People Column
OPC SCHOLARS
Elizabeth Barchas Prelogar, who won the Flora Lewis Scholarship in 2006, is joining special counsel Robert Mueller’s team to investigate possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. Prelogar is a Harvard Law School grad who clerked for Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan. A former Fulbright scholar to Russia, she used her OPC scholarship to study the legal issues surrounding censorship there.
Jeff Horwitz, who won the OPC Foundation scholarship in memory of Fred Wiegold in 2009, is on the investigative team whose probe of an aviation mogul led The Wall Street Journal to fire its chief foreign correspondent, Jay Solomon. Horwitz and his colleagues at the AP reported in June that Solomon “was offered a 10 percent stake in a fledgling company, Denx LLC, by Farhad Azima, an Iranian-born aviation magnate who has ferried weapons for the CIA.” Azima was one of Solomon’s sources. Solomon denied any business involvement with Azima, but apologized in a statement to the AP, saying “I understand why the emails and the conversations I had with Mr. Azima may look like I was involved in some seriously troubling activities.” Horwitz joined the wire service’s investigative unit in 2014 after a stint as a reporter at American Banker.
Derek Kravitz has won a Deadline Award for Newspaper or Digital Local News Reporting from the New York chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. He shared the prize with colleagues at ProPublica for their series “The Rent Racket,” about widespread problems with rent control and other tenant protections in New York City. Kravitz is the research editor at ProPublica and teaches investigative reporting at Columbia’s Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism. He previously worked at The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, The Washington Post and the Columbia Daily Tribune. Kravitz won the 2014 Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in memory of I.F.Stone.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ massive Panama Papers project continues racking up honors. It won two Deadline Awards – in the Reporting by Independent Digital Media and Public Service categories – and was a finalist for the Daniel Pearl Investigative Reporting Award. 2005 Emanuel R. Freedman scholar Marina Walker Guevara coordinated reporters at more than 100 news outlets in the joint investigation.
WINNERS
OPC Governor Abigail Pesta won the Deadline Award for Magazine Feature Reporting for her Cosmopolitan story, “Three Young Women, Killed. Why Do Some People Say It Was All a Hoax?” The story focuses on “truthers” who believe high-profile shootings like the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre were faked, and who harass the victims’ families. Meanwhile, Pesta’s new book, How Dare the Sun Rise: Memoirs of a War Child, written with Sandra Uwiringiyimana, is garnering raves. “This hard-hitting autobiography will have readers reeling as it shows one young woman’s challenging path to healing,” wrote Kirkus Reviews.
OPC member David Rohde has won the Deadline Award for Newspaper for Digital Enterprise Reporting. He shares the honor with his Reuters colleagues for “The Uncounted,” a series of stories about the rising threat of antibiotic-resistant infections. The series also received an honorable mention in the Consumer Journalism-Newspapers category of the National Press Club Awards. Rohde has worked at Reuters since 2011. Previously he was a foreign correspondent at The New York Times.
The Deadline Award winner for Multimedia, Interactive Graphics, and Animation is former OPC member Lynsey Addario. She shares the award with Aryn Baker for their Time Magazine story “The Only One God Left Alive,” a profile of a 13-year old boy who survived a massacre in South Sudan. Addario’s photos regularly appear in The New York Times, National Geographic, and TIME. She has covered conflicts and humanitarian crises including Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, South Sudan, Somalia and Congo.
OPC member Brett Forrest was a finalist for the Deadline Award in the Magazine Investigative Reporting category for “The FBI vs FIFA.” The ESPN the Magazine story, which he wrote with Shaun Assael and Vivek Chaudhary, details how a small team of federal investigators uncovered corruption at the highest levels of soccer’s international governing body. Forrest has since left ESPN for The Wall Street Journal (see Updates).
Jordan Robertson, Michael Riley and Andrew Willis of Bloomberg Businessweek have won the Deadline Awards Magazine Investigative Reporting prize and the Sigma Delta Chi Magazine Investigative Reporting (National Circulation) prize for “How to Hack an Election.” The same crew won 2016 Morton Frank Award for their story, which profiles a man who claims to have rigged elections throughout Latin America.
