People Column

OPC SCHOLARS

Rawya Rageh, 2006 Dan Eldon scholar, is a senior crisis adviser for Amnesty International where she is investigating human rights abuses and war crimes in situations of emergencies. A former reporter for Al Jazeera English, she was at the center of AJE’s coverage of the Egyptian uprising in 2011. Her reporting of the events was named one of the top 50 stories produced by graduates of Columbia Journalism School during its first 100 years of operation.

2001 Reuters Fellowship winner Lingling Wei landed a front-page story in The Wall Street Journal on Nov. 17 about the 8-year low in the yuan, which many analysts tie to efforts by the Chinese government to combat economic sluggishness. Wei covers Chinese finance from The Wall Street Journal’s Beijing bureau.

The New York Times carried a front-page story from 2007 Stan Swinton scholar Ben Hubbard on Nov. 14 about the devastating airstrikes in Yemen being carried out by U.S.-trained pilots using American weaponry. Hubbard, the Times’ Middle East correspondent, reports that the Saudi-led campaign is raising accusations of war crimes amid a burgeoning humanitarian crisis.

Levi Bridges, the 2016 Swinton winner, filed a story for Public Radio International about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s broken promises to give sanctuary to Ukrainians after the war. Bridges developed the story while working as an OPC Foundation fellow in the AP’s Moscow bureau.

Dake Kang, the 2016 Fritz Beebe winner, has started an OPC Foundation fellowship in the Associated Press bureau in Bangkok. He filed a story on Dec. 1 about Vitit Muntarbhorn, the first U.N. expert charged to look into violence and discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

WINNERS

OPC Foundation board member and OPC member Nicholas Schifrin has won a 2017 Ochberg Fellowship from the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. The weeklong program offers journalists the opportunity to “explore the many dimensions of psychological trauma; to discuss ethical and craft challenges raised by their work; and to forge relationships with colleagues who share their interests and commitment.” Schifrin is a special correspondent at PBS NewsHour.

OPC member Nisid Hajari’s Midnight’s Furies was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize, an award for first books published by Indian authors. The book examines the bloodshed around the 1947 partition of India. Hajari is the Asia Editor for Bloomberg View, and writes about Asian politics, history and economics.

UPDATES

NEW YORK: John Daniszewski, vice president for standards for The Associated Press, has issued guidance on how to handle the term “alt-right.” Daniszewski, an OPC member, says it should be used within quotation marks and must always be accompanied by a definition, such as “an offshoot of conservatism mixing racism, white nationalism and populism” or “a white nationalist movement.” He warns that the term should not be used generically because it “may exist primarily as a public-relations device to make its supporters’ actual beliefs less clear and more acceptable to a broader audience.”

OPC affiliate member Brion Tingler is the new head of external affairs for Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. Tingler previously worked in senior communications roles for Lenovo, and will continue to be based in New York.

OPC member Patricia Milton’s recent documentary for 60 Minutes focused on Americans who are lured overseas to fight for ISIS. “It kind of takes control of you. And you think you’re doing something for a greater cause. And you think you’re doing it for good,” one Minneapolis teenager told three-time OPC award-winner Scott Pelley, after finding Islamic extremism through online videos. Milton is a senior producer with the CBS News Investigative Unit. She previously spent two decades at the Associated Press.

News outlets including The Washington Post, the Huffington Post and Newsday have turned to OPC member and Stony Brook University lecturer Richard Hornik as an expert source on the “fake news” that fueled Donald Trump’s presidential win. Hornik, who works at the university’s Center for News Literacy, says news consumers need to understand that “If something seems too weird, too funny, too perfect,” it probably is – and that placing high on a list of Google search results is no guarantee of a story’s authenticity. Hornik spent more than 20 years at TIME Inc., including stints as bureau chief in Warsaw, Boston and Beijing.

