Shahla Sherkat, a 2005 winner of the IWMF Courage in Journalism Award, wrote an essay for Harvard’s Nieman Reports about her experience running a women’s magazine in Iran. Her magazine was shut down two years ago by the government. Read Sherkat’s piece.

Women journalists from across the U.S. learned about topics such as leadership styles and work-life balance at the U.S. Leadership Institute in July in Chicago.

Carolyn Byerly, principal investigator for the IWMF’s Global Report on Women in the News Media and a professor at Howard University, has been selected to receive the Donna Allen Award for Feminist Advocacy from the Commission on the Status of Women of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication. The award will be presented Aug. 7 in Boston. Read more on the AEJMC Web site.

Three out of 435 proposals for the New Media Women Entrepreneurs Initiative received a $10,000 award for their projects. The winning proposals are a Web site on community news sites, a food policy start-up and a health Web site for women ages 18 to 27. For details about the award winners, visit the New Media Women Web site.

Natalia Estemirova, Russian human rights NGO Memorial’s representative in Chechnya and a former journalist, was found murdered July 15 in Chechnya. Estemirova was a friend and former collaborator of Anna Politkovskaya, a 2002 winner of the IWMF Courage in Journalism Award who was murdered in 2006. Estemirova was working on a highly sensitive case in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. Read more in The Guardian.

News media organizations can -- and must -- maximize the content they produce in order to reach a wide array of readers and viewers, says Jennifer Moyer, former chief operating officer for Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive who is now the chief financial officer for Alarm.com.

Firle Davies, a journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation, is the recipient of the 2009-10 Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship from the International Women’s Media Foundation.

A reporter for more than two decades, Davies has worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and Zaire, among other countries. She has covered topics such as war, genocide and ethnic violence. During her fellowship, Davies hopes to put into context her years of covering conflict and human rights and social justice issues.

Davies is the fifth 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 and social justice issues.

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.

• Read the press release.
• Click here for more information about the fellowship.

For immediate releaseJuly 14, 2009 For more information:Lindsey Wray(202) 496-1992LWray@iwmf.org BBC Journalist Firle Davies Named 2009-10 IWMF Eliz...

Each month in the Democratic Republic of the Congo 11,000 rapes are committed as a tool of warfare. And the DRC is only one country where rape is a deadly weapon targeted at women.

Still, despite two U.N. resolutions, combatants commit sex crimes with impunity. At a recent panel at The Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C., participants discussed how the media can help bring these crimes to public attention and help the women who are victimized daily.

• Read Margot Wallstrom’s blog. 
• Visit the site of UN Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict Campaign.
• Visit the Council of Women World Leaders at The Aspen Institute.  

The International Reporting Project is seeking applications from U.S. journalists and editors for a fact-finding trip to Peru. The focus of the trip will be social, economic and political and will incorporate discussion of environmental, educational and health issues. Application deadline is Sept. 15. For more information or to apply, visit the IRP Web site.

Euna Lee and Laura Ling, American reporters who have been sentenced to 12 years in a North Korean labor camp, are seeking a pardon. North Korea has delayed sending the convicted journalists to a labor camp in a possible attempt to talk about their release. The journalists were captured in March on the China-North Korean border. Read the Washington Post article.

Jestina Mukoko, a former reporter at the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, appeared in Zimbabwe’s Supreme Court on June 25 to challenge the infringement of her constitutional rights to liberty. State prosecutors conceded in court that security agents had abducted and illegally detained Mukoko in December 2008. She was taken by men in plain clothes, some armed with handguns. Now the director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, Mukoko is being charged with banditry, sabotage and terrorism. Read the IFEX alert on Mukoko. 

The family and friends of Euna Lee and Laura Ling, the two American journalists sentenced to 12 years in a North Korean labor camp, as holding a vigil on Thursday, July 9, from 6:30 p.m to 7:30 p.m. in Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. Vigils will also be held in Birmingham, Phoenix, San Francisco and Sacramento. For more information, contact Dan Beckman at (202) 276-1675 or dan.p.beckmann@gmail.com.

The International Media Institute, a project of New Dehli-based Society of Policy Studies and Washington-D.C.-based International Center for Foreign Journalists, will provide journalism students with experience in print, multimedia and new media.Deadline for applications is August 8. Scholarships are available. For more information, visit the institue website.