Press release
WBUR, BOSTON UNIVERSITY ANNOUNCE 2010 DANIEL SCHORR JOURNALISM PRIZE WINNER
Ailsa Chang of WNYC to be honored at WBUR gala Nov. 10
(Boston) – Boston University and WBUR 90.9 FM, Boston’s NPR News Station, announce the selection of WNYC reporter Ailsa Chang as the winner of the 2010 Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize. Now in its ninth year, the award is named for the longtime senior news analyst for NPR and a veteran Washington journalist who passed away in July.
The $5,000 Schorr Prize — sponsored by WBUR and Boston University, and funded by Jim and Nancy Bildner — salutes a new generation of public radio journalists 35 years old and under, seeking to inspire them to stretch the boundaries of the medium.
Chang will be honored on Nov. 10, at the WBUR Public Radio Gala at the Seaport Hotel in Boston celebrating the station’s 60th anniversary. The annual benefit for the not-for-profit station is expected to raise more than $350,000 to support independent news and programming.
Chang was selected for her investigative report about Detroit’s broken public defender system. Her piece, titled “Not Enough Money Or Time To Defend Detroit’s Poor” aired on NPR’s award-winning newsmagazine, All Things Considered, during her tenure as a Kroc fellow at NPR in 2009. Chang’s full story may be heard online.
Chang covers terrorism, criminal justice and the courts for WNYC. Earlier, she was a Kroc Fellow for NPR in Washington, D.C. and worked at KQED public radio in San Francisco. She began her public radio career after practicing law for five years, and was a law clerk to Judge John T. Noonan, Jr., on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
A San Francisco Bay Area native, Chang holds a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford University, a law degree from Stanford Law School, a master’s in journalism from Columbia University, and a master’s in media law from Oxford University, where she was a Fulbright Scholar.
Past recipients of the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize include reporter Chana Joffe-Walt, who covers global economics for NPR’s multimedia project Planet Money (2009); former NPR defense correspondent Guy Raz, who is now the host of All Things Considered Weekend Edition (2008); NPR National Correspondent Laura Sullivan (2007); and Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, then a NPR foreign correspondent in Mexico City (2006).
Schorr was honored to have this prize in his name, saying he believed in supporting talented journalists as they rose through the ranks of the broadcast industry — particularly those who found a calling in public radio. Public Radio journalists from around the world competed for the recognition.
The panel of distinguished journalists who served as Schorr prize judges for 2010 included:
Ed Fouhy, former network television executive
John Barth, Managing Director, PRX
Anne Donahue, Associate Professor, Journalism, Boston University
John Keefe, Senior Executive Producer, WNYC News
John Van Hoesen, VP for News & Programming, Vermont Public Radio
