Deadline: 12-Sep-2025
The Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network is now accepting applications for its 2025–2026 fellowship program, offering journalists the opportunity to spend up to a year working on an in-depth or investigative ocean story.
The program aims to expand and diversify the global community of reporters, editors, and outlets conducting investigations and publishing deeply reported ocean stories, with a focus on overfishing and illegal fishing, marine protected areas, the rising temperature of the ocean and its impact on marine biodiversity and dependent communities, and efforts to restore and protect ecosystems such as coral reefs and kelp forests. Proposals on underreported topics are strongly encouraged, including deep-sea mining, marine energy generation, blue finance and carbon crediting, marine genetic resources and benefit-sharing, shipping, marine carbon dioxide removal and ocean geoengineering, aquaculture, marine protected areas, polar issues, fishmeal production, and more. Data projects using marine, scientific, and satellite data, as well as science-based projects that examine ocean systems, are a priority. Spaces are also reserved for investigations into transparency and governance, including the financial structures enabling environmental damage and unsustainable supply chains, flags and ports of convenience, government subsidies, monitoring, control and surveillance, fishing access agreements, tax loopholes, beneficial ownership, seafood supply chains, and illegal wildlife trade. The program particularly welcomes applications from the Global South, with a focus on Asia-Pacific, east Africa, and Latin America.
The fellowship will provide up to nine journalists with financial support, mentorship, training opportunities, and a community of peers. Fellows will receive guidance from the Pulitzer Center’s Environmental Investigations Unit and support from the Engagement team to amplify their work, connect with audiences, and measure impact. Applicants can be staff reporters or freelancers, and full-time fellows will receive a salary plus reporting expenses.
Selected fellows will work closely with their newsrooms and the program editors to produce compelling, impactful, and innovative stories, potentially through cross-border collaborations. Shortlisted candidates will be interviewed in October 2025, with the fellowship beginning in January 2026.
The deadline for applications is September 12, 2025, at 11:59 p.m. EDT. An “Ask Me Anything” webinar will be held on August 27, 2025, with the Ocean Editor and a former fellow to discuss the fellowship experience.
For more information, visit Pulitzer Center.