The 2015 OPC Malcolm Forbes Award honoree, Stephen Grey, is a co-winner of this year’s Deadline Awards Daniel Pearl Prize for Investigative Reporting. Grey and Reuters colleagues Selam Gebrekidan and Amina Ismail produced the interactive web project “The Migration Machine,” which covered Europe’s refugee crisis from multiple angles.
Nelson D. Schwartz of The New York Times, a 2005 OPC Morton Frank citation winner, took home the Deadline Awards Business Feature prize for “Can Trump Save Their Jobs? They’re Counting On It,” a profile of employees at the Carrier factory in Indianapolis.
Margie Mason and Martha Mendoza of The Associated Press won the Deadline Awards Business Investigative Reporting category for “Exploited in Paradise,” a story about undocumented workers in Hawaii’s fishing industry. They won the OPC’s Malcolm Forbes Award and Hal Boyle Award in 2015 for their reporting on slavery in the seafood business.
Multiple OPC Award-winner Tom Burgis has claimed the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Investigative Reporting (Affiliated). Burgis’s story, “The Great Land Rush,” was written in partnership with Pilita Clark, Michael Peel and Charlie Bibby of the Financial Times. The multimedia series traces the impacts of the worldwide struggle to acquire land.
UPDATES
NEW YORK: OPC member Norman Pearlstine retired as vice chairman of Time, Inc. in mid-July. “I’m grateful and proud to have spent 14 years at one of the most influential and storied media companies,” Pearlstine said in a statement. In addition to his two stints at TIME – one as chief content officer and vice chair from 2013 to 2017, and one as editor-in-chief from 1995 to 2005 – he spent more than two decades at The Wall Street Journal and shorter stints at Dow Jones, Bloomberg LP and Forbes. His retirement plans include advising companies and writing.
NEW YORK: OPC member Christopher Sherman and multiple OPC Award winner Rodrigo Abd racked up 3,000 miles in two weeks while traveling the whole of the US-Mexico border for the AP this spring. What they found was “a region convulsed by uncertainty and angst, but rooted in a shared culture and history unlikely to be transformed by any politician, or any barrier man can construct,” Sherman wrote. “It’s a relationship that can be adversarial at times. Far more often, it’s symbiotic.” Sherman has been with the AP since 2008; previously he worked at The Orlando Sentinel. Abd shot for La Razón and La Nación newspapers in Buenos Aires before joining the AP in 2003.
The Wall Street Journal has hired Brett Forrest to cover national security and investigative subjects. Forrest, an OPC member, was previously a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. As a freelancer he has reported from nearly 50 countries, with stories appearing in more than 30 languages.
Vanity Fair editor and OPC member David Friend has a book coming out in the fall. Friend writes that The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido “looks at how Boomers took power in Washington, Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, ratcheting up the culture wars. It addresses the emergence of the Web, reality TV, mainstream porn, 24/7 scandal coverage, and the breakdown between our private and public lives.” Interviewees include Anita Hill, Monica Lewinsky, Woody Allen, Frank Rich, and key members of the Clinton and Bush administrations.
OPC member Adriana Loureiro Fernandez was one of just 150 photographers selected out of 2900 entrants to the Fifth Annual New York Portfolio Review. Fernandez writes that “Paraíso Perdido.”her series of photos from Venezuela, “chronicles the cycle of violence in a decaying country.” The Portfolio Review is sponsored by The New York Times LENS Blog and the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. It features workshops and private photo critiques for up-and-coming photographers. Fernandez has freelanced for national news outlets in Venezuela; she is currently getting her masters degree in journalism at Columbia.
“Without Us, It’s The New Yrok Times” and “Copy Editors Save Our Buts” were two of the signs carried by New York Times journalists at a 15-minute walkout and demonstration in June. Hundreds of employees took part in the walkout to protest cuts to the copy desk. Executive Editor Dean Baquet, an OPC member, and managing editor Joe Kahn have said the editorial reorganization is necessary to speed production and reduce layers of editing. They add that most of the editors being cut will get new editing jobs at the paper.
