Pulitzer Center Staff
Jon Sawyer is director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a non-profit organization that funds independent reporting with the intent of raising the standard of media coverage of global affairs. Sawyer became the center's founding director after a 31-year career with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Sawyer was the Post-Dispatch Washington bureau chief from 1993 through 2005. He had been a member of the newspaper's Washington bureau since 1980 and before that worked in St. Louis, first as an editorial writer and then as a staff reporter. His assignments have taken him to some five dozen countries, with special projects ranging from southern Africa, Cuba and Haiti to Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and China. He reported from Bosnia at the time of the Dayton peace accords and from Israel and the West Bank just after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Since the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States Sawyer has focused much of his reporting on the Middle East and predominantly Muslim countries. He reported from Central Asia during the fall of 2001 and from Sudan, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt during 2002. In 2003 he reported on a four-nation tour through the Middle East just before the Iraq war and to Iran just after. He reported from Afghanistan in 2004 and from Beirut and England last fall as part of a project on Muslim communities in the United States and abroad. In early 2006 he reported from Sudan, including Darfur, for the Post-Dispatch and for the public-television program Foreign Exchange.
Sawyer was selected three years in a row for the National Press Club's award for best foreign reporting. His work has been honored by the Overseas Press Club, the Inter-American Press Association and the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Sawyer's reporting on defense procurement contract abuses won the top investigative reporting prize among large newspapers from IRE (Investigative Reporters and Editors). His reporting on the problems of nuclear waste disposal was honored by the Atomic Industrial Forum and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
He received a B.A. degree from Yale University in 1974, majoring in English literature and history, and during the 1978-79 academic year was an Alfred Sloan Fellow in Economics Journalism at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy. In the fall of 1992 he was a research fellow affiliated with the Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Sawyer was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
He attended public schools there and is a graduate of the Phillips
Exeter Academy. He and his wife, children's book author Kem Knapp
Sawyer, have three daughters.
- Pulitzer Center Director, Jon Sawyer, addresses the
Southeastern World Affairs Institute. North Carolina, July 30, 2006
Read more - “Media Misfires: Lessons from a Troubled Time,” address by Pulitzer Center Director
Jon Sawyer to The Roundtable, St. Louis, Mo. 2/28/06
Read more
Nathalie Applewhite, Research Associate
Nathalie Applewhite has worked nationally and internationally on documentaries, educational,
political and commercial productions as a producer, director, and editor. She has also
worked as a project manager and media specialist for the University of Pennsylvania’s
Literacy Research Center,
and as a consultant for the United Nations.
Co-founder and director of vis à vis productions.
Her documentary Picture Me an Enemy,
about two young women from the former Yugoslavia, won several awards, including best
documentary in the Philadelphia Film Festival of Independents, and was nominated for
a regional Emmy in the category of Outstanding Documentary Program. The film has
screened in festivals and universities both internationally and nationally. She
is also the recipient of the Leeway Foundation's Harmony grant for projects that
promote racial, religious and ethnic tolerance.
Nathalie earned a Master’s degree from the School of International and Public Affairs
(SIPA) at Columbia University where she concentrated in international security policy
with a regional concentration in the Middle East; and co-founded and directed the
Media and Communications in War and Peace student group.
During her time at Columbia, she was also a delegate on the US-Syria Citizen’s Exchange
program and is currently editing footage and interviews from her trip into a 30-minute
documentary.
Her research interests lie at the intersections of media, democracy, and nationalism,
and in the role of media in war and its potential in conflict prevention, resolution
and peace-building. Nathalie co-presented a workshop on the subject of war and
representation at
he International Institute on Peace Education’s 2005 Program,
and presented a talk and on “Picturing the Enemy” at Columbia University in
the Fall of 2005.
Jon Sawyer
