The Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute has named Lisa Armstrong, an award-winning reporter who has written for the Washington Post, National Geographic, and O, the Oprah Magazine, the recipient of its 2012 Reporting Award.

Human Rights Journalist Lisa Armstrong Winner of NYU Carter Journalism Institute’s 2012 “Reporting Award”
NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute has named Lisa Armstrong, an award-winning reporter who has written for the Washington Post, National Geographic, and O, the Oprah Magazine, the recipient of its 2012 Reporting Award. The award supports a work of journalism in any medium on significant underreported subjects in the public interest. As the 2012 Reporting Award recipient, Armstrong will continue her coverage of sexual violence in Haiti, which has increased threefold since the January 2010 earthquake.

New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute has named Lisa Armstrong, an award-winning reporter who has written for the Washington Post, National Geographic, and O, the Oprah Magazine, the recipient of its 2012 Reporting Award.

The award supports a work of journalism in any medium on significant underreported subjects in the public interest. As the 2012 Reporting Award recipient, Armstrong will continue her coverage of sexual violence in Haiti, which has increased threefold since the January 2010 earthquake.

In establishing the award in 2009, the Carter Journalism Institute’s faculty cited the need for encouraging enterprise journalism during a time of extensive layoffs and budget cuts throughout the journalism industry. The American Society of Newspaper Editors, for example, reports that the number of news professionals at newspapers is down nearly 30 percent from its peak a decade ago.

The award includes a stipend of $2,500 upon selection as the competition winner and an additional $10,000 upon timely completion and submission of the work, provided the Institute’s awards committee judges the work acceptable. The winner also has use of the Institute’s facilities, including an office, as well as NYU’s libraries and other scholarly resources. In addition, the program funds up to $6,000 in NYU journalism graduate student assistance. The Institute will publish the completed work either alone or in partnership with another media outlet.

Armstrong grew up in Nairobi, Kenya and has worked in Ethiopia, India, Zimbabwe, Tajikistan, and elsewhere primarily writing stories about humanitarian issues. She has written about teenage prostitution in displaced persons camps in Haiti and former child soldiers in Liberia. She won an award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors for an article about a Kenyan village formed by women who were allegedly raped by British soldiers—and subsequently banished by their husbands.

In February 2010, Armstrong received a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for a yearlong reporting project in Haiti. Her articles were published in USA Today and on the Atlantic.com, NYTimes.com, and the Daily Beast. She was also featured on NPR and the BBC, discussing rape in the camps and the spread of HIV after the earthquake. Armstrong and her Pulitzer Center colleagues were awarded the 2010 National Press Club's Joan Friedenberg Award for Online Journalism for their work in Haiti.

Sarah Stillman, the inaugural recipient of the Reporting Award, traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan to report on the abuse of third-world service workers on U.S. military bases there. Her piece, “The Invisible Army,” which appeared in the June 6, 2011 issue of the New Yorker, won several of journalism’s top prizes in 2012: the National Magazine Award in the category of “Public Interest”; the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism; the Overseas Press Club’s Joe and Laurie Dine Award for International Human Rights Reporting; and the Michael Kelly Award for the “fearless pursuit and expression of truth.”

For more on the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, go to http://journalism.nyu.edu/.

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