Author: OPC of America

Nora Ephron, an essayist and humorist in the Dorothy Parker mold (only smarter and funnier, some said) who became one of her era’s most successful screenwriters and filmmakers, making romantic comedy hits like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry Met Sally,” died Tuesday night in Manhattan. She was 71.

Anthony Shadid, the Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporter who died in Syria this year, had heated arguments with his editors just prior to his final trip into the country, a cousin of Shadid’s says, and told his wife that were he to die The New York Times would be to blame.

Syria has until recently been a country led by the cultivated, English-speaking President Bashar al-Assad who, along with his British-born wife, Asma, was helping usher in a new era of openness and prosperity. That second impression is no accident with the help of high-priced public relations advisers who had worked in the Clinton, Bush and Thatcher administrations, the president and his family have sought over the past five years to portray themselves in the Western media as accessible, progressive and even glamorous.

Jeffrey Gettleman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent, says he travels with “a small militia” whenever he reports from Somalia, a country afflicted by armed insurgency, poverty, and hunger.  Gettleman spoke to a crowd of about 100 at the Half King pub in Manhattan on May 22 in the first event in the new CPJ discussion series, “CPJ Debrief.”

Paul E. Steiger will step down at the end of the year as the editor in chief and chief executive of ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative news organization that he started nearly five years ago.