February 18, 2025

People Column

SCHOLARS

Hana Kiros, winner of the 2024 S&P Global Award for Economic and Business Reporting Reporting, is now an assistant editor at The Atlantic, focusing on science, tech and health. Her first piece appeared in the Sept. 23 issue, titled How to Save Outdoor Recess, covering school responses to health risks of recent heat waves for children, and how safety policies could restrict access to outdoor play.

Sarah Dadouch, the Emanuel R. Freedman Scholarship winner in 2017, has left The Washington Post where she was a Beirut-based correspondent covering Syria and Lebanon, as well as the Gulf, to join Semafor Gulf where she will cover Saudi financial, business and geopolitical news. Previously, she was a Reuters correspondent in Beirut, Riyadh and Istanbul covering Lebanon, Syria, the Gulf and Turkey. Dadouch had an OPC Foundation fellowship in the Reuters bureau in Beirut.

Bloomberg News reporter Olivia Carville, the Roy Rowan Scholarship winner in 2018, has won the Women’s Economic Round Table (WERT) Prize from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for the second time in three years. Carville was awarded the 2024 WERT Global Prize for a series of stories focusing on mental health and safety risks of social media for young people. The WERT Prize honors excellence in comprehensively reported business journalism by a woman that fosters a greater understanding of global business.

Jesse Coburn, the winner of the Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in Memory of I.F. Stone in 2016, was named a national reporter with ProPublica. Most recently, he was with StreetblogNYC where he won the 2023 George Polk Award in Local Reporting for Ghost Tags: Inside New York City’s Black Market for Temporary License Plates.

Diksha Madhok, the Theo Wilson Scholarship winner in 2011, has joined Bloomberg News as its South Asia economy and government editor. She previously had been at CNN Business as an editor and reporter based in Delhi. Madhok also worked for Quartz as editor and platform director of QZ India.

Jeff Horwitz, the Fred Weigold winner in 2009, and his colleague Katherine Blunt at the Wall Street Journal won a 2024 Loeb Award in the beat reporting category for a story entitled “The Dark Side of Meta’s Algorithms.” The series of articles described how Instagram and Facebook connected networks of pedophiles and served them disturbing content, and how parent Meta Platforms not only failed to stop this harmful activity but added to the risks.

Anupreeta Das, the Reuters Scholarship winner in 2006, is leaving The New York Times’ New York bureau where she served as finance editor since 2020 to join the Times’ Delhi bureau as a South Asian correspondent. Das has also worked at the Wall Street Journal and Reuters. She is the author of the recently published Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World.

Damien Cave, winner of the Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in Memory of I.F. Stone in 1998 and formerly bureau chief in Australia for The New York Times, is moving to Ho Chi Minh City to open the Times’ first bureau in Vietnam since 1975. Cave has spent most of the past 20 years as a correspondent for the Times based in Baghdad, Miami, Mexico City and Sydney, and spent lengthy stints reporting from many other places, including Lebanon, India, Taiwan, Turkey and Cuba. He is the author of Parenting Like an Australian: One Family’s Quest to Fight Fear and Dive into a Better, Braver Life. Cave was part of the New York Times team that won the OPC’s 2007 Website Award for best web coverage of international affairs for coverage of violence in Baghdad.

AWARDS

OPC Governor Raney Aronson-Rath, the editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE PBS, has received the John Chancellor Excellence in Journalism Award from the Columbia Journalism School. Aronson-Rath’s journalism career spans 25 years as reporter, producer and correspondent. She said in an article about the award on the FRONTLINE website that she is “profoundly honored and humbled by this recognition” and thanked Columbia along with FRONTLINE staff, colleagues at WGBH, PBS and CPB, and “all the journalists and filmmakers who have inspired, collaborated, and supported me.” The award is presented annually to a journalist “with courage and integrity for cumulative professional accomplishments.” In addition, FRONTLINE won two Emmys at the 45th annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards this year, for documentaries on Clarence and Ginni Thomas and the Pegasus spyware scandal. Aronson-Rath was one of eight documentary filmmakers and news industry professionals inducted into the Silver Circle by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS), which the organization describes as “an elite group of professionals who have made significant contributions to television” for 25 years.

