People Column
SCHOLARS
Simon Bajaj, winner of the 2024 Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in memory of I.F. Stone, was named the 2024 recipient of the Society of Professional Journalists-New England Mark of Excellence Award in general news reporting for his NPR stories on New Zealand’s tobacco laws. The award honors the best in student journalism. He also won the Award for Excellence in Health Care Journalism from the AHCJ for a story he wrote for the Guardian on how a tiny town is paving the future of tobacco policy. In addition, he was named a finalist in science reporting for his STAT News story on lung cancer story.
Annie Todd, winner of the S&P Global Award for Economic and Business Reporting in 2020, and her colleague Makenzie Huber at the South Dakota Searchlight and Sioux Falls Argus Leader, were named finalists for the 2024 Livingston Award for Excellence in Local Reporting for their three-installment story The Lost Children. The Livingston Award is administered by the Wallace House Center for Journalism at the University of Michigan and honors young journalists. The awards honor the best reporting and storytelling by journalists under the age of 35. Read more about finalists from the OPC community in the Awards section below.
Euan Ward, the winner of the 2022 Rick Davis-Deb Amos Scholarship who is an OPC member and New York Times contributor based in Beirut, has been reporting on the Israel-Hamas war with 12 bylines for the Times in April alone. On April 29, he wrote about a barrage of Hamas rockets launched from Lebanon into northern Israel that were nearly all shot down, writing that the attacks were meant to show military capabilities, “an apparent attempt by the group to signal that it is still capable of striking within Israel’s borders even as it studies the latest proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza.”
Meg Bernhard, the Flora Lewis Fellowship winner in 2020, is the 2024 recipient of the Spurrier-Winiarski Wine Writer-in-Residence Award. Bernhard will be awarded $50,000 to support her three-month residency at UC Davis, where she will pursue a research and writing project delving into the intersection of climate change and labor in the global wine industry. She is a Las Vegas-based journalist, essayist and author of the 2023 book, Wine.
Serginho Roosblad, the 2017 winner of the Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in Memory of I.F. Stone, had his directorial debut on PBS on April 30 with a piece on FRONTLINE, titled Documenting Police Use of Force, covering the Associated Press investigation into deaths in the U.S. that followed incidents in which police used “less lethal force.” Roosblad is a video producer for the AP Global Investigations team.
Tom Finn, the H.L. Stevenson Internship winner in 2013, has joined BBC News as a news editor and visual journalist. He had spent the previous nine years at Reuters, the last four as a special products editor at the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Finn had an OPC Foundation fellowship in the Reuters bureau in Cairo.
Mariano Castillo, winner of the Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in 2008, is returning to his alma mater as a professor in the journalism department at Texas A&M University. He is currently a senior director of news standards and practices at CNN. Castillo had an OPC Foundation fellowship in the Reuters bureau in Mexico City.
AWARDS
Mohammed Salem of Reuters, the winner of this year’s Olivier Rebbot Award, has also won the 2024 World Press Photo of the Year award. His winning photo depicts a Palestinian woman cradling the body of her five-year-old niece in the Gaza Strip. That photo was among the images he submitted for the OPC awards. The photo was taken on October 17 last year at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
In addition to OPC Foundation scholar Annie Todd, The Wallace House Center for Journalists at the University of Michigan on April 24 also announced that OPC member Nicolas Niarchos has been named as a Livingston Award finalist in the International Reporting category for work in The Nation. Also among the international reporting finalists are Lynzy Billing, who won the OPC’s 2022 Ed Cunningham Award for The Night Raids, a film she discussed during an OPC program at Columbia last September, and Renata Brito of The Associated Press, one of this year’s OPC Kim Wall Award winners. Brito won the Kim Wall Award with colleague Felipe Dana for “Adrift,” a multimedia piece that follows migrants bound from Africa to Europe who are lost at sea or land thousands of miles off course in the Americas. OPC member Lila Hassan was named as a finalist in the National Reporting category for work with KCRW public radio in California along with colleague Allison Behringer. Winners will be announced on June 11.
UPDATES
Steve Herman, an OPC member and senior correspondent with Voice of America, is set to publish a new book in June about his years covering U.S. presidents. According to publisher Kent State University Press, Behind the White House Curtain makes the case that a healthy and peaceful democracy relies on public access to accurate, unbiased information, “and that journalists can and should play a key role in pressing government officials to be truthful and transparent.” The book will weave together memoir and history, examining the inner workings of the White House press corps and the historic and current relationship between U.S. presidents and the press.
OPC member Doreen Carvajal wrote a piece for the Mexican website Diariojudio.com on April 7, filed from Arcos de la Frontera in Spain, about her family’s Sephardic Jewish identity, which was kept secret for generations under cover of a Catholic identity. She wrote about her quest to investigate her family, the Carvajals, and to reclaim “ancestral memories, history and DNA clues that I believe had been faithfully passed down for generations of my family.” Carvajal said her family left Spain during the Inquisition, and raised as Catholics in Costa Rica and California. “I wanted to understand why my family guarded secret identities for generations with such inexplicable fear and caution,” she wrote.
