Jon Sawyer

Summary of Madison Activities

In Spring 2019, Lindsay Palmer (UW-Madison) moderated a discussion on discrimination in the newsroom and field. The discussion, entitled, “Gender at Work: Overcoming Bias in the Newsroom,” was attended by over 200 people and headlined by Michelle Ferrier (Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University, TrollBusters.com), Christina Kahrl (ESPN) and Jon Sawyer (Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting).

Jon’s Biography

Jon Sawyer was chief executive officer and president of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a nonprofit organization that funds independent reporting with the intent of raising the standard of media coverage of global affairs and that also supports a broad range of educational initiatives. Sawyer became the center’s founding director after a 31-year career with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Projects supported by the Pulitzer Center have won five Pulitzer Prizes, three Peabodys, seven Robert F. Kennedy Awards, 11 Overseas Press Club awards, four George Polk awards, and best online reporting honors from the National Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the National Press Foundation. The Center’s educational programs now encompass hundreds of k-12 schools and nearly 40 university, community college, and HBCU partner institutions.

Sawyer was selected three years in a row for the National Press Club’s award for best foreign reporting. His work has been honored by the Overseas Press Club, the Inter-American Press Association, and the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His reporting on defense procurement contract abuses won the top investigative reporting prize among large newspapers from IRE (Investigative Reporters and Editors). His reporting on the problems of nuclear waste disposal was honored by the Atomic Industrial Forum and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Sawyer’s projects for the Pulitzer Center have included reporting from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Bangladesh, China, Haiti, and the Caucasus. His work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera English, the Nieman Reports, To the Point, and PBS NewsHour. He was executive producer of LiveHopeLove.com, the Center’s Emmy-award-winning website on HIV in Jamaica, and also of The Abominable Crime, a feature-length documentary on homophobia and stigma.

Sawyer was the Post-Dispatch Washington bureau chief from 1993 through 2005. He had been a member of the newspaper’s Washington bureau since 1980 and before that worked in St. Louis, first as an editorial writer and then as a staff reporter. His assignments for the Post-Dispatch took him to some five dozen countries, with special projects ranging from southern Africa, Cuba, and Haiti to Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Israel, the Balkans, and China.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States Sawyer focused much of his reporting on the Middle East and predominantly Muslim countries. He reported from Central Asia during the fall of 2001 and from Sudan, Iraq, Turkey, and Egypt during 2002. In 2003 he reported on a four-nation tour through the Middle East just before the Iraq war and to Iran just after. He reported from Afghanistan in 2004. And from Beirut and England in 2005 as part of a project on Muslim communities in the United States and abroad. In early 2006 he reported from Sudan, including Darfur, for the Post-Dispatch and for the public-television program Foreign Exchange.

He received a bachelor’s degree from Yale University in 1974, majoring in English literature and history, and during the 1978-79 academic year was an Alfred Sloan Fellow in Economics Journalism at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy. In the fall of 1992 he was a research fellow affiliated with the Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Sawyer was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He attended public schools there and is a graduate of the Phillips Exeter Academy. He and his wife, children’s book author Kem Knapp Sawyer, have three daughters, seven grandchildren, and a miniature Schnauzer.