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Updated: Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Published: Tuesday, April 5, 2005 |
Dele Olojede Biography
Dele Olojede formerly served as Newsday's foreign editor, overseeing the newspapers five overseas bureaus and its daily coverage of foreign news. Prior to that assignment, he was Newsday's Asian bureau chief, based in Beijing. He also served as African bureau chief, based in Johannesburg, South Africa, and traveled extensively throughout the continent.
Olojede joined the newspaper on June 6, 1988, as a summer intern. He later became a special writer covering minority affairs when, on loan to the foreign desk in 1992, he made his first of several trips to South Africa. His coverage drew high praise and prizes. Promoted to Newsday's United Nations bureau chief, he covered a range of international stories before his posting in Johannesburg.
Prior to Newsday, Olojede was a reporter at the National Concord Newspaper in Lagos, Nigeria, from 1982-84, and a founding staff writer and assistant editor at Newswatch, a Lagos weekly newsmagazine, between 1984 and 1987. A 1986 award-winning investigative report by Olojede resulted in the freeing of an internationally known Nigerian musician, Fela Kuti, and the dismissal of the federal judge who had sentenced him to prison on trumped up charges.
After winning a $26,000 Ford Foundation Scholars grant, Olojede left Nigeria in 1987 to earn a masters degree at Columbia University in New York, where he won the Henry N. Taylor Award as the outstanding foreign student.
Olojede's other awards include the 1995 Publisher's Award from Newsday; the 1995 Educational Press of America Distinguished Achievement Award for Excellence in Educational Journalism; the 1992 Unity Award from Lincoln University; the 1992 Clarion Award from Women in Communications; the Media Award the same year from the Press Club of Long Island; and several awards from the New York Association of Black Journalists.
Olojede was born in Nigeria in 1961, the 12th of 29 children. He lives with his wife, Amma, also a journalist, and their two children in Johannesburg.
Olojede left Newsday in December 2004.
Biographical material provided by Newsday and Pulitzer.org |
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