Pulitzer Center Untold Stories

Where webcam meets storytelling: Pulitzer Center and iWitness

Alex Amend, Pulitzer Center

The Pulitzer Center is proud to announce a new partnership with the award-winning interview series iWitness - from Frontline/World - where newsmakers and journalists connect from around the world on webcam (using Skype). Launched just last year, iWitness is the recipient of two 2009 Webby Awards: one for best news and politics series on the web and one as a People's Voice award winner.

The Pulitzer Center, also a People's Voice award winner at the 2009 Webby Awards, will make available for interview Pulitzer Center journalists in the field and in the midst of their reporting. This partnership will enable both organizations to expand our reach providing the best in-depth international reporting of important and often underreported issues.

Karachi Nights

Sarah Stuteville for the Pulitzer Center, with slideshow by Alex Stonehill

5/7/09 - No matter how frenzied the exhaust-coated sun-saturated day is in Karachi—this city really lives at night.

Hawks come out against the dirty pink sunset, their wide ragged wings stretched against the salty wind rising from the clanging port. The yellow street lights buzz on, their harsh glow smeared in the heavy humid air. Children, barefoot and bored, poke their lazy limbs through wrought iron bars that cage  apartment balconies.

And then all at once the rising night floods in with the call of a hundred muezzins layering like rounds until one last cry to God falls back to earth as a lonely prayer, settling somewhere among 14 million people, all jostling against each other for some small piece of economic opportunity in this explosive city.

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Behind the Scenes Update from Karachi Pakistan

Alex Stonehill, Sarah Stuteville and Jessica Partnow for the Pulitzer Center
April 28, 2009

In this video blog the CLP team takes a break to reflect on the first half of the Pakistan: Hearts and Minds reporting project.

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Pakistan: Letting the Terrorists Win

Sarah Stuteville, for the Pulitzer Center

Pale columns of smoke are rising from a sea of blue tents stretching into the distance of the flat khaki  plain that is Jellozai, a refugee camp eight miles outside of Peshawar, home to an estimated 43,000 people fleeing violence in the tribal regions not far from here.

It’s late in the day. Nearing evening actually, and I’m nervously checking the clock on our taxi’s dashboard as we bounce on the rocky dirt road past the crumbled mud remains of Afghan homes, the last refugees that occupied this forgotten feeling landscape. We don’t have permission to be here and had promised ourselves we’ll be back on the road to Islamabad by 5 pm. Which was now fifteen minutes ago.

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Pakistan's Viral Video

Alex Stonehill, for the Pulitzer Center
April 11, 2009

The release of a grainy video showing a girl being flogged for adultery by the Taliban in the Swat valley has created an uproar in Pakistan. In this video-blog journalist Alex Stonehill discusses why, amidst all the violence in Pakistan, this particular video has evoked such a reaction.

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Pakistan: Hanging with the Ladies

Sarah Stuteville, for ther Pulitzer Center

In the gray light of my first morning in Pakistan, the thick salty smell of sulfur introducing me to the seaside city of Karachi, the streets were full of men. With few exceptions it was men congregating in front of the still dark airport, men piled onto buses carnival decorated with Technicolor and chrome and men weaving through the thickening traffic on motor bikes and rickshaws. I was rushed back to my trip to Pakistan in 2006, when one of my greatest regrets was that I hadn’t had the opportunity to meet and hang out with more women. Sitting at a stop light en route to our hotel (also staffed entirely by men) watching a group of teenage boys crowded on the sidewalk watch me through the taxi window, I promised myself that I would pursue more diversity in my reporting this trip and make a point of finding out what women think about this critical time in their country’s history. Continue reading »

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Fear Factor: Pakistan

 Sarah Stuteville, for the Pulitzer Center

I’ve become terrified of my email. I’ve always been a little skittish of the inbox, never knowing what that first login might bring to my day - an outraged critique of a recent article, a facebook request from a long lost ex-boyfriend - but in the weeks leading up to our departure my crowded inbox has set my stomach lurching in newly anxious ways as I sift through daily accounts of the chaos that has touched down in Pakistan.

As I sit here in my spacious Seattle kitchen, sipping tea and listening to my roommates play video games in the living room, the mosque bombings in Peshawar, kidnappings in Northwest Frontier Province and most recent attacks in Lahore are fuzzy nightmares slowly pulling into focus. Usually, by this time in trip preparations I’m all buttoned up and ready to go. My backpack should be neatly set beside the door, my immunization card tucked into my passport and my little plane snacks safely in zip lock bags.

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