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Megha Rajagopalan was not watching the Pulitzer announcement ceremony because she did not expect to win. Rajagopalan, the international correspondent for BuzzFeed News, got to know her series exposing the detention camps of Uyghur Muslims in China, won the Pulitzer Prize in the International Reporting category after editor Mark Schoofs called it.
I’m completely in shock, I wasn’t expecting it, said Rajagopalan, who is based in London, according to BuzzFeed.
Rajagopalan won the Pulitzer Prize with contributors Alison Killing, a licensed architect, and Christo Buschek, a programmer, for a series exposing the extent of the internment of Uyghur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang Province. This was the first Pulitzer for BuzzFeed News, a digital news publication founded in 2014.
I am very grateful to our team, @BuzzFeedNews, @alexcampbell and the organizations that have supported us. I am especially grateful to the ex-detainees who told us what happened to them in the camps in Xinjiang. The public owes a lot to their courage. Still a lot of work to do, Megha Rajagopalan also tweeted.
Body of work
BuzzFeed said in a report that Rajagopalan, who speaks Tamil and Mandarin Chinese, was the first reporter to visit an internment camp used to detain Uyghur Muslims in the troubled Xinjiang province at a time – in 2017 – when China denied their existence. She was quickly expelled from the country and the Chinese government refused to renew her visa.
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Ben Smith, then editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, recalled this episode in a tweet. Smith said after the Chinese government refused to renew his visa, he and a BuzzFeed editor met with government officials. They said we were invited to send literally any other reporter, but not Megha. Who exposed the Uyghur camps from the outside to the inside and just won a Pulitzer, Smith, who now works with the New York Times, wrote.
Rajagopalan, however, continued to report on the camps from London, with Alison Killing, an architect specializing in forensic analysis of architecture and satellite images of buildings, and Christo Buschek, a programmer who makes tools for data journalism.
She is one of two American Indians to win America’s biggest journalism award, announced Friday. Tampa Bay Times Neil Patel won the Pulitzer for Local Reporting with Kathleen McGrory. This was for their series of investigations into a Florida County Police’s use of computer modeling to identify potential crime suspects, including children who performed poorly in school or had been victims of abuse at home. Patel now works with ProPublica, a nonprofit organization focused on investigative news.
Discreet reaction from Indian father
Rajagopalan, born to Indian parents, grew up in Maryland near Washington DC and attended the University of Maryland. I am deeply grateful for their support, said Rajagopalan of his parents. No one in my family has ever worked in media, but they have always supported my career as a journalist and have been my greatest cheerleaders since I was a student, she added.
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The multiple-award-winning reporter shared a screenshot of her conversation with her father, which she said was a low-key reaction from an Indian father. Her dad just said, well done. The official Pulitzer Prize Twitter account even retweeted the post.
Asia, Middle East
Rajagopalan has worked for BuzzFeed News for almost five years and her LinkedIn profile shows that she was based in China and Thailand as well as Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Prior to that, she was political correspondent for Reuters in China. She has reported in 23 countries in Asia and the Middle East on stories ranging from the North Korean nuclear crisis to the peace process in Afghanistan, according to the profile.
Rajagopalan also won the Human Rights Press Award in 2018 and a Mirror Award in 2019 for an investigation revealing links between Facebook and religious violence in Sri Lanka. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Beijing and a Fulbright Fellow in the New America Foundation in Washington DC. She was selected as Asia 21 Young Leader in 2019.
In her spare time, she volunteers as a career mentor for the Coalition for Women in Journalism and Report For America.
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