Associated Press and FRONTLINE (PBS) Win 2025 Asia Society Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia 

New York; May 12, 2025 — Asia Society is pleased to announce that the 2025 Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia is being awarded to The Associated Press and FRONTLINE—the PBS investigative documentary series produced at GBH in Boston—for South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning. This project includes a series of investigative stories, an online interactive experience, and a documentary led by reporters Kim Tong-Hyung and Claire Galofaro, and director/producer Lora Moftah.

In announcing the award, the Osborn Elliott Prize Jury issued the following statement: 
“This tour de force of reporting by Associated Press reporters Kim Tong-Hyung and Claire Galofaro and FRONTLINE (PBS) documented the costs of a generations-long South Korean program of sending children abroad for adoption. Started in the years after the Korean war, the program eventually sent more than 200,000 children to new homes mostly in Europe and North America. Years of painstaking document review and interviews with more than 100 adoptees revealed systemwide fraud and wrongdoing in the program, which in turn imposed a lifetime emotional toll on parents whose children were taken from them, sometimes without consent, and on the adoptees themselves, many of whom were never told or could never find the truth about their origins. The AP also found that many U.S. adoptees—from South Korea and other countries—were left without citizenship because of legal lapses that Congress failed to fix. The work of these journalists has caused Seoul to open up records, countries to review past adoption practices, and families around the world to re-examine their personal histories.”

Asia Society will host a special program in New York to honor this year’s winners on Tuesday, June 5. The Osborn Elliott prize, carrying a $10,000 cash award, is given annually by an independent jury to the best example of journalism about Asia during the previous calendar year. 

In noting the quality and breadth of the entries for the Osborn Elliott Prize this year, the jury praised a Bloomberg entry titled The Egg:
“In particular, the Jury recognizes another powerful example of transnational reporting by Bloomberg News, whose reporters tracked the international commerce in human eggs, part of a $35 billion global fertility industry in which Asia plays a crucial role. In much the same way that wealthy countries once patronized Korea for babies, today wealthy families may acquire eggs or pay for surrogates from people in other countries.”

The jury for the Osborn Elliott Prize is chaired by Marcus Brauchli, managing partner of North Base Media and the former top editor of both The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Jurors for the 2025 prize are: Dorinda Elliott, Executive Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University and formerly with Newsweek; Nisid Hajari, author, member of the Bloomberg editorial board and a former top editor at Newsweek; Zuraidah Ibrahim, Executive Managing Editor, South China Morning Post; and Norman Pearlstine, media executive and advisor and former top editor at the Los Angeles Times, Time Inc., and The Wall Street Journal. 

The Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia, affectionately referred to as the “Oz Prize,” honors the late Osborn Elliott, legendary journalist, author and former editor-in-chief of Newsweek. Elliott was a leading figure in the field of journalism who became one of the earliest practitioners of “civic journalism”—the deliberate focusing of the journalistic enterprise on urgent issues of public policy. 

Recent winners of the prize include The Outlaw Ocean Project (2024) for “China: The Superpower of Seafood,” Sue-Lin Wong and David Rennie, The Economist (2023) for their China coverage, Matthieu Aikins and Jim Huylebroek, New York Times Magazine (2022) for “Inside the Fall of Kabul,” and Alice Su, Los Angeles Times (2021) for China coverage. Find out more about the Oz Prize and prior winners at AsiaSociety.org/OzPrize.