The on-the-ground complexities of the ongoing civil war in Yemen, supported and exacerbated by outside powers, are nearly impossible for outsiders to follow. Stepping back, we all know this: one of the great humanitarian tragedies of our time is unfolding before our eyes, abetted and worsened by the intervention of actors who shoulder none of the consequences. Confronting continual threats from all sides, reporter Maggie Michael, photographer Nariman Ayman El-Mofty, and video journalist Maad al-Zikry, filed stories for The Associated Press that consistently broke new ground, brought the nature of the conflict vividly alive, and exposed the ruthless cynicism of those perpetuating the conflict. The AP’s investigative reporting on the war in Yemen in 2018 was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
2020 Michael Kelly Award Finalists
Craig Whitlock
The Washington Post
With his five-part series, “The Afghanistan Papers,” Craig Whitlock has produced what already feels like a definitive survey of the U.S. government’s deceptive and complicit role in America’s longest armed conflict.
Tom Warren and Katie J.M. Baker
BuzzFeed News
In an exposé spanning six countries and supported by thousands of pages of documents and more than 100 interviews, Warren and Baker reveal the human cost of the World Wide Fund for Nature’s war on poaching.
Kyle Hopkins
Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica
In “Lawless,” Hopkins investigates local policing in a vast state that is also a “news desert”—a region that has little in the way of reliable local-news coverage.
Azam Ahmed
The New York Times
The horrifying cycle of violence that afflicts so many Latin American countries is rendered with deeply felt humanity in Azam Ahmed’s five-part New York Times series, “Kill, or Be Killed: Latin America’s Homicide Crisis.”
