Projects for Events: Our very near-term prospect is Jason Motlagh, a free-lance journalist we've funded on South Asia projects over the past 18 months. He has written for half a dozen newspapers and magazines, shot photographs for same, and produced video pieces for public television -- from India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The biggest project for us was his work on unresolved internal conflicts -- economic, religious/ethnic and environmental -- that threaten India's emergence as a global power. We've just completed a web portal that incorporates much of Jason's reporting, in an interactive format that gives students and others the opportunity to engage with the material, with each other, and with Jason. He presented the project last month at Washington University and half a dozen St. Louis-area high schools. We would love to send him out to your campus and have him talk, either on the India project generally or on the full range of his reporting. He's available the first couple of weeks in March. URL: http://pulitzergateway.org

Several other projects top the list for likely presentation later this spring: 

            (1) Food security. This is the multimedia, multi-journalist project we've undertaken in partnership with NewsHour, PRI/The World, The Washington Post and other outlets. The lead reporter is NewsHour/WideAngle veteran Fred de Sam Lazaro, and we've commissioned several other journalists as well. Field work so far in Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya, with additional reporting forthcoming from India, Tajikistan and Guatemala. What we propose is to build a program around Fred and two of the print journalists, assessing the growing global food crisis from multiple perspectives.

             (2) Women/children in crisis. This draws on the experience of three women journalists representing different media and covering different zones of conflict. Alaa Majeed is the Iraqi journalist (winner of the 2007 Courage in Journalism award from the International Women’s Media Foundation) who has worked on projects for us with husband David Enders and videographer Rick Rowley. Meredith May is a feature writer at the San Francisco Chronicle; her project for us on child indentured servitude in western Nepal was featured on the Chronicle’s front page and website this past Sunday. Jessica Partnow is the radio journalist (NPR, World Vision Report, Living on Earth) from our project on water issues in East Africa. 

            (3) Renewed conflict eastern Congo. We've just sent Michael Kavanagh to the eastern Congo, for the third time in the past year, to report on conflict that is once again drawing in armies and militias from Congo's neighbors. Michael has reported for NPR, Slate, PRI/The World, WorldFocus and other outlets. He has a master's from Yale where he focused his research on the Great Lakes ethnic conflicts he is now reporting on. 

            (4) Water wars, continued. We've commissioned additional reporting on water conflict issues from Kenyan journalist Ernest Waititu, a member of the reporting team we funded last year. Ernest is a graduate of the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, and we're working with Greg Shepherd at Ohio to bring him there to speak later this spring or early fall. We're eager to schedule other campus appearances while Ernest is in the country. http://waterwars.pulitzergateway.org

             (5) HIV/AIDS, in Jamaica and beyond. Our award-winning HOPE website combines video, photography, original music and poetry to capture the human impact of HIV/AIDS. The lead journalist is Kwame Dawes, a native of Jamaica and poet in residence at the University of South Carolina. HOPE is being distributed now as an hour-long radio documentary and we have submitted a proposal to present a performance version of this work next August at the National Black Theater Festival in Winston-Salem. We are currently preparing a follow-on reporting trip to Jamaica by videographer Micah Fink.URL is: http://livehopelove.com