Rappler CEO Ressa wins Stanford Award

INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST Maria Ressa won this year’s Stanford University Shorenstein Journalism Award.

The CEO and executive editor of online news site Rappler received the award from the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) for her efforts in presenting the complexities of the situation in the Asia-Pacific region.

Stanford cited Ressa as “a highly-regarded journalist in Asia for more than thirty years, commended worldwide for her courageous work in fighting disinformation and attempts to silence the free press.”

“Maria Ressa is a champion of digital journalism innovation, and a paragon of protecting democracy and speaking truth to power,” said Gi-Wook Shin, Shorenstein APARC director. 

The awards committee credited Ressa’s previous work as CNN’s Manila bureau chief and ABS-CBN news and current affairs chief. The committee also noted how she turned Rappler into one of the country’s most influential news organizations.

Ressa taught courses in politics and the press in Southeast Asia for her alma mater, Princeton University, and in broadcast journalism for the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication. She also authored two books: From Bin Laden to Facebook (2012), which traces the spread of terrorism from the training camps of Afghanistan to Southeast Asia and the Philippines, and Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia (2003), which documented the changing tactics of Al-Qaeda and its next-generation roots in the Muslim strongholds in the Philippines and Indonesia.

Earlier this year, Ressa also received the 2018 Tully Award for Free Speech at the SI Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and the 2019 Columbia Journalism Award from the Columbia Journalism School. She was named by Time Magazine as one of the World’s 100 Most Influential People in 2019 and as Time’s Persons of the Year for 2018.