Weekly Digest: Pulitzer Prize winners, AFP journalist killed by Russian rocket strike

Arman Soldin, a video coordinator working for Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency, was killed in eastern Ukraine by a Russian rocket strike on Tuesday.

AFP reports that Soldin was working with four colleagues on the outskirts of Chasiv Yar, a city near the frontline and close to war-torn Bakhmut. Other AFP team members weren’t hurt, but Soldin died when a Russian missile landed close to where he was lying. 

The journalist was 32; originally of Bosnian origin, he was a French national and has worked for AFP, one of the biggest global news agencies, since 2015. He started covering Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine from its very start and lived in Ukraine permanently since September 2022.

Soldin is part of over a dozen journalists killed while covering Russia’s war against Ukraine. While most journalist casualties happened in the first months of the full-scale invasion, covering the war remains an extremely dangerous task, as exemplified by the killing of Ukrainian journalist Bogdan Bitik who worked as fixer for Italian newspaper La Repubblica in April.

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The 2023 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced on Monday, with several prizes awarded to the Associated Press (AP) and The New York Times for their coverage of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The prize for public service, one of the most prestigious awards in journalism, went to the AP for the agency’s reporting from Mariupol in early 2022. Its journalists Mstyslav Chernov, Evgeniy Maloletka and Vasilisa Stepanenko were the only international journalists in the besieged city for several weeks as Russian invading forces were closing in.

The AP also received a prize for breaking news photography for coverage of Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities affected by Russia’s invasion.

The prize for international reporting was awarded to The New York Times for the paper’s coverage of Russia’s war against Ukraine, “including an eight-month investigation into Ukrainian deaths in the town of Bucha and the Russian unit responsible for the killings.” (Yaroslav Trofimov and James Marson of The Wall Street Journal were distinguished as finalists in the category for their war coverage).

Prizes in other categories were awarded primarily for US-centred reporting, including to several local outlets exposing corruption. “No one outlet dominated the winner list this year”, Axios notes; digital media company Vox Media (via New York magazine) and Spotify-owned podcast firm Gimlet received their first-ever prizes.

Bonus — Two more stories you might want to check out:

• Axios: American extremists linked to Russian sites 
• Semafor: Inside Tucker Carlson’s new media plan

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