People Column

SCHOLARS

Francis Tang, the David R. Schweisberg Memorial Scholarship winner in 2023, has been hired as news reporter at the Japan Times. Tang has an OPC Foundation fellowship in the Reuters bureau in Tokyo.

Anna Jean Kaiser, the Sally Jacobsen Fellowship winner in 2021, celebrated her one-year anniversary as the Florida correspondent for Bloomberg, where she covers the business and politics. Before her time at Bloomberg, she was a staff reporter on the business desk at the Miami Herald. She previously freelanced in Brazil.

After two and a half years at the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Annie Todd, winner of the S&P Global Award for Economic and Business Reporting in 2020, is headed to the Cascadia Daily News in Bellingham, Washington, where she will cover criminal justice.

Wall Street Journal reporter Alexander Saeedy, the Fritz Beebe Fellowship winner in 2015, is now covering banking for the paper. He previously covered credit markets, financial distress and sovereign debt for the Journal. Before that, he covered corporate bankrupt for Reorg, and was a senior reporter for Leveraged Commentary & Data. Before covering finance and economics in the U.S., he was a reporter in Brussels, covering European politics. His fellowship for the OPC Foundation placed him at the Reuters’ bureau in Brussels at the height of the Greek debt crisis.

AWARDS

In addition to winning this year’s Peter Jennings Award from the OPC, the FRONTLINE (PBS) documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. OPC Governor Raney Aronson-Rath was part of the team that produced the documentary, produced in collaboration with The Associated Press, marking her sixth OPC award since 2015 for her work with FRONTLINE (PBS), and several citations over the same period. 20 Days in Mariupol’s production team includes Michelle Mizner, Derl McCrudden and Mstyslav Chernov. Chernov was also part of the team that won the 2022 Hal Boyle Award for AP coverage of Mariupol.

OPC member Alice Driver won a J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Award in the Work-in-Progress category for her book, The Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company. The award comes with a $25,000 prize, presented by the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Krithika Varagur, an OPC member and the winner of the Sally Jacobsen Fellowship in 2019, won the OPC’s Madeline Dane Ross Award for her piece in Harper’s Magazine, which follows the story of “what happens when you fall in love, but your genes are incompatible.” That article, titled “Love in the Time of Sickle Cell Disease,” involved a year of reporting from Nigeria.

UPDATES

The New York Times has hired OPC member Cassandra Vinograd as a news editor in London. She has reported news from Africa, Europe and the Middle East for almost 20 years, starting with The Associated Press in West Africa, and later working as an editor with The Wall Street Journal in Brussels and then in London, where she has freelanced and covered defense, foreign affairs and politics for the AP. She also previously worked for 60 Minutes and NBC News and was part of the NBC team that won a 2014 Peabody Award for coverage of ISIS and Emmy nominations for coverage of the 2016 attacks in Brussels and Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.

OPC member Mady Camara wrote a piece for The New York Times on March 24, along with colleague Ruth Maclean, about the presidential election in Senagal that “many young people see as a chance to overhaul the political and economic order.” The election was beset by sudden changes, with incumbent President Macky Sall calling off the election three weeks beforehand, then reversing that decision, and releasing a rival, Ousmane Sonko, from jail along with a man Sonko was supporting for president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye. Faye won the election, with early counts showing he had garnered 54 percent of the vote.

Prue Clarke, an OPC member who is co-founder and executive director of New Narratives, a women-led organization that supports local news and independent journalism, noted that the group supported an investigation in Liberia, published on March 22, into the use of cleaner cookstoves to improve health and reduce environmental impact from cookpots on open fires. “Cookpots are often used in confined areas with little ventilation, exposing families to air pollution which causes diseases such as asthma, lung disease, pneumonia, and cancer,” wrote reporter Tina S. Mehnpaine, with support from New Narratives.

Anand Gopal, a club member and past OPC Award winner, wrote a longform story for The New Yorker’s March 18 issue about a U.S.-supported prison camp in Syria where tens of thousands of survivors and supporters of ISIS have are being held indefinitely in horrific conditions. Gopal wrote that about fifty thousand people, more than half of them children, are currently imprisoned in Al-Hol, a place that the United Nations has called a “blight on the conscience of humanity.” He described atrocious conditions at the prison, which is effectively under the control of its ISIS inmates. including assassination squads, makeshift Sharia courts where judges order floggings and executions, and bodies of murdered detainees regularly turning up in ditches. Gopal is a four-time OPC Award winner, most recently winning the 2021 Ed Cunningham Award for his examination of how Afghan women have been affected by waves of war.

OPC member James Brooke will speak about Ukraine and Russia on April 9 for an online chat at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Berkshire Community College. Brooke lived and worked in Kyiv and Moscow for a total of 14 years as correspondent for The New York Times, Voice of America and Bloomberg, among others. The event will begin at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Registration is free, and the program will be recorded and posted on the OLLI YouTube channel afterward.

OPC member Judith Matloff has been working as a consultant for an HBO pilot comedy about war correspondents. The show-runner for the project is actress Amanda Peet.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

Neil Hickey, a past OPC member and awards judge, died on March 22 in Mahopac, New York at the age of 92. Hickey started his career in journalism in Baltimore, serving for three years as a naval officer aboard a destroyer during and after the Korean War, and then resuming his career as a reporter in New York. He reported from Vietnam, the 1991 war in Kuwait, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Cuba, the Baltics, Northern Ireland, Singapore, and around the U.S. He was New York bureau chief for TV Guide, and served as editor-at-large for the Columbia Journalism Review and was adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was welcomed as a new member of the OPC in 1962. Hickey was a judge for the OPC Awards for a number of years spanning from about 2007 to 2019. His book, Adventures in the Scribblers Trade, was published in February 2015. His wife, Lisa Lane, a champion chess player, died on Feb. 28 at the age of 90.