He has chaired the Committee to Protect Journalists and currently directs International Programs at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. At the journalism school he also directs the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, inaugurated in 1939, which annually recognizes outstanding coverage of the Americas (the Western hemisphere) by journalists based there.Working for Newsday in 1984, Friedman, fellow reporter Dennis Bell, and photographer Ozier Muhammad created a series of articles "on the plight of the hungry in Africa", namely the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia, for which they won the annual Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1985.