Best newspaper or wire service reporting from abroad
AWARD YEAR: 1998
AWARD NAME: The Hal Boyle Award 1998
RECIPIENT: Ken Guggenheim, Niko Price
AFFILIATION: The Associated Press
HONORED WORK: “Hurricane Mitch”
This was an extraordinary series of 60 reports on Hurricane Mitch, which killed more than 9.000 Central Americans last August. As the storm pounded Nicaragua and Honduras, AP correspondents Niko Price and Ken Guggenheim led a team of 18 writers and photographers to remote villages buried under mudslides and flooding rivers. They chronicled the relief efforts for four weeks, trudging for hours through thigh-deep mud. “Each step requires a Herculean effort to extricate a waterlogged leg from the muck, then the horror of squishing it down in again and praying it doesn’t fall on one of the hundreds of bodies buried beneath,” wrote Price. Bodies decayed in the sun, breeding disease and further misery. With their graphic descriptions and tightly focused analysis, the authors showed that disaster coverage need never sound familiar or routine.
Citations for Excellence:
Peter Waldman, Marcus W. Brauchli, Jay Solomon
The Wall Street Journal
“Indonesia: Collapse of a Nation”
David Hoffman
The Washington Post
“Russia: Legacy of the Cold War”