Salem Solomon is an award-winning multimedia reporter and editor with the Voice of America’s News Center.
Salem’s multimedia and data-driven projects include Hunger Across Africa, a project that won the Cowan Award for Humanitarian Reporting, Boko Haram: Terror Unmasked, Unrest: Ethiopia at a Crossroads, How Western DRC’s Ebola Outbreak Was Contained, Zimbabwe in Transition and How Long Have Africa’s Presidents Held Office?, which won second place at the 2016 African Media Awards.
Previously, she worked in the Africa Division, covering the latest news from across the continent. She started working at VOA with the Horn of Africa service while completing her master’s degree in journalism at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, where she was a teaching assistant. She has reported and edited stories online, and for radio broadcasts and TV in English, Amharic and Tigrigna.
Salem’s work has appeared in prominent news outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Tampa Bay Times and others. She researches trends in analytics and digital journalism. Her work focused on journalism innovation and fact-checking initiatives has appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, on Poynter Online and Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, and she has taught advanced reporting at the University of South Florida’s Department of Journalism and Digital Communication.
Before joining VOA, Salem was a contributing writer at the Tampa Bay Business Journal/American City Business Journals and an anchor for Newsy.com, an online news site. She also hosted Global Journalist, a radio show on international news with panels of journalists at the Missouri School of Journalism.
She was a board member at Columbia Access Television, the local community TV station in Columbia, Missouri, and volunteered at the local radio station, KOPN. There, she hosted music shows and worked on news programs and public service announcements. Before coming to the U.S., Salem was a news anchor for the English News Department at Eri-TV, a state-owned television station in Eritrea.
Salem is the founder and editor of Africa Talks, a multimedia website about Africa and the global African Diaspora and future training hub for African journalists.