People Column

SCHOLARS

Dani Morera Trettin, the 2024 Flora Lewis/Jacqueline Albert-Simon Scholarship winner, landed his first byline in Reuters in June after covering the Meta Conversations conference in Brazil and writing about the latest WhatsApp AI features for businesses. Since then, he has filed stories from Brazil on Olympics news, opposition to the tightening abortion ban, Sao Paulo’s Japanese neighborhood, and sharks that tested positive for cocaine. In a post on LinkedIn, he thanked Katie Paul, a former OPC Foundation scholar who won the 2007 Irene Corbally Kuhn Scholarship and is now with Reuters in New York, for “all the editorial and emotional support in the process.”

Cadence Quaranta, the David R. Schweisberg Scholarship winner in 2022, is starting as a reporter for TaiwanPlus, an English-language media new site based in Taipei. She has spent the last year in Taiwan on a Fulbright grant.

Jacob Kushner, who won the OPC Foundation’s Nathan S. Bienstock Memorial Scholarship in 2013, is joining the Columbia Journalism School faculty as the Newsday/Laventhol Visiting Assistant Professor of Journalism. He will teach reporting and long-form magazine writing in the fall semester. An award-winning freelance journalist, Kushner is based in Nairobi. He had an OPC Foundation fellowship in the AP bureau in Nairobi. In May, the OPC and Grand Central Publishing hosted a discussion of his new book, Look Away at the Rizzoli Bookstore in Manhattan.

J.p. Lawrence, the H.L. Stevenson Fellowship winner in 2015, is now a reporter at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis covering southwest Minnesota. In a tweet expressing his excitement on his first day at the new job, he said it was “wild to have a childhood dream come true.” He spent more than six years as a down-range reporter with Stars and Stripes. Lawrence had an OPC Foundation fellowship with AP in Uganda.

Artis Henderson, the 2010 Irene Corbally Kuhn Scholarship winner, has been named a 2024 Fulbright-National Geographic Award recipient. She will spend eight months in Shark Bay in Western Australia studying marine stromatolites, the world’s oldest living microorganisms. Her project will include the voices of the Malgana people – traditional custodians of Gatharragudu, the Malgana name for Shark Bay. Marine stromatolites play a key role in understanding both early conditions on Earth and the potential for life on Mars and are in danger of disappearing within the next 30 years due to climate change. Henderson had an OPC Foundation fellowship with AP in Dakar.

The 2005 David R. Schweisberg Scholarship winner, Emily Steel, and her colleagues Sydney Ember and Mike Baker at The New York Times, won the Michael A. Dornheim Award at the National Press Awards for their insider look at issues facing air traffic controllers in their investigative piece, “Flight Risks.”

Edward Wong, an author and New York Times correspondent who won the 1998 David R. Schweisberg Scholarship, published a book in June about mysteries in his personal family history as a lens to examine 80 years of history in China. The Atlantic named At the Edge of Empire as a top summer read, and it ranked as the number one release in Chinese history on Amazon.

AWARDS

OPC Governor Beth Knobel has won the 2024 Diversity in Journalism History Research Award for her history paper “Breaking Barriers: Ed Bradley’s Early Years in Radio.” The award, given by the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), honors an outstanding paper in journalism or mass communication history that address issues of inclusion and the study of marginalized groups and topics. Judges said her submission “wove oral history, archival broadcast media, and traditional print journalism sources into a vivid narrative of overcoming structural inequality in the radio industry.” Knobel will receive a cash prize during a gala on Aug. 7 at the AEJMC National Convention in Philadelphia.

UPDATES

OPC Governor Rod Nordland spoke on a July 11 podcast that centers on a type of brain tumor, glioblastoma, which Nordland has grappled with since he had a seizure in India in the summer of 2019. The podcast, Glioblastoma AKA GBM Podcast, covered his storied career in journalism, his personal battle with the daunting diagnosis, and his advocacy for disability awareness. Nordland wrote about his experiences with the disease in Waiting for the Monsoon, which was published by Mariner Books in March this year. He was Kabul bureau chief for The New York Times and worked as a foreign correspondent in more than 150 countries. Previously, he was Newsweek’s chief foreign correspondent, serving as Baghdad bureau chief from 2003 to 2005. His work has won the OPC’s 1999 Ed Cunningham Award for reporting from Kosovo for Newsweek, a Pulitzer Prize for news reporting, two George Polk awards, and many other honors. He is also the author of The Lovers: Afghanistan’s Romeo & Juliet.

Sewell Chan, an OPC member who has served as editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune since October 2021, has announced he will join Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism as the next executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. In a post on LinkedIn, he said he was excited to take the helm of the CJR, which he believes “has the potential to advocate for journalists worldwide as they confront pressing challenges – technological disruption, authoritarianism, misinformation, attacks on the free press – while explaining to the public why journalism matters more than ever.” He will join CJR on Sept. 16.

A book by OPC member and photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg is slated to be released on Sept. 3. Legacy of Lies, El Salvador 1981-1984 will feature a series of black and white images that were not published while he was covering the Salvadoran War for TIME magazine. “The book, beautifully printed by Kehrer Verlag, has essays by Alma Guillermoprieto, Jon Lee Anderson, Carlos Dada and Scott Wallace,” Nickelsberg said.

OPC member Alice Driver will also have a book published on Sept. 3. The Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company is an investigation into toxic labor practices at Tyson Foods, the largest meatpacking company in America, and follows the story of immigrant workers who fought back. Driver won a J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Award in the Work-in-Progress category for her book earlier this year.

OPC member Dian Zhang will speak at the Asian American Journalist Association (AAJA) convention in Austin, Texas next week on pitfalls and biases in AI tools. Zhang, a senior data reporter for USA Today, uses data and quantitative analysis to tell stories and weaves news reporting with technical skills such as Python programming, scraping, and data visualizations. She has covered a wide range of topics including business and finance, crime and justice, politics and more.

Peter Schwarztein, an OPC member and author who serves as Global Fellow at the Wilson Center and fellow at the Center for Climate and Security, is slated to publish a book in late September. The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence from Island Press will cover some of his most harrowing experiences while covering climate conflicts, including pursuit by kidnappers, beatings, police detention, and getting kicked out of some countries. He visited Iraqi towns where ISIS used drought as a recruiting tool, interviewed desperate farmers who turned to piracy in Bangladesh, and grappled with security forces who blocked him from a dam along the Nile that brought Egypt and Ethiopia to the brink of war.

André Liohn, who won the OPC’s Robert Capa Gold Medal in 2012 for his work in Libya, spoke at the Bronx Documentary Center on July 27 after a screening of a documentary, You Are Not a Soldier, that focuses on Liohn’s experiences as a war photographer. He held a Q&A session with attendees and discussed current risks for photographers working in an increasingly fractured industry as well as the importance of documentary work. His photos have appeared in Der Spiegel, The New York Times, Newsweek, The Guardian, El Pais, TIME, Stern and more. His video work has been broadcast on BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera English and France 24, among others.