WASHINGTON, DC: The 400 SAG-AFTRA members at NPR have reached a contract deal after the group threatened to strike. The union said its talks with the network centered on NPR’s desire to offer lower minimum salaries to new hires and to have greater flexibility in contracting work out to member stations. The union’s contract expired June 30. In a statement, NPR called the new contract “forward-looking.” The union said the new contract “provides for salary increases,” adding that a proposed two-tier salary system that would have paid new hires less than veteran staffers was scuttled.
The News Media Alliance is seeking an antitrust exemption from Congress in order to negotiate with Facebook and Google on behalf of its members. The Alliance, which represents more than 2,000 newspapers and websites, claims the internet giants have been allowed to gain a stranglehold on digital audiences while failing to properly compensate news outlets for the high cost of journalism.
A new survey finds that Republicans and Republican-leaning independents overwhelmingly feel the news media is bad for America. The Pew Research Center found some 85 percent of those on the right feel the news has “a negative effect on the way things are going in the country.” That number has held steady for the past few years. Democrats, however, have begun seeing more value in journalism. Forty-four percent say the news media has a positive impact – an 11 percent rise since last August.
LOS ANGELES: The Los Angeles Times announced a “limited voluntary buyout plan” in mid-June for employees with more than 15 years in the newsroom. In a memo to staff, editor and publisher Davan Maharaj wrote that “we need to address the current economic realities as we work to secure our future.” A round of buyouts in 2015 resulted in the exit of more than 80 reporters and editors.
SYDNEY: Australia’s top journalism awards are under fire after eliminating international reporting from the roster of prizes. In a statement on its website, the Walkley Foundation said it was dropping the category because “international journalism can be entered in any Walkley Award category – and these stories frequently win.” Sydney journalism professor Helen Vatsikopoulos called that argument weak. “On any given day in newsrooms around the country, journalists are asked to volunteer for assignments in Syria, Yemen and Iraq,” she wrote on TheConversation.com. “Only a few will ever put their hands up. This is about honouring them.”
BEIRUT: OPC member Alessandria Masi was chosen as a contributor to this year’s Attacks on the Press Anthology from the Committee to Protect Journalists. She wrote about the challenges of covering Syria from outside the country: “It is difficult to call a spade a spade when you haven’t seen it yourself.” But Masi, who is based in Beirut, said the struggle is worthwhile: “As long as there are people in Syria who want to tell their stories, we will try to find a way to make them heard.” Learn more about Masi in this month’s Meet the OPC Members on page 11.
NAIROBI: A U.S.-funded counterterrorism program may be threatening the lives of the people it’s trying to help, OPC member Mukhtar Ibrahim wrote recently for Buzzfeed. According to documents obtained by Buzzfeed, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent more than $3 million on the secret campaign to spread anti-extremism messages through social media, music and religious organizations. But some of the recipients of the cash have been targeted for threats or retaliation by extremists. Meanwhile, according to a local analyst, many Kenyans see the program as irrelevant because it’s imposed on them by the West. Ibrahim is a general assignment reporter for Minnesota Public Radio.
LAGOS: Google is working with the World Bank and the nonprofit organization Code for Africa to train 6,000 journalists from around Africa in data journalism skills within the next nine months. The trainings will be held in Abuja, Lagos, Nairobi, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban, Casablanca, Dakar, Freetown, Dares Salaam, Kampala and Yaounde. “With the Digital Journalism Initiative, we want to contribute to the growth of Africa’s news and media ecosystem,” OPC member Daniel Sieberg, who heads training and development at Google News Lab, told the Nigerian Tribune.
PEOPLE REMEMBERED
Three journalists have died of injuries sustained in an explosion in Mosul, Iraq on June 19. Bakhtiyar Haddad, Stephan Villeneuve and Veronique Robert were embedded with Iraqi forces in the Ras Al-Jadah district when a land mine exploded. Robert, 54, was a veteran war correspondent for France Televisions, specializing in the Middle East. Haddad, 41, was an Iraqi Kurdish journalist who had worked as a translator and fixer for French journalists in northern Iraq for more than a decade. Villeneuve, a 48-year-old cameraman, was also a veteran journalist who had covered conflicts in Bosnia. Sarajevo, Mogadishu, Rwanda, Kosovo, Congo, Haiti, Yemen, Iraq and Tunisia. The three were working together at the time of the explosion.