Telling the Story and Being Part of the Fight

Telling the Story and Being Part of the Fight Vice News, the Recipient of the Press Club’s Public Service Award, Does Things Its Own Way, and Gets Results   BY LUCAS SHAW Shane Smith hosts a regular news show, but he has no illusions of being the next Walter Cronkite. Instead, he’s trying to create a new type of newscast, one that forgoes the longstanding tradition of dispassionate, objective reporting and replaces it with a more active style of service journalism. It’s a unique body of work that led the…

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Breaking Ground and Changing Industries

Breaking Ground and Changing Industries Quinn Award Winner Willow Bay’s Incredible Career Has Taken Her to Many Newsrooms, and Now to the Classroom   BY GRETCHEN PARKER MCCARTNEY Willow Bay, the director of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, took a few detours before winding up in her chosen career. After a modeling career and an MBA from New York University, she finally got around to doing what she really wanted to do: reporting. Bay got her break on the NBC show “NBA Inside Stuff,” and went on to work…

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Daniel Pearl Award to Charlie Hebdo

Daniel Pearl Award to Charlie Hebdo The Los Angeles Press Club is proud to announce that the 2015 Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism will go to Charlie Hebdo.   “We are deeply honored. Of course, we’ll accept,” said Gerard Biard, Editor-in-Chief of Charlie Hebdo. “No act of terrorism can stop freedom of speech. Giving the Daniel Pearl Award to Charlie Hebdo is a strong message to that effect,” said LA Press Club President Robert Kovacik of NBC4 Southern California. Since 2002 the Los Angeles Press Club…

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Leading by Example and Making the World a Better Place Too

Leading by Example and Making the World a Better Place Too Journalist and Former California First Lady Maria Shriver receives the Los Angeles Press Club’s Public Service Award   BY ALEX BEN BLOCK Although Maria Shriver already had a distinguished career in journalism, her life changed in 2003 when she woke up to find herself First Lady of California. Determined not to let her role be simply symbolic, she created pioneering programs and initiatives to help the working poor, military families and the disabled, and to champion women. She inherited…

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Giving a Voice to Those Who Have None

Giving a Voice to Those Who Have None Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Ann Curry Has Made a Career Out of Being Fair and Giving the World a Chance to Care   BY TED JOHNSON PHOTOS COURTESY OF NBC NEWS Ann Curry’s recent NBC News project, the digital documentary “Twitter Diplomacy,” was notable not only for the way it explored social media’s role in easing tensions between the U.S. and Iran, but in the behind-the-scenes access she and her team were granted on both sides of the negotiations. Curry, the recipient…

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Standing on the Side of Truth

Standing on the Side of Truth Veteran Middle East Journalist Khaled Abu Toameh Receives the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage in Journalism   It’s safe to say that Khaled Abu Toameh, an Israeli-Arab journalist and documentary filmmaker, has had a career unlike anyone in the room at tonight’s Southern California Journalism Awards. While many journalists have garnered enemies for their hard-hitting reporting, few have had to live and work amid the unpredictable atmosphere of a heated Middle East. That work has earned Toameh the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and…

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The 2014 Daniel Pearl Award to Khaled Abu Toameh

The 2014 Daniel Pearl Award to Khaled Abu Toameh Khaled Abu Toameh is an award-winning Arab-Israeli journalist and TV producer who has covered Palestinian and Arab affairs for the past three decades.Abu Toameh studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and has worked for many media outlets, including BBC, VOICE OF AMERICA, WALL STREET JOURNAL and US NEWS & WORLD REPORT. He has also worked for THE JERUSALEM POST and currently serves as a Distinguished Fellow with the New York based Gatestone Institute think-tank. “Khaled Abu Toameh has been telling us,…

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Writing the Stories Cartels Don’t Want Told

Writing the Stories Cartels Don’t Want Told In a Country Where Journalists Are Sometimes Killed, Daniel Pearl Award Winner Sandra Rodríguez Nieto Refuses to Back Down   BY PATT MORRISON The hacked-up body of a young newspaper photographer, just hired to cover social events, turned up in a street in a town in Northern Mexico. Another newspaper photographer, this one working for the major daily El Diario, was murdered in 2010. And a reporter for El Diario was killed in 2008. Following the latter’s funeral cortege, one of his colleagues…

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