Rodney Sieh

Journalist and author, Rodney D. Sieh, is the editor and publisher of Liberia’s largest independent print and online daily, where groundbreaking reporting has brought down senior government figures and exposed corruption at all levels.

Rodney was a 2016-2017 Gordon N. Fisher / JHR Fellow at Massey College, Toronto, Canada, part of the William Southam Journalism Fellowship. A graduate in media studies from Hunter College in New York City, Rodney has won a number of awards including Journalist of the Year and Media House of the Year in Liberia. In 2014, he was named by Reporters Without Borders as one of its 100 “Information Heroes”, and FrontPageAfrica received the TV5Monde Prize for Press Freedom. In 2019, he received the X-International Press Freedom Prize, presented in Malaga, Spain. Rodney is co-founder of New Narratives, the non-profit that supports investigative journalism at leading independent newsrooms in West Africa. New Narratives has been a key partner with FrontPage Africa in many of the media outlet’s biggest stories. One New Narratives/FrontPage Africa collaboration made reporter Mae Azango into an internationally renowned journalist. Her reporting on female genital mutilation brought global attention to the cruel ritual, eventually forcing the government to act.

The newspaper has been successful in reporting stories about justice, striking mineral workers, poverty, and prostitution – stories that had never been covered by other Liberian publications, whose staff regularly accepted bribes from politicians. FrontPage Africa did such an effective job of exposing human rights violations and corruption that Rodney was sent to prison. In August 2013, he was sentenced to 5,000 years in jail, and FrontPageAfrica was shut down due to his failure to pay a libel award of $1.5million, won by a former government minister who sued him and his paper after the publication of a government audit.