Archive Event Highlight
‘How I Did It’: Nadja Drost Reveals How She Reported and Wrote the Pulitzer-Prize Winning Story on Migrants Crossing the Darien Gap
Nadja Drost and editor Kit Rachlis will kick off the OPC’s new series “How I Did It,” pairing freelance journalists with their editors or producers. The OPC’s goal is to offer our many freelance members the opportunity to interact with highly successful journalists. Topics will include how to pitch a story, secure funding, interact with editors and everything in between. Future programs will feature photographers, documentarians and cartoonists. Moderating the discussion will be Marina Walker Guevara, an OPC governor and executive editor at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Registrants will receive an email with the link to join the Zoom call about an hour before the program on Feb 3.
Nadja Drost is a Pulitzer Prize- and Emmy Award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker who works across print, radio, television, and documentary film.
Her reporting on the extraordinary journey of migrants from around the world who traverse the Darien Gap – a road-less, mountainous jungle straddling the Colombia-Panama border – to reach the U.S., won several awards. A longform piece she wrote for the California Sunday Magazine was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, as well as first place for Magazine Feature Writing from the National Headliner Awards, the One World Media Refugee Reporting Award, and Honorable Mention from the James Foley Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism.
A television series about the Darien Gap, ‘Desperate Journey,’ she reported with videographer Bruno Federico for the PBS NewsHour, was recognized with an Emmy and Peabody award, and received the Best in Show for television from the National Headliners Award in 2021.
Kit Rachlis is a senior editor at ProPublica. He spent seven years as a senior editor at California Sunday Magazine, where he oversaw Drost’s Darien Gap story, “When Can We Really Rest?” Previously, Rachlis was a senior editor at The Atlantic. He also served as editor in chief of LA Weekly, Los Angeles magazine and the American Prospect and as a senior projects editor at the Los Angeles Times. Stories he edited have won a Livingston Award, a George Polk Award, a John Bartlow Martin Award, a James Beard Award, a PEN USA Award and a Front Page Award.
