Andras Petho, Hungary, is co-founder and director of Direkt36, an investigative reporting center in Hungary.
Petho spent several years at Origo, one of the largest news portals in Hungary, which he left in 2014 after coming under pressure for pursuing a politically sensitive story. He also worked for the BBC World Service in London in 2004 and 2005 as a producer.
In 2012 and 2013, he was a Humphrey Fellow at the University of Maryland. As part of his fellowship, he spent eight months with The Washington Post’s investigative unit working on data-driven projects about gun violence: Sea of Steel, about weapons recovered by the police, and an analysis of the ShotSpotter system in D.C.
In Hungary, Petho has been reporting on corruption and the rise of Viktor Orbán, the country’s powerful prime minister. He has twice won the Soma Prize, the prestigious annual award dedicated to investigative journalism in Hungary.
He was a World Press Institute fellow in 2008 and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2019/20.
The Hungarian government is waging war on the press. Here's how ICIJ member Andras Petho is responding.
