Entries for July 2004

Belva Davis has more than 30 years of experience as a public affairs journalist in the San Francisco area. Now semi-retired, Davis continues to work as a special projects reporter at KRON-TV and as host of This Week in Northern California on KQED-TV.

Gwen Lister, 50, began working as a journalist in 1975 in Namibia, when it was a province of South Africa known as South-West Africa. After completing her degree at The University of Cape Town, Lister took a job at the Windhoek Advertiser. She soon left the paper when the South African government put pressure on the editor to sign a document stating that the Advertiser would cease to print positive articles about the South-West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), which opposed the government and its system of apartheid.

Mabel Rehnfeldt began her journalism career in 1983 at Sendero, the official newspaper of the Catholic Church in Paraguay. Sendero was the only independent newspaper published during the final years of General Alfredo Stroessner’s 35-year dictatorship. (Stroessner was overthrown in a 1989 coup and currently lives in exile in Brazil.)

Salima Tlemcani is the pen name of an Algerian journalist who began writing under this name in 1994, after receiving death threats from armed Islamic groups who did not like the way she reported on them. She has requested that she receive the IWMF Courage in Journalism Award under her pen name.