Maria Ressa

Maria Ressa was born in Manila and moved to New Jersey as a child after her mother remarried. She went to Princeton, then returned to the Philippines on a Fulbright and stayed. She spent almost two decades at CNN, opening its bureaus in Manila and Jakarta and reporting on terrorism in South-East Asia, then ran the news division of the country's largest broadcaster.

In 2012 she and three other women journalists founded Rappler, an online news site that started with a dozen staff. When Rodrigo Duterte became president in 2016 and launched a campaign of killings against alleged drug users, Rappler counted the bodies, published the names, and traced the network of fake accounts that flooded social media with abuse against anyone who criticised the government. The abuse turned on her: she has said she received an average of ninety hate messages an hour at its height.

The state followed. Rappler's licence was ordered revoked. Ressa was charged with tax evasion, securities violations and cyber libel over an article published before the law existed, and was arrested twice in 2019. In June 2020 she was convicted of cyber libel and faced years in prison; she appealed and remained free on bail, and was acquitted on the tax charges in 2023. Throughout she kept publishing and kept turning up in court, insisting that the point was to be seen not to be intimidated.

She shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize with the Russian editor Dmitry Muratov, the first journalists to win it since 1935.