Jon Sawyer is chief executive officer and president of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a nonprofit organization that funds independent reporting with the intent of raising the standard of media coverage of global affairs and that also supports a broad range of educational initiatives. Sawyer became the center’s founding director after a 31-year career with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Sawyer was selected three years in a row for the National Press Club’s award for best foreign reporting. His work has been honored by the Overseas Press Club, the Inter-American Press Association, and the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His reporting on defense procurement contract abuses won the top investigative reporting prize among large newspapers from IRE (Investigative Reporters and Editors). His reporting on the problems of nuclear waste disposal was honored by the Atomic Industrial Forum and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Sawyer was the Post-Dispatch Washington bureau chief from 1993 through 2005. He had been a member of the newspaper’s Washington bureau since 1980 and before that worked in St. Louis, first as an editorial writer and then as a staff reporter. His assignments for the Post-Dispatch took him to some five dozen countries, with special projects ranging from southern Africa, Cuba, and Haiti to Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Israel, the Balkans, and China.

He received a bachelor’s degree from Yale University in 1974, majoring in English literature and history, and during the 1978-79 academic year was an Alfred Sloan Fellow in Economics Journalism at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy. In the fall of 1992 he was a research fellow affiliated with the Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.