People Column

SCHOLARS

Two former OPC Foundation scholars were among the winners of the recently announced Society of Professional Journalism Best in Business Awards for 2024. Alex Saeedy, the first Fritz Beebe Fellowship winner in 2015, won the Banking/Finance large division award for an article he wrote for The Wall Street Journal entitled, “Overworked: How Wall Street Pushes Young Bankers to the Edge.” Jacob Adelman, the H.L. Stevenson Scholarship awardee in 2005, won the Investing/Markets medium division for the article “Investing Annuities” for Barron’s.

Olivia Carville, the Roy Rowan Scholarship winner in 2018, has been working on a documentary about online child safety for the last two years that is showing from April 4 to 10 at DCTV’s Firehouse cinema in Lower Manhattan. The screening on April 7 includes a Q&A with Carville and Bloomberg investigations editor Robert Friedman. Can’t Look Away, directed by award-winning filmmakers Matthew O’Neill and Perri Peltz, follows a team of lawyers battling tech giants on behalf of families whose children suffered devastating harm linked to social media. The screening is sponsored by the New York Financial Writers’ Association.

UPDATES

OPC Governor Azmat Khan co-wrote a piece for The New York Times on March 4 with colleague John Ismay detailing the Trump administration’s moves to close the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office, which handles policy surrounding risks to non-combatants during airstrikes and other operations, and the related Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which deals with training and procedures. Citing three defense officials, Khan and Ismay wrote that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was preparing to eliminate jobs for more than 160 Defense Department employees dedicated to mitigating and investigating civilian casualties. Khan has won multiple OPC awards and other accolades for her extensive reporting on harm to civilians during U.S. military operations around the world.

OPC member Judith Matloff recently published a year-long investigation into a group of white investors who promised Native tribes big windfalls from legal cannabis. The deals fell apart and the tribes are still picking up the pieces. The story was co-published by The Guardian and High Country News magazine, and received support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

An artificial intelligence company asked a federal court in California on March 24 to dismiss a lawsuit brought by a group of writers that includes OPC member Charles Graeber. Graeber, along with Andrea Bartz and Kirk Wallace Johnson, sued Anthropic in August last year, claiming the company used pirated versions of their works and others to teach the chatbot Claude to respond to human prompts. Anthropic told the court that their use of the authors’ work qualifies as fair use, because it transforms them into something new. Graeber and other plaintiffs have asked the court to represent a larger group of authors whose work they allege were also used inappropriately.

Jeanne Carstensen, an award-winning author, freelance journalist and OPC member based in San Francisco, spoke to WEKF public radio in Baton Rouge’s “Talk Louisiana” on March 31 about her new book, A Greek Tragedy. The book reconstructs the deadly shipwreck of an overloaded boat full of refugees from Syria and other countries in October 2015 near the Greek island of Lesbos. She said during the interview that 76 people drowned in that incident, but more than 30,000 migrants have died in the Mediterranean since 2014. She spoke to many survivors, including “a loan officer from Kabul, and an artist from Syria, and a psychologist from Syria who was about to open a kindergarten when war broke out in that country,” she said. “We just don’t get to know who these people are because we see them in media, and they look bedraggled when we see them getting out of a boat or crossing a border. So in this book I’m able to introduce people to these full human beings.” A Greek Tragedy was published by One Signal Publishers on March 25.

OPC member Sewell Chan, the executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, wrote a piece about the March 31 shuttering of the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit newsroom founded 36 years ago. He said CPI’s collapse over the last year followed a budget shortfall, departure of its chief executive and editor in chief, and a failed attempt to merge with The Markup. CPI has ceased publishing and might send its archives to the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), an anti-corruption watchdog group. Chan wrote that CPI’s most recent piece, “Forty Acres and a Lie,” was co-published in June 2024 with Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal. The project reviewed Reconstruction-era documents to reveal how formerly enslaved people were given land toward the end of the Civil War, and then had the land seized back less than two years later. The project won awards for its innovative reporting, including use of artificial intelligence tools.

Lila Hassan, a freelance journalist and OPC member based in Brooklyn, wrote for the news website Drop Site on March 4 about journalists’ efforts in Gaza to collect evidence of war crimes before they are destroyed. She profiled Soliman Hijjy, a 37-year-old freelance visual journalist who has been collecting drone footage, photography and videos, and conducting his interviews with survivors into an archive with backups scattered across many locations that he said was intended “to remember details of history you’d expect to be erased.” Hassan cited bans in Israel and Egypt on unembedded international journalists and investigators into Gaza, and the quiet removal of journalists’ posts from Gaza on X and Meta platforms.

Lynzy Billing, winner of the OPC’s 2022 Ed Cunningham Award, will premier a new film in New York on April 28 that focuses on healthcare in Afghanistan through the eyes of medical professionals who have worked through decades of war and its aftermath. The film, titled Long Night, reveals how heathcare continues to operate “in a society often overlooked by the media – and where hospitals are busier now than ever, treating victims of explosive remnants of war, many of them children.” After its North American premier in New York, which will feature a Q&A with Billing, it will be shown in Washington, D.C. on April 30 and Los Angeles on May 4. Billing won her OPC award for The Night Raids, a film she discussed during an OPC program at Columbia in October 2023.