On Wednesday, imprisoned Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were awarded the 2017 James Foley Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism. The award honors an individual or team of journalists, working for a U.S.-based media outlet, who best displayed moral, physical, ethical, financial or political courage in the pursuit of a story or series of stories. Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were recognized for their reporting in Myanmar, for which they have been detained since December 12, 2017. In the announcement of the prize, the Medill organization said it awarded the prize to Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo for their work chronicling the violence in Myanmar, including "painstakingly reconstructing the killings of 10 Rohingya men last September, following their path from a beach in the Rakhine state, where government troops and Buddhist villagers plucked them from among a crowd of villagers seeking refuge, to their mass grave nearby." Co-judge and Medill professor Donna Leff said the coverage was "riveting and horrifying. The reporting was meticulous and the story-telling was heroic." Reuters recently published the investigation that prompted Myanmar police authorities to arrest Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo. You can read the full report
here . [Reuters Press Blog] Media Contact: Heather.Carpenter at thomsonreuters.com
