People Column

SCHOLARS

Evan Gorelick, the Fritz Beebe Fellowship winner for 2025, has been hired by The New York Times as a staff writer for The Morning, the Times’s flagship daily newsletter.

Isabela Fleischmann do Amaral, the S&P Global Award for Economic and Business Reporting winner for 2025, has won a NAHJ Ruben Salazar Scholarship. The Scholarship Fund was established in 1986 to assist young Latino journalists. She will receive scholarship dollars and attend a sponsored trip to the 2025 national conference held July 9-12, 2025, at the Hilton Chicago. Isabela also has a Bloomberg summer internship in Los Angeles.

Laura Robertson, the Sally Jacobsen Scholarship winner in 2024, has won the 2025 Nellie Bly Award from the New York Press Club with her story “Death and Profit in New York’s Jail Infirmaries.” The winners receive an engraved plaque and were honored at the New York Press Club annual Awards Dinner on June 2 at the Cornucopia Majesty yacht.

Noelle Harff, the Walter & Betsy Cronkite Scholarship winner in 2024, has been selected as business journalism intern for summer 2025 by Dow Jones News Fund. The business fellowship takes place in New York City where the journalists learn how to cover the major economic forces, practice writing, pitching and interviewing skills.

Rachel Nostrant, the Edith Lederer Scholarship winner in 2023, is starting a new job at the Houston Chronicle as an energy reporter, with a focus on oil and gas. Prior to her new role, she was a disability reporting fellow at The New York Times.

Hayley Woodin Hastings, the Freedman Scholar Award winner in 2022, has been awarded the King Charles III Coronation Medal – a prestigious recognition of her outstanding contributions to Canada and the communities she serves. As the youngest and second female editor in the 36-year history of Business in Vancouver, Hayley has broken new ground in journalism while advocating for diversity and representation. She also co-founded Mákook pi Sélim, an Indigenous storytelling magazine amplifying Indigenous voices and supporting reconciliation efforts. She has also recently joined the board of the British Columbia and Yukon Community Newspapers Association.

Hakyung Kim, the Fritz Beebe Fellowship winner in 2022, has joined the Financial Times as a reporter on the Unhedged team. Previously she worked at CNBC as a markets reporter. She had OPC Foundation fellowship with the WSJ in Seoul in summer 2022.

Business Insider has hired Charles Rollett, the Jerry Flint Scholar Award winner in 2017, as its San Francisco tech correspondent focusing on Big Tech and AI. He was formerly with TechCrunch. Rollett had an OPC Foundation fellowship with The Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong.

Jeff Horwitz, an award-winning journalist and winner of the Fred Wiegold Scholarship in 2009, is joining Reuters in a new role of tech investigations reporter. Most recently, he was with The Wall Street Journal where he led the reporting on the Facebook Files, a 2021 series that exposed how Meta was aware that its social-media platforms were harming teenage girls and other users but failed to take action. The series won a George Polk Award and a Gerald Loeb Award. Last year, Horwitz shared a Loeb Award for “The Dark Side of Meta’s Algorithms,” a series that revealed how Instagram and Facebook connected networks of pedophiles and served them disturbing content. He will be based in San Francisco. Before the Journal, Horwitz was a financial and enterprise reporter for The Associated Press in Washington, where he broke stories about how former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had secretly worked to advance Russian interests.

AWARDS

The Reuters team that won this year’s Malcolm Forbes and Morton Frank Award has also won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. The series, “Fentanyl Express,” revealed how easy it is to procure Chinese chemicals used in the production of synthetic opioids. The reporting team legally acquired chemicals and equipment needed to produce a large quantity of fentanyl.

In addition, the Wall Street Journal team that won the OPC’s William Worthy Award for its reporting on Russian spying operations and Evan Gershkovich’s wrongful detention was also a finalist the Pulitzer’s International Reporting category, and Washington Post staff that won the Shireen Abu Akleh award for reporting on the war in Gaza was a finalist in the same category.