Thomson Reuters announced on Nov. 1 that it would cut 2,000 non-news jobs at its locations around the globe. The losses amount to a 4 percent cut in the company’s workforce of 48,000. “It’s about simplification and taking out bureaucracy and taking out layers, all of which have added complexity and slowed us down,” said Reuters president and CEO Jim Smith in a Reuters interview. “These actions are not driven by any reaction to market conditions or in any way coming on the back of underperformance.”

PROVIDENCE, R. I.: Brown University’s alumni magazine has high praise for 1980 graduate and OPC member Alissa J. Rubin of The New York Times. When you’re reading one of her reports, the magazine writes, “you might feel as if you’re reading a short story. That’s how vividly she portrays the characters and settings.” Rubin focused on Renaissance studies and classics at Brown and says she sees parallels between her work and the ancient Greeks: Antigone, for example, “is a play about the need to go through burial rites. Think of all the wars in which people have wanted to find their children and bury them.”

WASHINGTON, DC: President Barack Obama has nominated OPC member Markos Kounalakis to the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. According to the State Department’s website, the commission is tasked with “appraising activities intended to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics and to increase the understanding of, and support for, these same activities.” Kounalakis is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and president and publisher emeritus of the Washington Monthly. He previously reported for Newsweek and NBC Radio in Eastern Europe, the USSR and Afghanistan.

2011 Lowell Thomas Award winner Lourdes Garcia-Navarro is taking on a new role at NPR. In January, the South America correspondent will replace Rachel Martin as the host of Weekend Edition Sunday, the network has announced. Garcia-Navarro has been with NPR since 2004, reporting from Israel, Iraq, Brazil and Mexico.

COLUMBUS, Ohio: If you think fact-checking only reinforces people’s existing biases, better check your facts. A new study says the so-called “backfire effect,” wherein people believe an idea more strongly after it’s been debunked, is actually quite rare. “By and large, folks across the political spectrum were happy to move, at least some of the way, consistently with a factual intervention,” lead researcher Thomas Wood of Ohio State University told Poynter.org. The research was presented at the American Political Science Association this summer.

BOSTON: As Harvard Business Review trims its annual print output from 10 editions to six, OPC member Adi Ignatius is helping redefine the magazine for the digital age. According to the Nieman Lab blog, HBR is planning “six new online series, each of which will be a multi-day, multimedia package organized around a single concept.” It hopes to use these deep dives to attract a new generation of readers – and subscribers. The print product is still doing well, “but we’re also not idiots,” Ignatius tells Nieman.“We’re just trying to get ahead of how people consume things.”

SANTA MONICA, Calif.: A director has been chosen for the upcoming film version of OPC governor Charles Graeber’s book, The Good Nurse. According to deadline.com, Danish director Tobias Lindholm will helm the Lionsgate production. The book tells the story of serial killer nurse Charlie Cullen, who may have taken the lives of as many as 300 patients over 16 years in New Jersey and Pennsylvania hospitals.

MIAMI: When Fidel Castro died in late November, the Miami Herald was ready. “We’ve been planning for this story longer than some of the people covering it have been alive,” managing editor Rick Hirsch told Poynter.org. The “Cuba Plan” has been dusted off and updated many times over the years – the periodic eruption of Castro-is-dead rumors always provided a useful reminder – and like the industry itself it gradually moved from a print-focused to a digital-first approach. The stories and opinion pieces “reflect the emotional outpouring” of the moment, Poynter’s Al Tompkins wrote, and offer a rich range of viewpoints and experiences.

DHAKA: OPC member Hasan Mahmud was recently honored with an international pin by former Lions Club governor Abdul Halim Patwary. Mahmud has served as president of the Dhaka Delkus Green Lions Club since 2015. He is the editor of the national Sunday Line weekly newspaper.

TORONTO: OPC member Simcha Jacobovici’s Associated Producers is teaming with Keshet Studios and producer Robert Lantos on a 10-hour television series about Kabbalah. According to Variety magazine, “Kabbalah” will focus on “10 different moments in history where major players were adherents of the ancient mystical practice, including some of the U.S. founding fathers during the American Revolution and Michelangelo during his painting of the Sistine Chapel.”

