OPC Award Winners Share Their Stories: The Roy Rowan Award 

Please join the OPC for a discussion with this year’s winners of the Roy Rowan Award for best investigative reporting in any medium on an international story. The winners were members of a New York Times team with an entry titled “Russia’s Shadow War.”

Joining the discussion will be Malachy Brown, senior producer of the visual investigations team, along with Michael Schwirtz, Dionne Searcey and David Kirkpatrick.

Head judge James B. Steele will moderate.

RSVPs are essential. Please register now to receive a Zoom link via email about an hour before the program.

Judges said:

“The evil emanating from Vladimir Putin’s Russia has rarely, if ever, been revealed in more shocking detail than in “Russia’s Shadow War,” a courageous, multi-continent investigation by The New York Times. Ranging from Bulgaria to Syria, Madagascar to central Africa, Montenegro and beyond, Times reporters documented in stark prose and harrowing images the extent to which the Kremlin has gone to extend Russian influence to other nations. Moscow-directed assassination squads, sophisticated disinformation campaigns, the slaughtering of innocent civilians – these are now pages in the Kremlin’s foreign policy playbook. Extraordinary in its use of conventional reporting and cutting edge technology, the Shadow War’s moments include riveting footage of Russian pilots knowingly bombing Syrian hospitals and other civilian targets – their voices clearly heard as they unleash their deadly payload. The analysis of the cockpit recordings, the digital forensics, the deciphering of the Russian military codes was unlike anything any of us had seen before by a news organization. Often reported at great personal risk to the reporters, the series brought us a view of Russia much darker and sinister than we’d seen before.”