Fordham University has named Jane Ferguson’s book, No Ordinary Assignment as the recipient of this year’s Ann M. Sperber Book Prize. Ferguson won the OPC’s Peter Jennings Award in 2021 for her coverage on PBS NewsHour of the fall of Afghanistan, and participated in an OPC book night about No Ordinary Assignment last October. She will accept the Sperber Book Prize and deliver remarks at a ceremony on Nov. 11 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

UPDATES

Sewell Chan, an OPC member who recently became executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), wrote his first letter to readers on Sept. 20 to express his gratitude and declare goals. He referenced the publication’s mission statement in 1961, which noted a “widespread uneasiness about the state of journalism,” saying that in 2024, “our age has only gotten more complicated.” He said technological disruption, changing business models, rising misinformation, and threats to democracy are challenging the news industry. He pledged for CJR to expand international and local news coverage, cover emerging business models for news, AI tools and disruption, and “reflect on the role of journalism as a civic practice.”

Kang-Chun Cheng, an OPC member who works as print and photojournalist based in Kenya, filed a piece from Nigeria in September for Al Jazeera about the use of artificial intelligence to help communities recover from this year’s devastating floods. She wrote that seasonal flooding affects 4.5 million people living in Nigeria’s Kogi State and a total of 15 million across the country, with one million people displaced by the collapse of a dam in mid-September this year. She said a program that uses AI to predict flooding gives money to people living in high-risk areas before the waters rise, allowing communities to brace for the aftermath by stocking up on supplies.

OPC member George de Lama, president of the Eisenhower Fellowships, on Sept. 18 honored co-recipients of the 2024 James and Carol Hovey Eisenhower Fellowships Impact Award for their work to support social enterprises in Colombia. The recipients were Camilo Fonseca Velásquez of the Cultural and Graphic Industries for the Bogotá Chamber of Commerce, and Mariana Villamizar, the director of public and corporate relations for Grupo Éxito. The two were honored for their work on RECON, an online platform they lead that focuses on social enterprises, poverty reduction and peace-building projects “in a country dealing with the consequences of the long-running war between the government, organized crime syndicates, Far-Left guerrillas and Far-Right paramilitary groups.”

Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet who won the OPC’s Flora Lewis Award for best commentary this year, appeared as a guest on NPR’s Fresh Air on Oct. 15 to talk about his award-winning essays in The New Yorker. Toha told host Terry Gorss that he fled his home in Gaza days after the Oct. 7 attacks last year, along with his wife and their three young children. Their home was destroyed in a bombing attack two weeks later, and the refugee camp they sought shelter in was also bombed before they eventually got passports and left Gaza. Toha said he was then detained for two days and beaten by Israeli soldiers, falsely accusing him of being a member of Hamas, while crossing into Egypt.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

Dusko Doder, a prominent Cold War journalist who led the Moscow bureau of The Washington Post, died on Sept. 10 in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at the age of 87. Doder was known for breaking key stories, including the death of Soviet leader Yuri Andropov in February 1984, which he concluded after noticing hundreds of lights illuminating the Soviet Defense Ministry in Moscow and state television and radio suddenly changing programs to classical music – an observation U.S. officials dismissed. Doder was the target of a false accusation in TIME magazine in 1992, when a poorly sourced story suggested he had received a $1,000 payment from the K.G.B. Doder sued TIME for libel and won, receiving an apology from the magazine and $262,000 to cover his legal costs. But his career was cut short after the article appeared Former Post executive editor Ben Bradlee said in a 1995 memoir that Doder’s scoop on Andropov’s death had embarrassed the C.I.A., saying the agency had a hand in the TIME story to get even. The accusation hamstrung the rest of Doder’s career. He left the Post in 1987 and was posted in China for the U.S. News and World Report and then later worked as a freelancer in Belgrade. Doder’s work garnered two OPC Citations for Excellence, one in 1982 in the Bob Considine category for coverage of the Soviet Union and one in 1989 in the Hallie and Whit Burnett category for work on a U.S. News & World Report piece titled “Revolution and Ruin.”