LONDON: Has the world stopped caring about mass murder? OPC member Andrew Nagorski raises that question in a recent opinion piece for Reuters. Nagorski contrasts the silence that greeted the AP’s revelation of mass graves in Iraq and Syria to the shock people felt over the revelation of Nazi death camps at the end of World War II. He blames the lack of outrage on an “inability to focus” on such stories for longer than a news cycle. Nagorski spent more than three decades as a foreign correspondent and editor for Newsweek, based in Berlin, Rome, Moscow, Warsaw and Hong Kong. His latest book is The Nazi Hunters.

TOKYO: Motoko Rich began her new role as The New York Times Tokyo bureau chief in August. Rich previously covered education for the Times.

Changes continue at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan as the organization wrestles with a steep decline in the number of Western correspondents. Freelancer Peter Langan has resigned as president to take a position in Hong Kong. New president Khaldon Azhari, the founder of U.S.-based Pan Orient News, wrote in November that he was taking a fresh look at the club’s proposed move to new quarters.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

Pioneering journalist Ruth Gruber died at her home in Manhattan on Nov. 17 at age 105. Gruber covered Stalin’s gulags, the Nazi trials at Nuremberg and the plight of Jewish refugees in the aftermath of World War II. Gruber joined the OPC in March 1958 and remained a member until her death. In 2009, she received the inaugural Fay Gillis Wells Award, given in honor of one of the OPC founders, to a female journalist of exceptional achievement. Gruber is survived by her son, David Michaels, an assistant secretary of labor in the Obama administration; daughter Celia Michaels, a former CBS News editor; two stepdaughters, Jeri Drucker and Elaine Rosner-Jeria; nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

PBS NewsHour co-host Gwen Ifill died on Nov. 14 at age 61 in Washington, DC. Ifill served as co-anchor and co-managing editor of PBS NewsHour with Judy Woodruff, forming the first all-female anchor team on network nightly news. Before coming to PBS in 1999, she worked for the Washington Post, The New York Times and NBC. Ifill was scheduled to receive the John Chancellor Award on Nov. 16. The award, given out by the Columbia Journalism School, honors lifetime achievement in journalism.

Longtime NPR and BBC foreign correspondent Alan Tomlinson died in Miami on Nov. 26. He was 69 years old. Tomlinson covered Central America and the Caribbean, reporting on the civil war in El Salvador and unrest in Haiti. He and colleagues from NPR received the OPC’s Ben Grauer Award for their reporting on Haiti. In the mid-1990s he shifted his focus to television, producing documentaries on topics ranging from Ebola to street music. “The combination of his wit, friendliness, and perfectionism is what created the fuel that ignited Alan’s storytelling genius,” said John Labonia, general manager of Miami public television station WLRN, where Tomlinson had worked since 2013.

Reporter and editor Dileep Padgaonkar died on Nov. 25 in Pune, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, at age 72. Padgaonkar got his start in journalism in 1968 as the Times of India’s Paris correspondent. From 1978 to 1986, he worked at Unesco in Bangkok and Paris. He was awarded the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest civilian distinction, in 2002 for his service to journalism. In 2010 he was appointed by the Indian government to a three-person panel to develop a roadmap to peace in Kashmir, traveling the region extensively and speaking to thousands of people.

Tatiana Hoffman, a longtime international affairs reporter, editor and host at Israel’s Channel 2, has died at age 69 in Jerusalem. Born in what was then Czechoslovakia, Hoffman came to Israel in 1968 to accept a journalism award. The USSR invaded her homeland while she was away, and she remained in Israel. She became a foreign correspondent for Israel Radio, moving to Channel 2 in 1993.

Former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter John P. “Jack” Corr died on Nov. 20 at age 82, in Rittenhouse, Pennsylvania. Corr started as a copyboy at the Inquirer and worked his way up to feature reporter and foreign correspondent. He reported from Belfast, Northern Ireland; Pretoria, South Africa; and the Vatican.

