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 and told the stories of Congolese people trying to move past war. Prue has covered the controversial rebuilding of Rwanda under President Paul Kagame. In Liberia Prue has reported on the long quest for recovery and justice in the wake of devastating wars, and the ongoing legacy of Liberia’s founding by free Africans from the United States. She has won numerous reporting awards including the national Edward R. Murrow award, a Gracie Allen 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 during the Ebola crisis in West Africa. She was also project manager on large 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 trained 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 the 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, 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. It was 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.