Jill Langlois, an OPC member and freelancer based in São Paulo, Brazil, interviewed the country’s environment minister about her crackdown on illegal logging and mining for the Yale School of the Environment on April 18. She wrote that Marina Silva, a former rubber tapper and senator from the state of Acre, had campaigned against those nillegal operations when she held the same position during Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s first term in 2003. Silva, recently named one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2024, told Langlois that the international community plays a key role in the survival of the Amazon. “If we reach zero deforestation in the Amazon and the world does not reduce its CO2 emissions, the forest will still be turned into a savanna,” she said.
Haley Willis, an OPC member and video journalist on the New York Times visual investigation team, contributed to a piece for the Times on April 25 that analyzed visual evidence and internal communications to show that six Western aid groups had humanitarian sites hit by Israeli attacks, even after locations were shared with the Israeli military. The video said that aid groups used a process called “deconfliction” to inform the Israel Defense Forces (I.D.F.) about their locations to avoid accidental attacks. Despite those warnings, as well as banners and other markings to identify humanitarian sites, the military said the attacks were the result of “internal failures” and has only targeted military targets. The piece cited a United Nations count of more than 200 aid workers killed in the war in Gaza.
OPC member Aurora Almendral, a London-based editor with NBC News Digital, has been covering the Israel-Hamas war for the network, most recently with a story on April 24 about the release of a video from Israeli American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin. She wrote that Goldberg-Polin had been among the 250 hostages taken on Oct. 7, seen injured by a grenade blast before being loaded into a truck during attacks at the Supernova music festival in southern Israel near kibbutz Re’im. The video taken from captivity showed 23-year-old Goldberg-Polin, whose left arm is severed below his elbow, angrily asking the Israeli government to bring home the hostages. Almendral also filed stories as part of the NBC team on Iran’s retaliatory attack on Israel on April 13, and the killing of seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen on April 6.
OPC member Eric Reidy, the migration editor for The New Humanitarian, wrote about the passing of the 6-month mark of the Israel-Hamas war on April 8, enumerating the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, missing or injured by that date, with nearly all of the 2.3 million residents in Gaza displaced and more than 60 percent of homes damaged or destroyed. “When the guns eventually do fall silent, there are resounding questions about what will be left and what governing entity or arrangement will assume responsibility for what happens next in the devastated territory and to its battered people,” he wrote. Reidy was among the freelancers who received an OPC micro-grant to weather COVID-19 hardships in 2020.
Photos from OPC member Bing Guan have appeared in many stories covering pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, with images publsihed frequently in The New York Times, The Intercept and The Buffalo News, among others.
OPC member Sarah Schröer López has been covering the protests for German public broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR). On May 1, the outlet published her story with a recounting of police operations to remove and arrest protesters who had taken over Hamilton Hall. Schröer López is currently a student at Columbia journalism school and joined the OPC last month.
PEOPLE REMEMBERED
Terry Anderson, an Associated Press correspondent who was held captive in Lebanon for almost seven years during the Lebanese Civil War, died on April 21 at the age of 76. Anderson was Beirut bureau chief for the AP on March 16, 1985, when armed men pulled him from his car and kidnapped him. He was released in 1991. Before his abduction, he worked for the AP in Japan and South Africa before beginning a two-and-a-half-year stint in Lebanon in 1983. After his release, he owned a blues bar in Athens, Ohio and ran unsuccessfully for the Ohio State Senate in 2004. He built more than 50 schools in Vietnam after establishing the Vietnam Children’s Fund, and contributed to the Father Lawrence Jenco Foundation, named for a fellow hostage who was the director of the Catholic Relief Services in Beirut, which supports community service projects in Appalachia. Read about a memorial service for Anderson on May 8 in Upcoming Events above. The program will be streamed live on the OPC’s YouTube channel.
Richard Leibner, a longtime OPC member and supporter of the OPC Foundation, died on April 12 at the age of 85. He was an agent whose company, N.S. Bienstock, brokered contracts in the television news industry and represented hundreds of news staff members. During his career, Leibner served as agent and adviser to Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, Ed Bradley, Morley Safer, Bob Simon, Steve Kroft, Diane Sawyer, Norah O’Donnell, Paula Zahn, Anderson Cooper and Fareed Zakaria, among others. A remembrance on the OPC Foundation’s website said that the foundation had “lost a valuable friend,” who was an annual guest at Awards Luncheons as he hosted staff from N. S. Bienstock or the Richard Leibner /Carole Cooper Family Foundation. In 2012, he endowed the Nathan S. Bienstock Memorial Scholarship to honor one of the agency’s co-founders. N.S. Bienstock was purchased by the United Talent Agency (UTA) in 2014 but retained the Bienstock name. Leibner retired in 2021. He served on the committee of the OPC Awards Dinner several times in the late 1990s.