Stephen Adler praises Middle East team for Pulitzer recognition

New York’s Columbia University on Monday cited “Thomson Reuters Staff for its well-crafted reports on the momentous revolution in Libya that went beyond battlefield dispatches to tell the wider story of discontent, conflict and the role of outside powers”. But it awarded the prize for international reporting to Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times for his reports on famine and conflict in East Africa.

The ten Libya stories Adler submitted to the Pulitzer Prize advisory panel demonstrated the high calibre of work done by Reuters journalists day in and day out, he said. “The pieces cited were a mixture of extraordinary exclusives, a stream of breaking-news articles and longer, carefully crafted Special Reports. They span politics, war, business and diplomacy. It’s an exemplary body of work, one that shows how Reuters can lead the coverage of the world’s most important stories along the time curve – winning the moment with snaps and urgents, winning the day with scoops and smart trunk stories, and winning the year with definitive long-form journalism.”

Adler congratulated “the cast of outstanding reporters who worked tirelessly on these stories, often at personal peril”: Samia Nakhoul, Marie-Louise Gumuchian, Emma Farge, Alastair Macdonald, Oliver Holmes, Paul Taylor, Jessica Donati, Lamine Chichi, Christian Lowe, Dmitry Zhdannikov, Regan Doherty, Mohammad Abbas, Rania El Gamal, Maria Golovnina, Michael Georgy and Peter Graff. In addition to Middle East editor Samia Nakhoul, the coverage was guided by Europe, Middle East & Africa editor Michael Stott, enterprise editors Simon Robinson, Sara Ledwith, and Mike Williams, the commodities desk led by Richard Mably, and London editors Ralph Boulton, Giles Elgood and Peter Millership. “They are part of the broader team of reporters, editors, photographers, videographers and general managers who gave our customers and the general public the world’s best coverage of the Arab Spring in all media.”

Adler’s letter to the Pulitzer panel nominating the Libya team said Reuters journalists were on the ground from Day One, “delivering war dispatches from the front, market-moving scoops from the oil terminals and cinematic narratives that broke the biggest news of all: how the regime was toppled and what the revolution wrought”. 

No news organisation dominated an international story this year the way the Reuters team dominated Libya, he said. “Our correspondents didn’t merely cover events: they were out of their offices breaking the news others had to follow.” He added: “Throughout the uprising, readers and viewers around the world looked to Reuters for real-time news on the Arab Spring. As our Libya coverage exemplifies, what they found were war correspondence and business journalism of the highest order.” ■