OPC SCHOLARS

Emily Witt, who won the Flora Lewis Memorial Scholarship in 2009, has been getting a lot of press for her new book. Future Sex explores the online and offline sexual subcultures, from orgasmic meditation to Kink.com to polyamorous weddings. “Witt is as thoughtful as she is audacious” writes Vogue’s Julia Felsenthal, “and Future Sex is ultimately a carefully crafted literary and intellectual endeavor.”

Tess Taylor, winner of the 2004 Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in honor of I.F. Stone, recently published her second book of poetry. Work & Days, from Red Hen Press, is a cycle of 28 poems following the rhythms of life and work on a farm. Taylor’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harvard Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and other publications; she chairs the poetry committee of the National Book Critics Circle and reviews poetry on-air for NPR’s All Things Considered.

The accolades keep rolling in for 2005 Emanuel R. Freedman scholar Marina Walker Guevara, who helmed the massive Panama Papers investigation at the International Center for Investigative Journalism. Guevara received a special citation from Columbia University’s Maria Moors Cabot Prize for the project, which the prize committee said “prompted a much needed debate about transparency and accountability in the region and around the world.” She was also honored with the Susan Talalay Award for Outstanding Journalism from the Alfred Friendly Foundation. The Panama Papers consisted of 11.5 million leaked documents from offshore entities, showing where the world’s richest individuals and companies sheltered their wealth. Guevera is deputy director of the ICIJ.

WINNERS

OPC member Alissa J. Rubin made what she called a “heartfelt plea” to news organizations to keep funding war reporting in her acceptance speech for the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism on Oct. 24. “It’s expensive, it’s dangerous and it’s scary, but it also is at the heart of the journalistic mission,” she told the audience at Maine’s Colby College, which gives out the annual award. Rubin is the Paris bureau chief for The New York Times; she previously served as chief of the Kabul bureau and deputy chief of the Baghdad bureau.

Associated Press photographer Rodrigo Abd has won the 2016 Maria Moors Cabot Prize, recognizing excellence in coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean. Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, which awards the prize, said in a statement that Abd had worked with “untiring commitment and uncommon empathy” to create “close-up images of people in Latin America that illuminate urgent social issues.” Abd won the OPC’s Feature Photography Award in 2010 and 2015.

UPDATES

NEW YORK: Former OPC president Alexis Gelber is the new editor in chief of Straus News, which publishes 17 weekly newspapers websites in contiguous towns in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Gelber is a former managing editor of Newsweek International. She currently teaches at the New York University graduate school of journalism, a position she will continue to hold in her new role. She was president of the OPC from 2002 to 2004.

OPC member Roger Cohen has been named the inaugural Indiana University Poynter Chair. Cohen, a columnist on international affairs and diplomacy for The New York Times, is slated to give a lecture at the school’s Bloomington campus in the fall and return in the spring to work for several days with students and faculty. The mission of IU’s Poynter Center is to explore the intersections between ethics, media and public institutions.

A new multimedia venture called Emerging Market Views focuses on “business and economic coverage of the world’s developing economies.” The site offers videos and written opinion and analysis pieces, with plans for a monthly podcast to launch in 2017. Founder Dawn Kissi is an international business journalist who got her start at ABC News in New York.

OPC member Norman Pearlstine is embarking on another chapter of a storied career, joining Money.net as chief information architect. Money.net is working to build a more affordable alternative to the data terminals that anchor Bloomberg. Pearlstine will lead development of the company’s artificial-intelligence based news service. He has previously held top editorial positions at Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and TIME, and will continue in his current role as vice chairman of Time Inc.

Ali Velshi, an OPC member and former anchor at CNN and Al
Jazeera America, has joined MSNBC. “Ali’s sharp economic analysis will be a valuable asset” to the news channel, wrote MSNBC president Phil Griffin in a memo to staff, citing Velshi’s “unique mix of experience and perspective on both domestic and international issues.”

