Prue Clarke is an award winning journalist, foundation executive, professor and media innovator. Her reporting and commentary have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Guardian, the Financial Times, The Times and on the BBC, CBC and CNN.
Since 2004 Prue’s reporting has focused on sub-Saharan Africa where she has uncovered corruption in the mining industry, and child trafficking war in Ghana. In the warzones of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo Prue reported on child soldiers and rape as a weapon of war as well as the stories of Congolese people uniting in a quest to move past war. Prue has covered the controversial and dramatic rebuilding of Rwanda under President Paul Kagame. In Liberia Prue has reported on the long quest for recovery and justice in the wake of one of the most devastating wars on the continent and the ongoing legacy of Liberia’s founding by free and formerly enslaved Africans from the United States. She has won numerous reporting awards including the national Edward R. Murrow for featuring radio reporting and a United Nations World Gold Medal for investigative reporting.
Prue has spoken at conferences in the US, Africa and Europe and her opinion pieces have appeared in Foreign Policy, The New York Times, The Guardian, Project Syndicate, Columbia Journalism Review, Reuters and the Mail and Guardian. Prue’s work with New Narratives won the 2014 Advance Global Australian Award for Social Innovation.
Prue created and led BBC Media Action emergency radio and social media programming and training as part of the Unicef-led global communications response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa. She was also project manager on multi-million dollar projects in Sierra Leone and Nigeria funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, DFID and others. Prue has trained journalists in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo and has advised governments, universities and NGOs including the World Health Organization, Deutsche Welle Academie, the Thomson Reuters Foundation and the Natural Resources Governance Institute.
Prue was Director of the popular International Reporting program at the City University of New York’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism where she also taught classes in international reporting, media business models, radio reporting and the Craft of Journalism. Prue oversaw a team of ten professors including leading international reporters from the New York Times, Reuters, Quartz and NPR. She introduced risk awareness and security training, international reporting trips and formed a network of 60+ global media outlets who hired graduates and interns.
In 2019 Prue joined the executive team to set up the $100m Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas in Sydney. It was the first major philanthropic organisation dedicated to journalism in Australia. Early in her career Prue was a reporter with the Financial Times New York bureau and a television correspondent with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Sydney, Central Australia and New York. She covered the the September 11th 2001 terror attacks from Ground Zero.
Prue has lived in Australia, the US, the UK and Ghana. She holds a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism where she was also an “International Fellow” at the School of International and Public Affairs. She also holds a Master of International Relations and a Bachelor of Economics from the University of Sydney.