People Column
SCHOLARS
Simar Bajaj, winner of the Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in Memory of I.F. Stone in 2024, won the Kavli Gold Award in the Science Reporting in the Large Outlet category from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for a freelance profile he wrote for The Guardian US on Joseph Sakran, a Baltimore trauma surgeon who was shot in the throat as a teenager and who has become a national advocate against gun violence, which he regards as a public health emergency. The AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards are among the most prestigious prizes in science journalism.
Hannah-Kathryn Walles, a photojournalist who won the Nathan S. Bienstock Memorial Scholarship this year, completed her six-week fellowship with The Associated Press in Rio de Janeiro in October. She wrote in a LinkedIn post that she documented a range of stories for the AP, including Brazil’s Rock in Rio music festival, an Indigenous ceremony, and an environmental cleanup project by a marine biologist. “Every assignment was an exercise in meeting the moment – stretching the boundaries of my skills as a photojournalist and deepening my understanding of Brazil’s dynamic political and social landscape.” Walles thanked the OPC Foundation, saying the fellowship helped her to grow as a photographer and gain “a deeper sense of vision and purpose in my work.” She has relocated to Rome, Italy, where she plans to continue working full-time in editorial and commercial photography.
Sarah Wu, the Roy Rowan Scholarship winner in 2019, has joined The Economist as a China correspondent in Beijing. She previously worked at Reuters, reporting on politics and society in Hong Kong, semiconductors and cross-strait relations in Taiwan, and the rise of the electric vehicle industry in China. Wu had an OPC Foundation fellowship in the Reuters bureau in Hong Kong.
Suman Naishadham, the H.L. Stevenson Fellowship winner in 2018, is moving to Spain to cover Spain and Portugal for The Associated Press. She had been covering environmental policy for more than three years at the AP focusing on water, drought and climate change in the U.S. West. Naishadham was also an AP desk editor and reporter. She had an OPC Foundation fellowship with Reuters in Mexico City.
AWARDS
Nanna Heitmann, winner of this year’s Danish Siddiqui Award, was a finalist in the Pulitzer Prize category of Feature Photography. She won for her images in The New York Times portraying life in Russia amid resurgent nationalism during the war in Ukraine. Heitmann won the Danish Siddiqui Award for “unflinching coverage” of the Russian side of the war in Ukraine, and won the Olivier Rebbot Award for 2020 for coverage of the pandemic in Russia. Separately, the New York Times staff won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for the same coverage of Hamas’ attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel’s intelligence failures last year that also garnered the OPC’s Hal Boyle Award.
FRONTLINE PBS won the 2024 Scripps Howard Journalism Award on Oct. 20 for its documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, adding yet another accolade for the film, which was produced by OPC Governor Raney Aronson-Rath, Michelle Mizner, Derl McCrudden and Mstyslav Chernov. The film also won this year’s Peter Jennings Award from the OPC, an RTNDA 2024 Edward R. Murrow Award, an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, and two BAFTA Awards. Columbia Journalism School honored Aronson-Rath with the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism in a ceremony on Nov. 14 that is now available to watch on YouTube.
UPDATES
OPC Governor Beth Knobel was featured in Fordham’s alumni magazine in a new column titled “What’s on My Desk” on Nov. 14. The series takes a look at interesting objects and keepsakes displayed by professors in their offices. Knobel, an associate professor who teaches multi-platform journalism, highlighted a “New York Mets shrine” on her bookshelf, complete with player bobbleheads and a miniature Shea Stadium, black belts in taekwondo, an autographed photo of Mikhail Gorbachev, a cork board displaying press passes from her 20-year career, and an Emmy Award statue that she won for her role as a producer in CBS News’s coverage of the 2002 Moscow theater siege. “What a privilege to be a #journalist and travel all kinds of cool places. It’s the most important job in the world!” she wrote in a post about the article on Bluesky.
OPC Governor Alexis Okeowo, a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, wrote a piece for the magazine, posted online on Oct. 30, about the legacy of Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina, who died in 2019. Okeowo wrote about Wainaina’s criticism of outside coverage of Africa, which was distilled in an essay in 2005 “How to Write About Africa” for Granta magazine, and “ruthlessly and amusingly took down the clichés of lazy writing and foreign correspondence about the continent.” They said Wainaina had been fed up with tropes about corrupt natives, crusading aid workers, celebrity activists, and conservationists, and the lack of context about political problems in African nations. Wainaina chose to become a writer because he wanted to see complex stories that did not erase or romanticize, that would depict the “messy and full” picture of himself and Africans that he knew, Okeowo wrote. “He wanted to write himself into existence. Many of us can relate.”
A New York Times piece with photographs and video from OPC Governor Juan Arredondo on Nov. 4 documented the aftermath of raids on immigrant families in poultry towns in Mississippi five years ago. The piece, written by Isabelle Taft and titled “Trump’s Big Immigration Raid Snared Them. They’re Still in Mississippi,” follows some of the family members from the raids in August 2019 that led to the detention of 680 workers at poultry plants. Some were deported but have since returned to the U.S., and others have cases still tied up in immigration courts with yearslong backlogs.