OPC member Lydia Tomkiw reports she is now “spending a lot of time in glass towers in midtown” after moving into financial journalism from breaking news. She is covering the hedge fund industry for the Financial Times’ property FundFire. Tomkiw has previously reported from Ukraine and Indonesia for outlets including the Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, The Smithsonian, International Business Times and Nieman Journalism Lab.

The New York Times has tapped Jim Yardley as its next Europe editor. Yardley was previously the paper’s Rome bureau chief. He shared the Whitman Bassow award in 2007 with colleagues at the Times for reporting on the environmental impacts of development in China, and shared a citation for the OPC Bob Considine Award in 2005. The Times has also moved foreign desk editor Greg Winter to deputy international editor.

The formerly newspaper-centric Pulitzer Prize has opened all of its journalism categories to print and online magazines. The decision caps a gradual process that has seen two categories accept magazine entries in 2015, and five this year. “The broad expansion of digital journalism has led to a growing overlap in the work and roles of newspapers, digital-only news sites, and magazines,” said Joyce Dehli, co-chair of the Pulitzer board. The prize is also dropping its traditional application letter in favor of a Q and A format tailored to each category.

The Wall Street Journal sought a “substantial number of buyouts” in October in an effort to limit layoffs, editor in chief Gerard Baker told employees in a memo obtained by various news organizations. The option was offered to all news employees worldwide. The paper has also announced a “broader review of operations” to “rebalance revenue streams” in light of declining revenues from print advertising. A revamped design with some consolidation of sections is expected to launch in the next few weeks.

WOODBURY, Conn.: After 47 years of international living and 34 years in Belgium, longtime OPC member Jonathan Kapstein retired and moved to Connecticut in August. Kapstein also resigned as president of the Press Club Brussels Europe, where he and his wife Nancy, also a writer and editor, were given a fond farewell party. He remains on the PCBE board with a special assignment to coordinate with similar North American press groups such as the OPC. Jonathan also continues as a vice president of the International Federation of Press Clubs.

WASHINGTON, DC: Jeffrey Goldberg is the new editor in chief of The Atlantic –  becoming just the 14th person to occupy that spot since 1857. Atlantic Media chairman David G. Bradley announced the hiring after an extensive search. “It is fair to say that, together, we met a great deal of the nation’s top editorial talent,” Bradley wrote to the magazine’s employees. “But, at least for us, Jeff is something set apart.” Goldberg won the 2003 Joe and Laurie Dine Award. He has been a correspondent for the magazine since 2001 and has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and New York magazine.

OPC Governor Hannah Allam recently broke the inside story of what happened to three U.S. contractors who were kidnapped in Iraq early this year. The three say they were shackled and beaten by a militia led by longtime U.S. foe Muqtada al Sadr. They accuse the Iraqi government of inventing a widely-reported story that they were kidnapped in a brothel in order to distract from the fact that it took Baghdad a month to secure their release. Waiel El-Maadawy decided to speak out because he wants the U.S. to seek compensation from Iraq. “We were beaten and tortured for 31 days,” Waiel El-Maadawy told Allam. “We want the Iraqi government to take responsibility for a crime that was unjustified and unwarranted.”

Minky Worden attended the Sporting Chance Forum in mid-October, where she rubbed elbows with tennis great Martina Navratilova. The forum focused on the human rights impacts of large global sports competitions. Worden, an OPC member and director of Global Initiatives at Human Rights Watch, moderated a panel on mega-sporting events at the OPC in September.

The Newspaper Association of America has changed its name to the News Media Alliance and begun accepting digital-only publications as members. CEO David Chavern tells Poynter.org the organization will also revamp its annual conference to focus on innovation and ad technologies, and will resume reporting on the industry’s financial health. The organization had stopped updating revenue numbers for the industry in 2013.

