Australian Journalist Sally Sara Named 2007-08 IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow

Australian Journalist Sally Sara Named 2007-08 IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow

Washington, DC – The International Women’s Media Foundation announced today that Sally Sara, anchor and senior reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, has received the Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship. Sara is the third recipient of the annual fellowship, which gives a woman journalist working in print, broadcast or online media the opportunity to focus exclusively on human rights journalism.

Sara will spend the nine-month fellowship as a research associate in residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies. She will also have access to the Boston Globe and New York Times.

The fellowship is named for Elizabeth Neuffer, a Boston Globe reporter and the winner of a 1998 IWMF Courage in Journalism Award who was killed while on assignment in Iraq in 2003. Neuffer’s life mission was to promote international understanding of human rights and social justice.

Sara, 36, is an anchor for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s national news program “Landline.” She has worked for ABC since 1993, reporting from Africa as a foreign correspondent from 2000-2005. Sara is also an author; she took leave from her reporting job in 2005 to write a book on African women. Called GoGo Mama, the book will be published in July.

Sara has covered poverty, war, political unrest, ethnic violence and violence against women. Among the stories she has reported on are human rights abuses in Darfur and Zimbabwe, child soldiers in Liberia, AIDS orphans in Lesotho and mutilation of women in Uganda.

“I have a deep commitment to tell the stories of those who have endured human rights abuses, particularly women,” she wrote in her fellowship application.

Sara was the recipient of the British Prize for Journalism in 1999, and in 2003 was a finalist for the Walkley Awards for Excellence in Journalism for radio coverage of genocide survivors in Rwanda.

The Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship is a project of the Elizabeth Neuffer IWMF Fund, which also supports the Elizabeth Neuffer Forum on Human Rights and Journalism.

The International Women’s Media Foundation was launched in 1990 with a mission to strengthen the role of women in the news media worldwide. The IWMF network includes women and men in the media in more than 130 countries worldwide.

For further information, visit www.iwmf.org/programs/neuffer, or e-mail neuffer@iwmf.org.

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