Rosalie Murphy, USC Annenberg '14 has been awarded a Pulitzer Center International Fellowship for Reporting. The awards are given to students, studying at the Center's campus affiliates, for reporting projects that focus on topics and regions of global importance, with an emphasis on issues that have gone unreported or under-reported in the mainstream American media.
"The fellowship is a terrific opportunity for students interested in covering religion, politics and culture on an international scale," said Diane Winston, USC Annenberg Knight Chair in Media and Religion. "Rosalie was in my class this year and during our reporting trip to India she found a topic to pursue further."
The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is an innovative award- winning non-profit journalism organization dedicated to supporting the independent international journalism that U.S. media organizations are increasingly less able to undertake. The Center focuses on under-reported topics, promoting high-quality international reporting and creating platforms that reach broad and diverse audiences.
Last year, USC Annenberg's Knight Program for Religion and Media and USC Dornsife College became part of the Pulitzer Center's Campus Consortium program. The focus for the USC-Pulitzer Center consortium is global religion.
The partnership kicked off formally in February 2014 with a two-day series on Pentecostalism, the world's most rapidly growing religion. Pulitzer Center grantees Bregtje van der Haak and Richard Vijgen were on hand along with Pulitzer Center Executive Director Jon Sawyer and Pulitzer Center information designer Dan McCarey.
In addition to visits to USC by Pulitzer Center journalists, a key part of the partnership is the award of at least one reporting fellowship per year to a USC student.
"We're thrilled by our partnership with USC and Rosalie's selection as our first reporting fellow from the university," Sawyer said. "The USC-Pulitzer Center partnership is a great step forward in broadening each of our efforts to cover religions around the world in greater depth."
Murphy, who graduated from USC in May, majored in History and Journalism and minored in Russian Area studies. The Akron, Ohio, native has been a USA Today intern and a member of the campus' Trojan Scholar Society. Her fellowship proposal evolved from a radio story she produced during the spring trip to India.
"I produced a radio story about Parsi intermarriage laws during a March trip to Mumbai," Murphy explained in her application, "and since, I've been fascinated by how the shrinking population changes the community's economics."