Raney Aronson-Rath, an OPC Governor and editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE, on May 1 celebrated the program’s ten News & Documentary Emmy Award nominations this year. The nominations include documentaries on police use of force, the mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, violence in Gaza in 2023, adoption in South Korea and the rise of of Xi Jinping in China. In a release, Aronson-Rath said the nominations “are a testament to our filmmakers, whose ability to marry in-depth, investigative reporting with captivating documentary storytelling creates programming that educates the American public on issues facing our nation and world.”

UPDATES

Steve Herman, an OPC member who is retiring from Voice of America, has been named as the inaugural executive director of the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation at University of Mississippi. He will begin serving in his new role on July 7, leading the center’s mission of “engaging students, journalists and the public in addressing media literacy and journalistic integrity.” Herman recently wrote about the Trump administration’s gutting of his former employer after more than 1,300 colleagues were placed on indefinite leave with pay on March 15.

Sewell Chan, an OPC member and editor and journalist who recently left his position as executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, has been named senior fellow for the USC Annenberg Center for Communication Leadership & Policy (CCLP), where he will focus on press freedom in the U.S. and abroad. Chan previously served as editor at the Texas Tribune, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Geoffrey Cowan, director of the CCLP at USC Annenberg, said in a release that “we look forward to working with him on issues related to journalistic integrity, media and democracy, and new models for local news.”

OPC member Nicolas Niarchos wrote a longform piece on May 19 for The New Yorker about a displaced family’s 500-mile saga to find safety in Sudan. The piece, “Escape from Khartoum,” follows the family of nine as they survive weeks of bombings, hunger, and violence to escape to the Nuba Mountains, marked by perilous checkpoints and theft.

OPC member Lori Valigra has continued writing about so-called forever chemicals, or PFAS, in Maine for the Bangor Daily News. In May she wrote about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s moves under the Trump administration to fight contamination, but wrote that scientists and environmental experts found the plan lacking in details on budget or timelines. She also wrote on May 8 that a state-funded $11 million wastewater treatment project to remove those chemicals has been put on hold. Valigra reports on the environment for the BDN’s Maine Focus investigative team, a position supported by a fund at the Maine Community Foundation.

Adi Ignatius, an OPC member who serves as editor at large of the Harvard Business Review, announced on June 2 that the publication would launch a new subscription service for senior leaders, titled HBR Executive. He said in a press release that the new service “aims to help CEOs and their top teams tackle the most pressing issues of our time – from the rise of AI to rapidly shifting political and geopolitical landscapes.” Separately, HBR has also launched a new podcast, HBR IdeaCast, which will feature Ignatius as co-host with executive editor Alison Beard.

OPC member John Maxwell Hamilton, a professor of mass communications at Louisiana State University, spoke on the RealClearPolitics radio show on May 1 about his piece about Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s, titled “’Abundance’ Is Good Advice for Democrats.” Hamilton called on the Democratic Party to generate new ideas that reach across the spectrum of U.S. politics, and to solve problems like housing shortages with more efficient policies. Hamilton spoke during a book night in April 2021 about his book, Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda.

Daniella Zalcman, an OPC member and photojournalist, had several of her photographs featured in an April 30 Washington Post piece marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Her images depict many of the people profiled in the piece as they recount their stories and describe their current lives in Vietnam.

New York Public Radio and WNYC archives posted a piece of OPC history on May 23 with an audio recording of a 1968 program with David Hallenstein, sitting in for Seymour N. Siegel, moderating a panel of journalists who interview Ambassador Piero Vinci, Permanent Representative of Italy to the United Nations. The panel includes William Otis of The Associated Press, Ruggero Orlando of Radiotelevisione Italiana, and Michael Berlin of the New York Post. The participants discussed Italy’s role in the Nuclear nonproliferation treaty, China’s possible inclusion in the United Nations, and Paris talks on the Vietnam war.

Adriana Teresa Letorney, founder of Visura.co and recent OPC panelist, has launched a new short documentary, Disrupted, on the declining state of the media industry and its impact on freelance visual journalists. Visura.co is a platform for visual journalists and storytellers to connect with a global network and license their images directly to buyers. The film is available to watch online here.