Hi, it's Aaron. This week on the long form podcast, we're talking to winners of the George

Polk Award for journalism. It's something we've done for the last couple years on the show.

This episode, I talked to Laurie Hinnon from the AP. So Laurie is based in Paris,

but she worked with a team, including Mr. Slough Churnoff and others that she talks about in the

interview, who were reporting from within Ukraine, specifically within the city of Mariapol,

as it fell. Eventually, they became the last journalist who were there. So this is Laurie Hinnon

from the AP. Welcome Laurie Hinnon to the long form podcast. Thank you.

I wonder, you are a winner of this year's Polk Awards for work you did with the AP and some other

journalists in Ukraine. I wonder if you could just sort of briefly tell us like who was in this

team other than you? Our team was Mr. Slough Churnoff, Vasylisa Stepanenko, and Yevgeny Maloletka,

and me, and the three of them started out in Eastern Ukraine, which is as it happens where all

of them are from, and they knew even before the war started that Eastern Ukraine was going to be

where all of the action was going to take place. As a editor and reporter at the AP,

do you have teams like this sort of in the field in different parts of the world at all times?

It depends. We have teams like this when there are specific events. They're not going to be

outweeding for stuff to happen, but Yevgeny and Mr. Slough had worked together for years,

beginning, actually, we have possibly even predating Russia's initial invasion in 2014.

Vasylisa is from Kharkiv, and this was her first experience as a journalist for an international

news organization. She'd worked as a local journalist at Kharkiv. She's just 22 years old and has

packed essentially a career as worth of experience into the last year of her life.

So you're in Paris. They're in Ukraine in Marriottville. Am I pronouncing that correctly?

Marriottville? Yeah, initially I was actually in Ukraine. I was in Kiev.

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