The UA School of Journalism will honor Sandra Rodríguez and Rocío Gallegos for their reporting on community crime and other issues for El Diario de Juárez. The two women, who have maintained their “devotion to a free press despite threats from Mexican drug lords and government censorship, will be awarded the 2012 John Peter and Anna Catherine Zenger Award at a dinner on Friday, Oct. 12.
World renowned journalist, Jacqueline Sharkey, who retired this summer after many years in the University of Arizona journalism program, will offer remarks.
The El Diario reporters will also be speaking at “Journalists under fire: Bullets, censorship and coercion along the Mexican border” on Thursday, Oct. 11. According to the University, they will give first-hand accounts of the danger to reporting truth in many areas of Mexico. UA journalism professors Celeste González de Bustamante and Jeannine Relly will discuss the findings of their study that interviewed dozens of border reporters. The free event begins at 7 p.m. in the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Building, Room 202.
Gallegos and Rodríguez received the Knight International Journalism Award for their reporting on the devastation drug lords are wreaking in the town of Juárez. Juárez is known as “the deadliest city in North America—and probably in the world.”