AP wins top honors from Overseas Press Club
Intrepid reporting from Timbuktu, Mali, which revealed the inner workings of al-Qaida, and gripping images from the Central African Republic earned Associated Press journalists top honors in the 2014 Overseas Press Club of America awards.
Rukmini Callimachi received both the Hal Boyle Award and the Bob Considine Award for her reporting on a trove of al-Qaida documents she discovered in Timbuktu while working as AP’s West Africa bureau chief. Callimachi is now a foreign correspondent for The New York Times.
The John Faber Award went to longtime AP Chief Africa Photographer Jerome Delay for his searing images of unrest in the Central African Republic.
“The Central African Republic is in a state of chaos where the rule of law is slowly trying to return,” Delay said. “Everyone seems to pride themselves in doing their own justice, and death is the only sentence, it seems.”
In total, AP won four prizes and a citation in the contest. The OPC celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. The awards will be given tonight at the organization’s annual gala in New York, which will feature a keynote address from former foreign correspondent and current U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations Samantha Power.
“We are thrilled to see the excellent work of AP journalists recognized by these prestigious awards,” said John Daniszewski, vice president and senior managing editor for international news at AP. “Once again, our long presence in Africa and elsewhere has proven critical in breaking stories that resonate worldwide.”
The other honors went to Mexico City-based reporter Adriana Gomez Licon, who won the Madeline Dane Ross Award for her story about the death of a Mexican beauty queen ensnared in Mexico’s drug war, and Todd Pitman, AP's Bangkok bureau chief, who received the Joe and Laurie Dine Citation for his reporting on a massacre at an Islamic boarding school in Myanmar.