Ex-TheCable journalist Chinedu Asadu wins AP’s top journalism award

Chinedu Asadu, a former journalist with TheCable, has been honoured with the 2024 Oliver S. Gramling Journalism Award, the highest internal honour of The Associated Press (AP).

Asadu, who covers West Africa for the AP, was named one of the winners of the prestigious Gramling awards on Tuesday at the company’s headquarters in New York, United States.

Asadu was honoured in the journalism category for his “courageous reporting” in West Africa.

Announcing him as one of the winners, Peter Prengaman, AP’s global climate and environmental news director, who is one of the judges, said Asadu “imbibes the best of what” the organisation stands for.

“He is a team player, always ready to say yes and help out whenever he can. It is for these reasons that the judges were very happy to present him the Gramling Journalism Award,” Prengaman said.

Other AP staffers won in different categories. A team of US reporters who worked on absenteeism in American schools as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic were named the second winners of the journalism award.

The award was created in 1994 to recognise AP staffers for professional excellence. The $10,000 prize was named after Oliver S. Gramling, the late AP broadcast executive.

Asadu left TheCable for AP in 2021 after four years of producing excellent reports. He was named TheCable Journalist of the Year 2020 by the newspaper’s management.

In 2021, he won the environmental reporting prize at the 2021 West Africa Media Excellence Conference Award (WAMECA).

His undercover investigation, which exposed how Chinese miners endangered residents of the federal capital territory (FCT), was adjudged the best in the environmental reporting category.

He joined TheCable in 2017 as a graduate intern under the Policy Radar Initiative (PRIN) of the Cable Newspaper Journalism Foundation (CNJF), supported by the MacArthur Foundation.