People Column
SCHOLARS
Jared Mitovich, winner of the Emanuel R. Freedman Scholarship this year, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in May, will join The Wall Street Journal as a full-time news associate based in New York this fall. He will join Christopher Kuo, the 2025 Seymour and Audrey Topping Scholarship winner, who has also been announced as news associate for the Journal. Both will start there in September.
Rafael Escalera Montoto, winner of the 2025 Jerry Flint Fellowship for International Business Reporting, is currently in Mexico City for his OPC Foundation fellowship with Reuters. He already landed a byline on April 10 in a piece co-written with colleague Anthony Esposito about the Bank of Mexico’s reaction to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which board members said would add uncertainty to inflation forecasts, and a greater possibility of a further exchange rate depreciation and economic weakening.
Three OPC Foundation scholars are among the New York Times 2025 fellows. Kailyn Rhone, the 2023 Reuters Fellowship winner, Sonia Rao, the 2024 Freedman Scholarship winner, and Simar Bajaj, the 2024 winner of The Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in memory of I.F. Stone, have been selected for the Times’ one-year Fellowship program starting in June. Rhone will be the paper’s business fellow, Rao will report from the National Desk about disability issues in America, and Bajaj will focus on health reporting.
Carlos Garcia, the 2025 Harper’s Magazine Scholarship winner, has been hired by The Wall Street Journal as a production assistant on its daily podcast “The Journal.” An audio producer focused on business reporting, he has been covering how U.S. migration affects the economy, a theme he also reported on for NPR.
Kate Selig, winner of the 2024 Irene Corbally Kuhn Scholar Award, has been selected as a reporting fellow for the 2025 Journalism Program of the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE). FASPE annually grants up to 90 fellowships to graduate students and early-career professionals in the fields of Journalism, Business, Clergy, Design & Technology, Law, and Medicine. Fellows participate in a two-week program in Germany and Poland. Selig is a reporting fellow on the National Desk at The New York Times, where she covers breaking news with a focus on extreme weather and climate.
Meena Venkataramanan, the Emanuel R. Freedman Scholarship winner in 2021, wrote a review for The Washington Post on April 12 on Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara. In the book, Vara collaborated with a chatbot to write essays on digital technology, surveillance capitalism and her family’s immigrant experience. “Across 16 chapters, Vara journeys through the evolution of the internet, ethical quandaries surrounding AI, and her own life with her characteristically piercing, yet unadorned prose,“ Venkataramanan wrote. Venkataramanan also wrote a piece for the Public Books site on April 17 about a neighborhood of London known as Banglatown, or Brick Lane, and its multicultural history as a refuge for Huguenots, Jews, and Bangladeshis.
UPDATES
OPC Vice President Sandra Stevenson joined Education Week as managing editor, overseeing visuals and immersive experiences in February. She previously was deputy director of photography at The Washington Post, where she managed a team of photo editors covering international, climate and health news. Over her career of more than two decades she was associate director of photography at CNN, assistant photo editor and picture editor at The New York Times. At the Times, she supervised digital photo editors on the news desk and contributed to the “Race/Related” newsletter and projects such as “Gender,” “This Is 18,” and “Overlooked.” In a welcome message Beth Frerking, editor-in-chief of Education Week, said staff was excited about “leveraging Sandra’s creativity, her strong journalism chops, and her dedication to mentoring and helping guide colleagues’ career growth. And we welcome – especially in these busy times – what several colleagues described as Sandra’s preternatural ability to stay calm under pressure.” Separately, Stevenson spoke and presented her work at the Women Street Photographers Festival on April 12, in a presentation titled “Beyond the Frame: Developing Photo Projects that Get Published.”
OPC member Steve Herman, chief national correspondent for Voice of America, wrote a piece for the April-May issue of the Foreign Service Journal on the silencing of colleagues and “de facto destruction” of the international news service. He called efforts to silence the VOA “nothing less than a betrayal of the ideals that gave birth to the institution and made it relevant throughout World War II, the Cold War and the decades after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.” On April 22, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s effort to scuttle the news service, and ordered that VOA journalists be allowed to resume their jobs.
OPC Governor Marc Lacey, managing editor of The New York Times, will participate in the paper’s Well Festival on May 7. The day-long event highlights reporting on health and wellness topics, and features mainstage interviews between Times journalists and health industry experts.
OPC member Ali Velshi, host and chief correspondent for MSNBC, has been working on a book that is slated to come out later this year. Recent website biographies about Velshi promoting speaking engagements have stated his book, Open Space: How The Second Great Space Race Will Shape Our Future, to be published by Knopf, will explore the implications of the new space race, focusing on its economic and military benefits. Velshi is author of Gimme My Money Back and co-author with Christine Romans of How to Speak Money. His most recent book, Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy, was published by St. Martin’s Press in May last year.
OPC member Vivienne Walt wrote a profile on April 16 for TIME magazine about Duma Boko, who was elected President of Botswana in what she called a “seismic election upset” in October last year. She wrote that the 55-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer ousted the party that had ruled for nearly six decades since its independence from the United Kingdom. Walt said voter frustration with political corruption and flagging global diamond prices set the stage for his victory. Her profile was part of a TIME roundup of “100 Most Influential People of 2025.” Walk writes for TIME and FORTUNE from Paris.
Dana Thomas, an OPC member and freelancer based in Paris, reported for The New York Times in article published digitally on March 25 that appeared in print on April 1, about an exhibition at the Louvre-Lens in France that examines the relationship between art and fashion, including artists’ clothing and what they illustrate about their place in society. “The Art of Dressing: Dressing Like an Artist” features 200 artworks and fashion items and runs through July 21. Thomas wrote that the show explores clothing and gender identity, with pieces on writer George Sand and Andy Warhol, as well as pieces from Louise Abbéma and Georges Achille-Fould’s “shocking” 1893 portrait of her mentor, Rosa Bonheur wearing brown pants and a smock.
OPC member Keith Richburg wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post on April 7 about President Donald Trump’s use of name changes as a political tool, and how the move has apparently empowered other conservative global leaders to follow suit. He said Trump’s executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” and the stripping of Alaska’s Indigenous name of Denali as Mount McKinley, echoes the conservative Australian opposition leader Peter Dutton’s promises to remove Aboriginal names at Australian military bases, and a movement in New Zealand’s Parliament to ban the use of the country’s Indigenous Māori name, Aotearoa. “Trump seems to enjoy the name game, and he’s inspiring fellow autocrats and would-be autocrats to join in,” Richburg wrote.
PEOPLE REMEMBERED
Richard Bernstein, an author and former correspondent for TIME and The New York Times who attended and spoke at many OPC events and shared expertise on Asia and Europe, died on March 31 in New York at the age of 80. Bernstein started writing about Asia for TIME magazine in 1973, and opened the magazine’s first bureau in China as Beijing bureau chief in 1979. He started working at the Times In 1982, and during his tenure there he served as bureau chief for the United Nations, Paris and Berlin, and as national cultural correspondent and book critic. In an OPC program that gathered Hong Kong correspondents in December 2018, Bernstein expressed nostalgia for his years there, saying Westerners who became journalists after studying Mandarin and China at the time formed a fellowship of “China watchers,” adding that “it never stopped thrilling me to just be in this place.” A recap and video of a 2018 panel on the future of Taiwan that he participated in is available here.