Jury

Ann Cooper is an award-winning journalist, former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Professor Emerita at Columbia Journalism School. Cooper’s voice was well known to National Public Radio listeners as NPR’s first Moscow bureau chief, covering the tumultuous events of the final five years of Soviet communism. She co-edited a book, “Russia at the Barricades,” about the failed 1991 Soviet coup attempt. As NPR's South Africa bureau chief in the 1990s, she covered that country's transition from apartheid to majority rule. She has been a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, the State University of New York and at Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center, which published her 2020 report Conveying Truth: Independent Media in Putin's Russia.