Twenty inspirational women journalists

To mark International Women's Day, we have compiled a list of inspirational women journalists with the help of Twitter followers of @journalismnews.

Here is the list – in no particular order – which does not include many of the inspiring women nominated.

• Marie Colvin

Marie Colvin was an award-winning Sunday Times journalist who died last month while covering the siege of Homs in Syria. She lost the sight in her left eye while reporting in Sri Lanka.

• Anna Politkovskaya  

Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist, author, and human rights activist who was assassinated in 2006. She was known for her opposition to the Chechen conflict and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

• Veronica Guerin

Veronica Guerin was an Irish crime reporter who continued investigating, despite numerous death threats. She was killed in 1996 by drug lords and is immortalised in a film.

• Ida B. Wells

Born to slaves in 1862, Wells was an African-American journalist and anti-lynching campaigner. She died in 1931.

• Martha Gellhorn

American journalist Martha Gellhorn, who died in 1998, was one of the first female war correspondents. Gellhorn is widely credited with changing the face of war reporting, giving accounts of the suffering of real people.

• Lyse Doucet

A senior BBC correspondent who has been based in Sierra Leone, Afghanistan during the Soviet troop withdrawal in the late eighties, Jordan and Jerusalem. She played a leading role in the BBC's coverage of the Arab spring, reporting from Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

• Hala Jaber

Hala Jaber is British-Lebanese journalist currently writing for the Sunday Times. She was awarded the Amnesty International Journalist of the Year Award in 2003, has twice been named Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the British Press Awards and has co-won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for her work in Iraq.

• Kate Adie

A former chief news correspondent for BBC News. She became well known for reporting from war zones around the world, including from Tiananmen Square during the 1989 Beijing massacre.

• Caroline Wyatt

Caroline Wyatt is the BBC defence correspondent. She reported from Baghdad during the 1998 bombing of Iraq and covered the 1999 Kosovo conflict. In 2001 and 2002 she reported on the war in Afghanistan. She also covered the Iraq war in spring 2003 as an embedded journalist with the British troops in and around Basra.

• Rachel Carson

In the late 1950s, American campaigning environmental journalist Rachel Carson researched the conservation and the environmental problems caused by synthetic pesticides. The result was Silent Spring, which highlighted environmental concerns. She died in 1964, two years after Silent Spring.

• Eve Arnold

Eve Arnold, who died earlier this year, was an American photojournalist whose subjects included Marilyn Monroe. She is also known for memorable pictures taken in China, Russia, South Africa and Afghanistan.

• Nellie Bly

Born Elizabeth Cochran in 1864 she went pen name Nellie Bly. In 1889 she set out to beat Phileas Fogg, the fictional hero of Jules Verne's "Around the World in Eighty Days", travelling around the world in 72 days.

She pretended to be insane to expose the poor treatment in asylums and campaigned to find homes for poor children.

• Alex Crawford

Sky News correspondent Alex Crawford has won a number of awards in the past year. Crawford, a mother-of -four, was widely praised for her live on-scene reporting of the Battle of Tripoli.

• Lindsey Hilsum

Lindsey Hilsum is Channel 4 News international editor and has won a number of awards. She reported from Belgrade in 1999 when NATO bombed Serbia, from Baghdad during the 2003 US invasion, and covered the Fallujah assault in November 2004.

More recently she reported from Egypt and Bahrain following the start of the Arab spring.

• Sue Lloyd-Roberts  

Sue Lloyd-Roberts is an Emmy Award-winning BBC journalist, best known for human rights reports from North Korea.

• Clare Sambrook  

Winner of the Paul Foot Award and the Bevins Prize, freelance journalist and author Clare Sambrook is best known her reports on the detention of asylum seekers' children. She writes regularly for the OurKingdom section of openDemocracy.

• Frances Harrison

Frances Harrison is a former BBC correspondent, who has worked in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Iran. She has juggled motherhood and foreign reporting, concealing her pregnancy fearing she would not be given interesting assignments.

• Mary Stott  

Mary Stott, who has died in 2002, was the first editor of the Guardian women's page. In her 15-year tenure, from 1957 to 1972, she is credited with inventing a platform for women's voices and concerns, and used it to further such causes and campaigns.

• Ida Tarbell  

Ida Tarbell, who died in 1944, was an investigative journalist who is best known for single-handedly taking on Rockefeller and Standard Oil Company in her 1904 book.

• Fatuma Noor  

Kenyan journalist Fatuma Noor was named CNN MultiChoice African Journalist 2011 at the age of 24.

She won the accolade for her investigative three-part series on the "Al-Shabaab". The three-part investigative documentary followed the stories of a group of young men travelling to Somalia to fight for the country's Islamist group.

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