Judith Torrea
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Judith Torrea
Yahoo! International Fellow
judittha@stanford.edu
Freelance journalist, blogger and author
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
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Project: Develop a platform to provide support and training for, and bring together, the reporting of independent women bloggers in conflict zones.
When she was six years old, Judith Torrea took on the task of reading the newspaper to her grandfather, who lost his eyesight as a teenager in the Spanish Civil War. His addiction to the news taught her to dream of places far from their small village in the Basque mountains of Spain and ultimately led her to journalism. After graduating from the University of Navarra, she went to work for a local newspaper before moving on to El Mundo in Madrid and Euronews in France. In 1997, Torrea became an intern at The Texas Observer in Austin. Her first week on the job, she went to Cuidad Juarez, the city on the Mexico-Texas border that was beginning to experience waves of violence. Torrea ended up spending the next nine years in Texas and on the border, reporting for U.S. Spanish-language publications and European media outlets. She then moved to New York City, where she worked for El Diario Prensa and People en Español magazine. But she remained drawn to Juarez and moved back three years later to start a blog, "Ciudad Juarez, in the Shadow of Drug Trafficking," which has won numerous honors, including the 2010 Ortega y Gasset Prize, the Pulitzer Prize of the Spanish-speaking world.
