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 mining and child trafficking in Ghana. In warzones of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo Prue reported on child soldiers, rape as a weapon of war. Prue has covered post-genocide Rwanda and Liberia’s long quest for recovery and justice in the wake of devastating wars. She has won numerous awards including the national Edward R. Murrow prize for feature reporting, a Gracie Allen and a United Nations World Gold Medal for investigative reporting.
Prue co-founded New Narratives with Susan Marcinek and Rodney Sieh to bring donor support to leading newsrooms in Africa and the Pacific. She has led the organization as it has grown to five countries and provided support for independent journalism and news business resilience to 40 newsrooms and more than 200 journalists.
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 during the Ebola crisis in West Africa. She was also project manager on 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, The Gambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo and has consulted with governments, universities and NGOs including the World Health Organization, Deutsche Welle Akademie, the Thomson Reuters Foundation and the Natural Resources Governance Institute.
Prue was Director of International Reporting at the City University of New York’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism where she also taught classes in international reporting, audio reporting and the Craft of Journalism. Prue oversaw a team of ten professors – leading international reporters from the New York Times, Reuters, and NPR. She built the Journalist-in-Exile program with the Committee to Protect Journalists, introduced risk awareness and security training, international reporting trips and formed a network of 60+ global media outlets that 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, the first major philanthropic organization 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.