On Saturday, Oct. 15, Mimi Chakarova and the Center for Investigative Reporting received a prestigious Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting for “The Price of Sex.” Chakarova’s documentary exposes the shadowy world of sex trafficking from Eastern Europe to the Middle East and Western Europe. The award, given by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, was announced at the seventh Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Kiev, Ukraine. Named in honor of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was slain by militants in Pakistan in 2002, the awards were created to honor cross-border investigative reporting.
Awards judge Ginger Thompson of The New York Times said: “Her attention to detail and dignity in her portrayals of victims and the breathtaking courage she showed during her forays into the criminal underworld should serve as the professional standard to which all investigative reporters aspire.”
“The Price of Sex,” winner of the Nestor Almendros Award for Courage in Filmmaking at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, will have its San Francisco, Calif., premiere Nov. 5, part of the San Francisco Film Society’s Cinema by the Bay festival. A full list of screenings is here.
Robert J. Rosenthal is the chief executive officer at The Center for Investigative Reporting. Rosenthal was the executive director of CIR from January 2008 to spring 2017. When he joined CIR, it had a staff of seven and when he left, it had a staff of nearly 70 and was recognized as one of the leading nonprofit newsrooms in the country. He is an award-winning journalist and worked for some of the most respected newspapers in the country, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Francisco Chronicle. Rosenthal worked for 22 years at The Inquirer, starting as a reporter and eventually becoming its executive editor in 1998. He became managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle in late 2002 and left in 2007. During this time, he led the investigation into the murder of journalist Chauncey Bailey. That work became known as the award-winning Chauncey Bailey Project. Before joining The Inquirer in 1979, Rosenthal worked for six years as a reporter at The Boston Globe and three and a half years at The New York Times, where he was a news assistant on the foreign desk and an editorial assistant on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pentagon Papers project. As a reporter, Rosenthal won numerous awards, including the Overseas Press Club Award for magazine writing, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award for distinguished foreign correspondence and the National Association of Black Journalists Award for Third World reporting. He was a Pulitzer finalist in international reporting and was a Pulitzer judge four times. He has been an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Rosenthal is also currently advising or on the board of multiple journalism nonprofits. In 2018, Rosenthal was named a fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists for his “extraordinary contribution to the profession of journalism.”