OPC member Vivienne Walt filed a piece for FORTUNE magazine on Oct. 31 about a small startup company using blockchain technology to shake up the $100 billion diamond industry. The company, HB Antwerp, which was launched four years ago by three Belgian-Israeli cofounders, wants to shift control and profits away from hubs like London, Antwerp, and Tel Aviv, “to the countries where the diamonds are actually found. They argue that Botswana, with just 2.6 million people and vast diamond reserves (and tourist-attracting elephants) has not gotten its fair share since Western companies began extracting its precious gems nearly 60 years ago,” Walt wrote.
OPC member Alice Driver spoke at the 2024 Texas Book Festival in Austin last weekend about her book, The Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company, an investigation into toxic labor practices at Tyson Foods which was published in September. She said she decided to start her investigation after talking with her mother, who works with Karin refugees from Myanmar in rural Arkansas, where many Karin work for Tyson. Driver said she had been working on an article about it, but faced resistance from editors, who “I think didn’t want me to finish it,” because “Arkansas is really run top to bottom by Tyson. If you want to feel absolutely bad about something, try writing about Tyson in Arkansas.” She said once large numbers of meatpacking workers started dying of COVID-19 in 2020, it became even more difficult as publishers became more afraid of lawsuits from Tyson. “So the fact that this is a book – I never thought it was going to happen. So, I’m glad to be here today and no one has sued me.” Her comments are available to watch on C-SPAN’s Book TV.
Keith Richburg, an OPC member and veteran Asia correspondent for The Washington Post, spoke to The Diplomat news site and magazine on Nov. 13 about President Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Richburg told podcast host Luke Hunt, during an interview recorded in Bangkok, Thailand, that he expects a “carnival of chaos,” in foreign policy. He said China likely favored Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris because Tim Walz had been vocal about holding China to account for human rights violations, which “Donald Trump couldn’t care less about any of that. He’s very transactional.”
Evan Ratliff, an OPC member and journalist who serves as CEO and co-founder of media company Atavist, wrote a guest essay in The New York Times on Nov. 10 recounting how he made an A.I. voice clone of himself. In a process he said took him less than an hour and powered by ChatGPT, he developed an A.I clone that called colleagues and friends for a podcast about the experience, titled Shell Game. “What I’ve learned is that interacting with A.I. voice agents will change how we interact with one another: who we trust, what we expect and what we need in our communications,” Ratliff wrote.
OPC member Chriss Swaney wrote a piece on Oct. 25 about a survey from International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) that revealed high levels of harassment and physical violence against reporters in the U.S. The report included responses from 610 reporters who attended 25 IWMF safety training sessions in 19 cities in 2024. Swaney spoke with OPC Past President Allan Dodds Frank for her story on WorkersCompensation.com, quoting him as saying he was not surprised by the report, and in part blamed rhetoric from President Donald Trump, “who continues to denounce the media as ‘Fake News,’’’ She cited grim figures from the U.S. Department of Education indicating undergraduate and graduate journalism programs nationwide are in decline, with an average of two U.S. newspapers per week shuttered from the beginning of 2019 and May 2022. Swaney spent more than 20 years as a reporter and editor for national and international publications, including Reuters, UPI, The New York Times and Gannett, and 13 years at Carnegie Mellon University as media and public relations director for the College of Engineering.
Paul Caruana Galizia, winner of this year’s Cornelius Ryan Award, is joining the Financial Times as a reporter in its computational journalism team. His book about the assassination of his mother Daphne, A Death in Malta, won the Ryan award for the best book for on international affairs for 2023. With his brothers, he has received a Magnitsky Human Rights Award and an Anderson-Lucas-Norman Award for their campaign to bring her killers to justice. Caruana Galizia previously worked for Tortoise Media, where he investigated Russian influence on British politics, Iran’s treatment of dissidents in London, the former King of Spain’s financial affairs, and sexual misconduct investigations.
Poet Mosab Abu Toha, winner of this year’s Flora Lewis Award, spoke at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Oct. 30 about his experiences during attacks in Gaza over the last year, before fleeing with his family to Cairo and later to the United States. Pouya Alimagham, Middle East historian and MIT lecturer, moderated the event. Abu Toha won the Flora Lewis Award for his essays on Gaza for The New Yorker.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) on Nov. 8 expressed concern after Indian investigative journalist Rana Ayyub, winner of the OPC’s Flora Lewis Award for 2021, had her personal phone number leaked online and, separately, was harassed by local intelligence personnel during a four-day reporting trip in the northeastern state of Manipur in early October. CPJ called for Indian authorities to “swiftly investigate the doxxing of Ayyub and hold the perpetrators accountable.” Ayyub won the Flora Lewis Award for commentary in The Washington Post calling out Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s persecution of the Muslim minority.