People Column
SCHOLARS
Sonia A. Rao, winner of the 2024 Emanuel R. Freedman Scholarship, has concluded her internship in Nairobi, Kenya with Reuters News Agency. In a post on LinkedIn, she said that over her three-month stint there, she wrote and reported on the impeachment of Kenya’s deputy president, deteriorating Somalia-Ethiopia relations, Somaliland’s elections and more. “I pitched several features, including one that allowed me to travel to the coast and interview Kenyan villagers who have turned to seaweed farming as climate change has decimated other industries. I contributed reporting to big breaking news on the killing of Ugandan Olympian runner Rebecca Cheptegei, the Adani Group’s presence in Kenya, a suicide bombing in Mogadishu, and more.”
Trisha Mukherjee, the Stan Swinton Scholarship winner for 2024, has embarked on a reporting trip for The New York Times that will take her to Kenya, Madagascar, and Mauritius, where she will be traveling with Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof. “I’ll be reporting on topics from period poverty in the informal settlements of Nairobi to climate change in Madagascar’s coastal communities,” she wrote. To follow her updates from the field, check out her Instagram account, @trisha_writes__.
AWARDS
Hind Hassan, a member of the VICE News team that won the OPC’s 2019 David Kaplan Award, received the Neal Conan Prize for Excellence in Journalism in November. The annual award, now in its second year, comes with a $50,000 award and honors “extraordinary work embodying the spirit of public good.” A release about the announcement said that Hassan’s “fearless and thoughtful reporting for VICE News, Al Jazeera and Sky News on conflicts, humanitarian crises, and significant global stories aligns closely with the values championed by Neal Conan during his nearly four-decade tenure at National Public Radio (NPR).” Hassan spoke to Susan MacTavish Best about the award and the current state of journalism in the POSTHOC Salon series on Dec. 7. Hassan joined an OPC program with her VICE colleagues in July 2020 to discuss the winning investigation into illegal orphanages in Uganda.
UPDATES
OPC member, author and photojournalist Steve Raymer donated thousands of images from his decades-long career with National Geographic to the Wisconsin Historical Society in October. Raymer, an alum of the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication, included more than 2,000 digital files, nearly 200 color prints, and over 7,000 color transparencies in the donation. Raymer is emeritus professor of journalism at Indiana University. He traveled to more than 110 countries during his 60-year career, including 24 trips to Vietnam, where he served and fought as an Army first lieutenant in 1968 and 1969. “Giving the archive of my life’s work is a start toward paying it forward. But it’s a debt that I personally feel can never really be repaid,” Raymer said in an interview on the school’s website.
OPC Past President David Andelman wrote a remembrance of French jazz pianist Martial Solal for The New York Times on Dec. 13. Solal, who wrote many scores for films and orchestras over a career that spanned nearly 75 years, died in Versailles on Dec. 12 at the age of 97. The score for Jean-Luc Godard’s film Breathless was among his most notable works. Andelman said critics have compared him to Art Tatum, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, “But he blazed his own path, combining spare melodic lines with lush chordal passages in a style the French newspaper Le Monde described as ‘cutting through his music with the precision of a goldsmith.’”
OPC member Haley Willis filed a story with video from Damascus on Dec. 9 covering a rescue group searching Syria’s notorious Sednaya military prison as crowds searched for loved ones jailed under the rule of fallen President Bashar al-Assad. The piece, co-created with Times colleague Nader Ibrahim, showed footage from social media and wire services depicting rebels and rescue workers at the prison using tools to break through concrete floors and walls to uncover hidden jail cells. Willis is a member of the visual investigations team at the Times.
Peter Schwartzstein, a freelance environmental journalist and OPC member, spoke to Circle of Blue on Dec. 4 about connections between climate change and violence around the world. Schwartzstein’s book, The Heat and The Fury, includes on-the-ground reporting in 30 countries where climate changes such as blistering temperatures and erratic rainfall lead to violence, coastal piracy, rising crime and other results. “As one of the examples, between about 2014 and 2017, I spent many, many months looking at the ways in which ISIS had profited from collapsing agricultural conditions in the rural heartlands of Iraq and Syria to pad its ranks,” Schwartzstein wrote.
OPC member Aliide Naylor on Nov. 25 wrote a piece for The Times in the U.K. about the capture of a British soldier fighting for Ukraine. She wrote that James Scott Rhys Anderson appeared as a detainee in a video that circulated widely and was first shared on a Russian Telegram account. He described his story to the camera, saying the former signalman with the British Army had been fired from his job and decided to travel first to Poland and then to Ukraine to join the fight. The Russian state-controlled news agency TASS wrote that he had been captured in Russia’s Kursk region. The unit that captured Anderson was formed by veterans of the Wagner Group and is now a branch of Akhmat, Naylor wrote.