Geoffrey Nyarota
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Geoffrey Nyarota is an award-winning Zimbabwean journalist and author. He is the managing editor of thezimbabwetimes.com, an online newspaper. His first book, Against the Grain, Memoirs of a Zimbabwean Newsman, was published by Zebra Press of South Africa in 2006.
He started his working life as a teacher because, as he has explained, "In colonial Rhodesia the only job open to educated Africans was teaching." However, when The Herald began hiring black trainees, he seized the opportunity and was contracted.[1]
The World Association of Newspapers awarded him its Golden Pen of Freedom Award in 2002, while he was serving as editor-in-chief of the Daily News, the country's only independent daily, which he had founded in 1999.
That same year he was also awarded UNESCO's Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize.[2]
In 2001, the Committee to Protect Journalists awarded a CPJ International Press Freedom Award to Nyarota. He has won several other awards for his work as a journalist and media entrepreneur. As editor of the Chronicle he exposed large-scale corruption among government officials, including ministers. He was fired from the paper.
As editor of the Daily News he was arrested six times. He survived an assassination attempt in 2000 but the newspaper's printing press was destroyed in a bombing incident in 2001.
On 30 December 2002 Nyarota was mysteriously fired as editor of the Daily News. A few days later he fled to South Africa and, later, to the United States, where he was awarded a fellowship at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The Daily News was shut down by the government in September 2003.[3]
[edit] Source
- The first version of this article was translated and adapted from the corresponding article on the French-language Wikipedia.
