People Column
SCHOLARS
Noelle Harff, the Walter and Betsy Cronkite Scholar Award Winner in 2024, returned home after a fellowship with Reuters in Argentina. In a message to the OPC Foundation in August, she reflected on her experience over the last six months as she began her final semester at the University of North Carolina. “As an economics major, I arrived with a fascination for finance, but exploring economics from Argentina has changed how I see the world,” she said. “Six months ago, the subway fare in Buenos Aires was 67 pesos. Today it’s around 630. From credit to crypto, I was never short on ideas. I was even able to break the news that Argentina won its 16th consecutive continental title during Copa America! Thanks to the OPC Foundation, those ideas turned to bylines.”
Olivia George, the Irene Corbally Kuhn Scholarship winner in 2022, was named Outstanding New Journalist by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) at its annual Sunshine State Awards presented in a ceremony at the Hollywood Central Performing Arts Center, Hollywood, Florida, on Aug. 17. George covers local government at the Tampa Bay Times, a job she started shortly after graduating from Brown in 2022.
AWARDS
The Radio Television Digital News Association (RTNDA) has announced that 20 Days in Mariupol, a documentary by FRONTLINE (PBS) and The Associated Press that won this year’s Peter Jennings Award from the OPC, has also won two RTNDA 2024 Edward R. Murrow Awards. OPC Governor Raney Aronson-Rath, the executive producer of FRONTLINE (PBS), was part of the team that produced the documentary, with Michelle Mizner, Derl McCrudden and Mstyslav Chernov. Chernov was also part of the team that won the 2022 Hal Boyle Award for AP coverage of Mariupol. The film also won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature earlier this year.
UPDATES
OPC Governor Alexis Okeowo, a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, is writing a new memoir slated for publication in August 2025. Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama, to be published by Henry Holt & Company, will examine Okeowo’s own history growing up in Montgomery as the child of Nigerian immigrants, weaving memoir with state history and reporting on present-day legislative battles. Okeowo also wrote a longform piece for the New Yorker on Aug. 26 about a cult leader in Kenya. The story follows a doomsday pastor named Paul Mackenzie, who is alleged to have led more than 400 followers in a starvation suicide pact, their bodies later found in mass graves in Kenya’s Shakahola Forest. He was arrested in April and along with co-defendants has pleaded not guilty to murder charges.
OPC Governor Singeli Agnew directed a four-part series for PBS that follows high school students across the country as they grapple with critical questions about democracy. The first episode, “Chasing Victory,” premieres on Tuesday, Oct. 8 at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time on PBS and the next three episodes will air each Tuesday in October at the same time. The series, created by Retro Report, will also stream on Amazon Prime. Agnew and her team spent more than 145 days on the ground with students and teachers across the US over the last year. “While it’s easy to get discouraged about the state of politics in this country, this new generation of voters shows us what it means to be civically engaged and civil,” Agnew said. “After decades spent following war and conflict, this was one of the more inspiring projects I’ve been part of.” The Wrap flagged the series as one of their “60 Most Anticipated Shows of Fall 2024.”
Brian Byrd, an OPC Governor, a program officer at the Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts (FORE) and a freelance photographer, recently wrote an article for Hot Mirror Magazine about Paul McCartney’s photo exhibit “Eyes of the Storm.” The exhibit, which ran from May to August 2024 at the Brooklyn Museum, featured images captured by McCartney during The Beatles’ rise to global fame in late 1963 and early 1964. In his piece, Byrd, a lifelong Beatles fan, described approaching the exhibit with both excitement and trepidation. He wrote, “To my delight and surprise, McCartney’s photographs revealed an even more nuanced and human story than I had hoped.” Byrd was particularly captivated by images depicting quiet, intimate moments with the band’s inner circle of “confidants, protectors and loved ones who formed the Beatles’ inner sanctum during this whirlwind period.” Byrd highlights photography’s power to “actively shape perception, memory, and cultural narratives,” and notes how “in the act of observing, we often become part of the story ourselves, forever altering the narrative we seek to document.” Hot Mirror, the online photo publication where Byrd’s article appeared, serves as an educational partner of the BarTur Photo Award. The OPC is collaborating with this award to create new opportunities for OPC member photographers, with a particular focus on supporting freelancers.
OPC member Stephen Shepard is publishing a book titled Salinger’s Soul: His Personal & Religious Odyssey, which examines how J.D. Salinger’s private life influenced his famous stories. Shepard writes that Salinger’s son, Matt, has been sorting through the unpublished writing his father left behind after his death in 2010. Most of these stories will be released soon, and are heavily influenced by his years in seclusion. Salinger’s Soul recounts his traumatic experience in World War II, as well as his transition from the Judaism of his youth to his embrace of a mystical form of Hinduism known as Vedanta. The book is available for Kindle and is slated for publication in print on Sept. 10.
A book by OPC member Adriana Carranca has been named as a finalist for the Christianity Today Book Awards. Soul by Soul, which was discussed at a book talk co-hosted by the OPC at Book Culture on May 2, follows the rise of evangelical Christian missionaries secretly trying to convert Muslims in Kabul. Winners will be announced in December. Carranca will be participating in a series of book events this fall, including a discussion at CUNY on Sept. 17 and an online discussion hosted by New America on Oct. 9. She received the OPC Foundation’s 2018 Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in Memory of I.F. Stone.
PRESS FREEDOM
To mark the 10-year anniversary of American-Israeli journalist Steven Sotloff’s murder by a member of ISIS, Marc Marginedes, a Spanish reporter who was in captivity with Sotloff, wrote a piece for TIME magazine remembering Sotloff’s courage, “humor, and relentless quest for justice, despite the incredible dangers they’d experienced.” He said over the six months they were held captive together, he had witnessed “how this young and brilliant journalist, 14 years younger than me, had dealt with the harrowing situation he was put in with serenity, efficiency, honesty, and enormous bravery, becoming an example for me and, very likely, for others.” Sotloff was killed on Sept. 2, 2014, just two weeks after American journalist and video reporter James Foley was killed by ISIS. In an opinion piece for The New York Times to mark that anniversary, Diane Foley, James’ mother, said on the day of his murder she “felt almost more rage against our government than I did against his killers,” adding that it seemed “that Jim was considered collateral damage by our political leaders. The government has claimed that it did all it could to bring Jim home, but I refused to accept what I saw as its inaction.” She said since her son’s death, she has tried to direct her grief to enable hope and change. “To be moral, we must have courage, and we must speak out about our loved ones captured and wrongfully imprisoned overseas.”
Reuters safety adviser Ryan Evans was killed in a strike on a hotel in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on Aug. 25. Two of the agency’s journalists were treated in a hospital, and one of them was seriously injured. Evans, a former British soldier, advised journalists on safety around the world, including in Ukraine, Israel and at the Paris Olympics. He was 38.
This installment, catch up on news about OPC Foundation scholars Noelle Harff and Olivia George; and OPC community members Raney Aronson-Rath, Alexis Okeowo, Singeli Agnew , Brian Byrd, Stephen Shepard and Adriana Carranca.