Nick Schifrin
PBS NewsHour
Recipient of the 2020 Award for Reporting
Nick Schifrin is the foreign affairs and defense correspondent for PBS NewsHour, based in Washington, D.C. He leads NewsHour’s foreign reporting and has created week-long, in-depth series for NewsHour from China, Russia, Ukraine, Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Cuba, Mexico, and the Baltics. The PBS NewsHour series “Inside Putin’s Russia” won a 2018 Peabody Award and the National Press Club’s Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence.
Prior to PBS NewsHour, Schifrin was Al Jazeera America’s Middle East correspondent, based in Jerusalem. He led the channel’s coverage of the 2014 war in Gaza. He reported extensively on the Syrian war from Syria’s Turkish, Lebanese and Jordanian borders. And he arrived in Ukraine as violence peaked in Kiev and reported on the conflict in and annexation of Crimea. He won an Overseas Press Club award for his Gaza coverage and a National Headliners Award for his Ukraine coverage.
From 2008-2012, Schifrin served as the ABC News correspondent in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2011 he was one of the first journalists to arrive in Abbottabad, Pakistan after Osama bin Laden’s death and delivered one of the year’s biggest exclusives: the first video from inside bin Laden’s compound. His reporting helped ABC News win an Edward R. Murrow award for its bin Laden coverage. He ran the Islamabad and Kabul bureaus for nearly four years, beginning at age 28.
Schifrin is a visiting fellow at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, where he lectures and teaches a foreign policy class. He is also a Council on Foreign Relations term member and an Overseas Press Club Foundation board member. He has a Master of International Public Policy degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), with a concentration in Strategic Studies.