Media Awards for IWPR Staff

Two foreign staff members with IWPR in Afghanistan have been awarded prestigious international reporting prizes for their work in North America and Southeast Asia.

Javier Manzano, who is filming a series of human rights documentaries in Afghanistan, won second place in the Domestic News Picture Story category of the National Press Photographers Association’s Best of Photojournalism 2011 contest.

His winning entry chronicles the bloody drug war and its human toll in and around Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez. Manzano, 35, had previously been awarded third place in the World Press Photo’s General News Singles category, also for a photo from Juarez’s drug violence.

Seth Meixner, who is coordinating IWPR’s Afghan investigative reporting programme, was awarded two first place prizes by the Society of Publishers in Asia for his work at The Phnom Penh Post newspaper in Cambodia.

Meixner, 38, was a member of the winning team in the Excellence in Multimedia News Presentation 2011 category for an online interactive feature on the first verdict handed down by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge tribunal in July 2010. He also triumphed in the Excellence in Reporting Breaking News category for the Post’s staff coverage of a deadly bridge stampede in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh.