Time magazine names Khashoggi, other journalists as ‘Person of the Year’

Murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and other persecuted journalists were named Time magazine's 2018 “Person of the Year” on Tuesday, an annual profile on an individual or group that has proven influential over the previous 12 months.

By choosing Khashoggi, who was murdered at his country's consulate in Istanbul in October , United States magazine Time awarded its “Person of the Year” title posthumously for the first time.

Khashoggi will grace one of four covers of the magazine, which presents its choice of persecuted journalists through the theme of “the guardians and the war on truth”.

The three other covers feature journalists that the magazine says it chose “for taking great risks in pursuit of greater truths, for the imperfect but essential quest for facts that are central to civil discourse, for speaking up and for speaking out”.

Philippine journalist Maria Ressa has chronicled the violent war on drugs and extrajudicial killings of President Rodrigo Duterte, whose administration has threatened to send the reporter to jail for 10 years on allegations of tax fraud.

Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo are currently imprisoned in Myanmar for their reporting on the treatment of the country's Rohingya Muslim minority .

The staff of the Capital Gazette in the US city of Annapolis, including five members killed in a mass shooting in the paper's newsroom in June, also share this year's title.

Time has awarded the title every year since 1927.
It said in a 2002 publication that the honour went to a person, group, idea or object that “for better or for worse… has done the most to influence the events of the year”.