MEXICO CITY (AP) — Peter Prengaman, a cross-format journalist and news manager who has reported from more than a dozen countries for The Associated Press, has been named news director for Brazil.
Based in Rio de Janeiro, Prengaman will lead video, text and photo operations for the AP in Latin America’s most populous nation, a culturally diverse and vast territory that is home to one of the world’s most important emerging economies and is just months away from hosting the Summer Olympic Games.
The appointment was announced Tuesday by Latin America News Director Paul Haven.
“Peter is a tremendously talented journalist and editor who has worked throughout his career in multiple formats across several continents,” said Haven. “I couldn’t be more excited that he is taking those skills to one of Latin America’s most important countries at a key moment in its history.”
The appointment of Prengaman, 40, who is currently AP’s Buenos Aires-based Southern Cone news editor, is part of a drive to make the news cooperative fully cross format.
“Prengaman has been a leader in imaginative and innovative story-telling throughout his career, exploring new platforms and techniques. This skill will be of great service as AP continues to break ground in telling the stories of Brazil,” said John Daniszewski, AP’s vice president for international news in New York.
In 14 years at the AP, Prengaman has been a reporter, video journalist and editor on many big stories, including the uprising that ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, the Arab Spring in Egypt and most recently, the Zika virus spreading across Latin America.
He joined the cooperative in 2002 in Portland, Oregon, and later served as Caribbean correspondent based in the Dominican Republic, immigration beat reporter and supervisor in Los Angeles and the interactive and graphics editor for the Southern United States, based in Atlanta.
Prengaman was part of teams that received the Polk Award and Grantham Prize for environmental reporting during the Gulf oil spill and the APME Multimedia Award for a major economic interactive project called the AP Economic Stress Index. He received an Edward R. Murrow award for video stories on unemployed people suffering through the worst economic crisis in the United States in decades. He also received the Atlanta Press Club Award of Excellence for video and print stories during the Haiti earthquake and trapped miners in Chile in 2010.
A hobby linguist and Portuguese speaker, Prengaman also has a certificate in Arabic from the University of California, Los Angeles, a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and English literature from Wabash College and a master’s in Latin American Studies from Stanford University, where he wrote his Master’s thesis on Pentecostal movements in Brazil. He and his wife have three sons.
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