People Column

SCHOLARS

Kailyn Rhone, the 2023 Reuters Fellowship winner, who had an internship with The Wall Street Journal in the spring of 2023 is returning to the Journal as a finance reporting fellow for the next 12 months. She had an internship with Reuters last summer.

Portia Crowe, who won the Reuters award in 2014, is joining the Reuters Dakar bureau as a West and Central Africa correspondent. She had an OPC Foundation fellowship at the Reuters bureau in Nairobi. She was featured in an OPC Bulletin profile in 2020 and joined an OPC Foundation panel in 2021 on the future of global journalism.

Jad Sleiman, the 2013 David R. Schweisberg Scholarship winner, recently got his job back at WHYY, an NPR member station in Philadelphia. Despite excellent reviews, he had been fired from his job as a reporter at The Pulse, a nationally syndicated health and science program, when his bosses discovered clips of his work as a stand-up comic online and deemed them offensive. He did his comedy routine under an assumed name and never mentioned his employer or his day job. The arbitrator “performed an in-depth analysis” of the clips and found that many of them were funny or an “astute critique” of power – though they also ruled that Sleiman must delete the clips.

Jeff Roberts, the Reuters winner in 2010, has been named Fortune Magazine’s new finance editor, overseeing stories that track the intersection of money and power. His focus will include how tech – notably crypto and AI – is changing finance. Jeff had an OPC Foundation fellowship in Paris.

AWARDS

The PBS FRONTLINE documentary Afghanistan Undercover, which won the OPC’s David A. Andelman and Pamela Title Award last year, won a Dupont Columbia Award, which was celebrated in a Jan. 25 ceremony. The piece focuses on the work of correspondent Ramita Navai and photographer Karim Shah as they documented the conditions for women after the Taliban returned to power.

The Associated Press team that won a Hal Boyle Award last year for the entry titled “Erasing Mariupol” also won a Dupont Award, in collaboration with PBS FRONTLINE, for the series of stories titled “20 Days in Mariupol.”

UPDATES

Laurie Hays, an OPC Governor, is now serving as CEO and Editor in Chief for The Fuller Project, a global newsroom dedicated to groundbreaking reporting that catalyzes positive change for women.

OPC Governor Anup Kaphle spoke to the Nepali outlet Ukaalo News in December to talk about the state of Nepali media, its challenges, and what may be needed to fix what’s broken.

OPC member James Brooke is now the Russia-Ukraine correspondent for The New York Sun. Writing twice a week for the New York-based news site, Brooke draws on his six years in Kyiv, reporting for his own business newsletter, and eight years in Moscow, first as Bloomberg bureau chief, then as VOA bureau chief.

Hasan Oswald, a filmmaker who works with OPC member Fahrinisa Campana, provided updates on a film titled Mediha, in which the titular teenage Yazidi girl who had just returned from ISIS captivity documents herself to process trauma while rescuers search for her missing family members. The film won the Grand Jury Award at DOC NYC last year, and has been invited to screen at the UN in February, where Mediha will speak. The film has also been invited to serve as the opening film at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in March as its UK premiere and to be part of the Activist Competition at Movies that Matter. The film will be screened in at least 30 festivals in the coming months. Oswald and Campana both received OPC grants in 2020 to help freelancers during the pandemic. OPC members Annelise Mecca and Alexander Spiess were also producers on the film, along with Stephen Nemeth.

Adriana Zehbrauskas, a past recipient of a Citation for Excellence in the Robert Capa category and a panelist at an OPC event, announced on Jan. 6 that she will serve as the Howard G. Buffet Visiting Professor of Visual Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University this semester. “It’s a huge honor (and responsibility) to help form a new generation of creative and ethical photojournalists,” she wrote. Zehbrauskas spoke on an OPC panel at Columbia University in 2016 with other female photojournalists discussing their in-depth documentary work.