Meet the FilAm journalism student journalist who won a Pulitzer

MARIA PADILLA

SHE HAD NO IDEA that she had won journalism's highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize.

Mairel Padilla, a student at Columbia University School of Journalism, was in class last week when The Pulitzer winners were named. She knew that The Pulitzer awardees were being announced a couple of floors below her classroom, but when you're typing notes, you don't have time to think of anything else.

She was on busily typing away on her laptop when a text message popped onto her screen. It was from her editor from The Cincinnati Enquirer, where she had done an internship last summer:

“I was in shock,” the 23-year old Padilla told the Columbia Journalism Review. “My eyes just went so wide and I’m pretty sure my mouth was open. Obviously, I couldn’t make noise or anything because my professor was still talking.”

The classroom stayed quiet, but the news spread quickly around as classmates began furiously typing messages. “No one is supposed to be on their phones, but we have our laptops, so other students in class started messaging each other and finding out,” she told the CJR. It wasn’t until the class break that a classmate made the announcement.

During the Filipina/American's internship at the Enquirer, the newspaper had a special project chronicling a week of Cincinatti's heroin crisis. As a breaking-news intern, Padilla, 23, was assigned to visit the county jail each morning during the project’s week of coverage to sort through hundreds of paper arrest slips and flag opioid mentions, according to the CJR. 

On her own initiative, Padilla was able to use technology to gather the data in a useful form. She took it upon herself to create a spreadsheet for Enquirer reporters, documenting the time, location, and nature of every opioid-related event that occurred over the week 24/7. Reporters and editors took to using her spreadsheet to chronicle their reporting.

Published in September 2017, the story, “Seven Days of Heroin,” prompted a nationwide conversation about the opioid crisis, with newspapers around the country taking up the baton passed on by the Enquirer series.

“I mean, I technically am a Pulitzer winner, but I am just so humbled by the fact that they put the interns on the byline," says Padilla, who hails from Canton, Ohio.  "I feel like I still need to learn all the things that I’m learning, which I think is why my general reaction was just straight shock. I still don’t believe it.”

Time for Padilla to update her resume.

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Reuters news agency win two Pulitzers for its work in Philippines, Myanmar

REUTERS, the London-based news agency, won an unprecedented two Pulitzer prizes for its work in Southeast Asia.

A Filipino journalist was among those who won this year’s prestigious Pulitzer Prize for “relentless reporting” on Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-drugs war.

Manuel “Manny” Mogato, colleagues Clare Baldwin and Andrew R.C. Marshall from international news agency Reuters were cited for their “relentless reporting that exposed the brutal killing campaign behind Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs.”

“It was a team effort. Every one in the Manila bureau did their job but it was months of hardwork and I admired the courage, strength, and perseverance of the team to pursue the drugs war story,” said Mogato, who has been Reuters' political and general news correspondent in Manila for 15 years.

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Manuel Mogato, Reuters' Manila correspondent, won part of a team honored by winning this year's Pulitzer.

Winning a Pulitzer Prize, a recognition for outstanding work, is journalism's highest honor.

“In a year in which many Pulitzers were rightly devoted to U.S. domestic matters, we’re proud at Reuters to shine a light on global issues of profound concern and importance,” Reuters Editor-in-Chief Stephen J. Adler said in an address to the Reuters' newsroom in London.

In the Philippines coverage, the Reuters team “demonstrated how police in the president’s ‘drug war’ have killed with impunity and consistently been shielded from prosecution,” Adler said.

The coverage included a report that revealed how a police anti-drug squad on the outskirts of Manila had recorded an unusually high number of killings. Many members of the squad came from a distant place that was also Duterte’s hometown, where the campaign’s brutal methods originated during his time as mayor there. 

They identified not just new patterns in the killings, but also the top killers, corroborating their findings with months of risky reporting in slums and hostile police stations. The series explored how Philippine police use hospitals to cover up drug-war executions; how a group of police officers from Duterte’s hometown Davao formed the core of a lethal anti-drug unit; and how Duterte targets Philippine children in a bid to widen the drug war. 

The Pulitzer committee recognized the team for their “relentless reporting that exposed the brutal killing campaign behind Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs.”

Mogato, a veteran Filipino journalist who previously worked for the Manila Chronicle before joining Reuters, is the second Philippines-based journalist to win the prestigious journalism award, after Carlos P. Romulo became the first non-American to be given the Pulitzer Prize in Correspondence in 1942.

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View the photo gallery of the Myanmar exodus. 

Reuters photographers Adnan Abidi, Mohammad Ponir Hossain, Hannah McKay, Cathal McNaughton, Damir Sagolj, Danish Siddiqui and Soe Zeya Tun were recognized in the category of Feature Photography for their coverage of the mass exodus of the Rohingya people to Bangladesh.

The Rohingyas’ migration from Myanmar is grueling and deadly. Hundreds of thousands of people, wet, caked in mud, exhausted, starving or sick, arrive in a state of panic and need the last of their energy. To document it was a severe challenge to Reuters journalists.  To see a gallery of their photos, click here.

The Pulitzer judges honored the team “for shocking photographs that exposed the world to the violence Rohingya refugees faced in fleeing Myanmar.”

As Reuters garners international praise for its reporting, the news agency has hired human rights attorney Amal Clooney, wife of the actor, to represent them in gaining the release of two its reporters who have been under arrest by Myanmar authorities since Dec. 12, 2017.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo have have told relatives they were arrested almost immediately after being handed some rolled up papers at a restaurant in northern Yangon by two policemen they had not met before, having been invited to meet the officers for dinner.

A request to dismiss the case for lack of evidence was denied last week.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist wins new honors

Upon learning that a woman was with the military unit, Iraqi women greeted Charyl Diaz Meyer warmly.

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FILIPINO/AMERICAN freelance photojournalist Cheryl Diaz Meyer celebrated an historic victory this week, sweeping the international category in the Eyes of History contest presented by the White House News Photographers Association (WHNPA).
The Eyes of History contest is “held annually to select the best in visual journalism across still, video, and multimedia disciplines.”

Meyer’s photos took all awards: First place, Second place, Third place, and two Awards of Excellence of WHNPA’s International News category.

Her photographs depicting Rohingya refugees were what won her these prestigious awards, reported Town & Country. “Anwara Nurhassan takes a boat from Chalpuridip, Bangladesh, as she continues her journey to refugee camps further inland on Oct. 3, 2017,” read the photo caption below the stunning black-and-white image which won Meyer her First Place award.

According to The Philippine Star, the Rohingyas depicted in Meyer’s winning photographs are a stateless Muslim minority in Myanmar. They have escaped to Bangladesh to avoid murder and destruction of villages in the Western state of Rakhine. Amnesty International has described the Rohingyas as the most persecuted minorities in the world.

Cheryl Diaz Meyer's photographic coverage of the Rohingyas evacuation earned a sweep in the WHNEPA's
 'Eyes of History.' This photo won first place.

“Thank you to the judges of the White House News Photographers Association for this immense honor. I’ve never been awarded an entire category in any competition, and I’m deeply moved,” Meyer wrote on LinkedIn. “I hope this increases awareness for the plight of the Rohingya refugees who Bangladesh wants to repatriate to Myanmar.”

Along with this achievement, Meyer has also won two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 2004 for Breaking News Photography for her work covering the Iraq War; and another in 2006 for Breaking News Photography on Hurricane Katrina while working for the Dallas Morning News. 

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