Green took on the complex topic of carbon offsets, the system that allows companies to continue emitting their own greenhouse gases while paying others to reduce their emissions. The reporters analyzed more than 200,000 transactions to show how dozens of companies are using questionable accounting to claim “carbon neutral” status, allowing them to erase tens of millions of tons of carbon from their books.

THE JOE AND LAURIE DINE AWARD

Best international reporting in any medium dealing with human rights

Sponsor: Philip Dine

Staff

The New York Times

War Crimes at Bucha

Judges: In compelling, landmark reporting, The New York Times unraveled a human rights tragedy, giving voice to the victims of war while exposing the ruthlessness of their perpetrators. The package of stories, notably a meticulously constructed 28-minute documentary, summoned the propulsive narrative style of courtroom drama to detail the murders of civilians. The journalists relied on data bases, cellphone videos, 4,000 intercepted phone calls and on-site investigation to reconstruct how Russian brigades unleashed premeditated atrocity in Bucha.

Photography

THE ROBERT CAPA GOLD MEDAL AWARD

Best photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise published in any medium

Sponsor: Getty Images

Marcus Yam

Los Angeles Times

The First 30 Days of the War in Ukraine

 Judges: Marcus Yam ushers the viewer through a complete story of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Unflinchingly, he captures the devastation with nuance and poetry. Yam’s reporting on the cruelty of war is carefully curated, displaying the expected terrors of human loss and mourning tempered with quiet moments of survival among people who carry on though their world is upended. Yam’s is an exceptional example of the power of photography to expand our collective conscience.

THE OLIVIER REBBOT AWARD

Best photographic news reporting from abroad in any medium

Sponsor: David Ake

Justyna Mielnikiewicz

The Wall Street Journal

The War in Ukraine: Portraits of Resilience and Resistance

Judges: In a conflict that has been photographed by dozens if not hundreds of photographers, Mielnikiewicz’s visual and storytelling style is uniquely her own. She expertly manages the most difficult challenge of news photography: her work is both an intimate view of the lives of Ukrainians and a showcase of the larger geopolitical implications of the war.

THE FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY AWARD

Best feature photography on an international theme published in any medium

Sponsor: Sony Electronics Inc.

Laetitia Vancon

The New York Times

Odesa is Defiant. It’s Also Putin’s Ultimate Target

Judges: A group of dancers in the middle of the road. Street salesmen sharing a glance. A woman posing in a pool for a snapshot. Each of Laetitia Vancon’s images taken in Ukraine during this first year of war feels like its own complete universe. Each image is filled with details that emerge, layer by layer, and urge the reader to witness the beauty of humanity that perseveres throughout violence and destruction.

Books

THE CORNELIUS RYAN AWARD

Best non-fiction book on international affairs

Sponsor: Friends of Richard Threlkeld

William Neuman

St. Martin’s Press

Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela

Judges: Neuman’s vivid reporting never lets the reader forget how the lives of ordinary Venezuelans have been crushed by this man-made disaster. The book is never stronger than in Neuman”s even-handed account of the 2019 nationwide electricity blackout – which the subsequent Maduro administration blamed on computer hacking by the United States. Perhaps the most disturbing conclusion of all in this highly readable book is that years of misrule have corrupted Venezuela’s society to its very roots.

Cartoons

THE BEST CARTOON AWARD

Best print or digital graphic journalism, including cartoons, on international affairs

Sponsor: Mercedes-Benz

Adam Zyglis

The Buffalo News

Judges: Zyglis submitted a portfolio of consistently high-quality cartoons tackling a myriad of issues with spark and ingenuity. Employing simple ink lines, impressive caricatures and minimal dialogue, Zyglis brilliantly channels the old masters of art and editorial cartooning to take on the global crises of today.

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