CPB has awarded a $500,000 grant to NPR to support the network’s international news coverage.
The grant, announced at a March 26 awards dinner honoring NPR correspondent Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, will support salaries and travel costs for reporters and producers in Jerusalem, Cairo, Beirut, Shanghai and Beijing. Last year NPR spent more than it had anticipated covering the Arab uprisings and the earthquake and nuclear disaster in Japan.
As NPR’s foreign desk steps up its reporting from the Middle East, Asia and Africa, reporters are putting themselves “on the front line of historic news events,” said CPB Chair Bruce Ramer, who announced the grant. “This will help NPR stay on the story as long as it takes.”
“This is going to be so important for our work,” said NPR President Gary Knell. “There’s nothing more important to me and my colleagues than the foreign reporting work that we do.”
Garcia-Navarro, recipient of CPB’s 2011 Edward R. Murrow Award honoring outstanding contributions to public radio, described the grant as “a real gift to those of us who work in the field, and it has actual, practical implications.”
“Never has covering the world been more dangerous and more vital,” she said.
The grant came out of CPB’s Radio Program Fund.