IRP Fellow Wins UN Correspondents’ Gold Medal Award
By IRP Staff, December 14, 2010
Julia Lyon, a 2009 IRP Fellow, has won the UN Correspondents Association "Gold Medal" Award for her package of stories about Burmese refugees in Thailand and their journey to the United States.
Lyon, a reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune, will be honored on December 15 as the winner of the Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize at an awards dinner of the UN Correspondents Association hosted by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Lyon, who is expecting a child in Utah, will not attend. Her editors and John Schidlovsky, director of the IRP, will be present at the awards ceremony in New York.
The IRP Fellowship enabled Lyon to spend five weeks reporting from the Thai-Burmese border on the background of a Burmese family of refugees who moved to Utah. The seven-year-old daughter of the family was murdered in Utah, prompting Lyon and the Tribune to apply for an IRP Fellowship to support Lyon's reporting trip. The package of stories, entitled "A Missing Piece: A Family's Unrealized Dreams Reflect the Plight of Refugees," were published simultaneously in the Tribune and on the IRP site.