COLUMBIA, Mo.: The American Society of News Editors is also changing to reflect the ascendance of digital. The organization has announced it will now use web traffic numbers, rather than print circulation, to set its membership fees. It has also adopted a new lower-priced membership level for news executives who are not in top positions at their companies, in an effort to reach out to up-and-coming leaders of the industry.

SEATTLE: Getty Images has launched a new agency called Verbatim to represent its photographers to commercial clients. The venture will channel a percentage of its profits into photojournalism projects. OPC Third Vice President Pancho Bernasconi, vice president of news, Americas, will be one of two executives overseeing Getty Images Reportage, which will house the agency’s Emerging Talents program.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.: A new global code of principals promotes fairness, transparency and non-partisanship among fact-checking organizations. The five-part code, whose development was led by the Poynter Institute, includes transparent funding, transparent methodologies, and a commitment to open and honest corrections. It has been endorsed by 39 organizations, including Africa Check, South Asia Check, Politifact and Snopes.

TORONTO: A film produced by OPC member Kathy Eldon premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September. “The Journey Is The Destination” is based on journals left by her son, photojournalist Dan Eldon, who was killed by an angry crowd in Somalia while documenting the aftermath of a U.S. bombing in 1993. “My great desire is that this film will be a spark to ignite a movement of young people and the young-at-heart to believe they have a role to play in changing the world around them,” Eldon told a Reuters reporter following the premiere.

CALAIS, France: “The Jungle has been the worst of all the journey, because this is Europe,” a teenage migrant tells OPC Governor Vivienne Walt at the infamous refugee camp perched on the English Channel. “When we hear about Europe in our country, we think about democracy, we think they will protect us.” Walt’s recent stories from the camp have painted a vivid picture of the frustrations migrants have faced living in tents and shacks in The Jungle while trying to get into England. The camp is now being closed and its occupants dispersed, mostly to locations in Britain and France.

LONDON: The BBC World Service radio program, Witness, is working on an episode about legendary photojournalist and OPC member Dicky Chapelle. The program has asked to use a WNYC audio archive of Chapelle addressing the club in 1964. Chapelle was a war correspondent from World War II through her death due to shrapnel in Vietnam. She frequently traveled with troops and was known for her fearlessness.

PARIS: OPC member and renowned photo editor John G. Morris will celebrate his 100th birthday with an open house at his home in Paris in December. Morris worked with such giants of photojournalism as Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, telling stories from D-Day, the Vietnam War and countless other hotspots around the globe. He has lived in Paris since 1983.

MUMBAI: “I have consciously tried to create a mix of photographs which are of social relevance – be it about the environment or about taboo topics such as homosexuality,” OPC member Chirag Wakaskar tells The Floating Magazine in a recent feature about Everyday Mumbai, an Instagram account he curates. Wakaskar, an independent photographer, says he also looks for photos that going beyond a tourist’s-eye view of the city and that reflect the photographer’s “personal thoughts and opinions.” Everday Mumbai has more than 100,000 followers.

SYDNEY: Jason Motlagh, co-winner of the 2014 Madeline Dane Ross Award, spent 12 days crossing the notorious Darién Gap with a film crew for the Dateline program on Australia’s SBS network. The Darién is a 10,000-square-mile wilderness spanning the border between Colombia and Panama. As other routes into the U.S. have become more difficult, more people are taking a chance on this grueling and dangerous trip through mountains and rainforest. SBS negotiated for months with FARC rebels, who control access to the most direct path through the gap, to secure safe passage for the crew. The story aired in September.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

Richard P. O’Mara, a foreign correspondent and foreign editor for the Baltimore Sun, died on Oct. 27 in Towson, Maryland at the age of 80. O’Mara held numerous positions with The Sun in the ‘60s and ‘70s, including chief of the Rio de Janeiro bureau. In 1979 he began a 12-year stint as foreign editor, then served as London correspondent for three years. “Rich O’Mara was a very graceful writer who could take mundane stories and make them interesting,” retired foreign correspondent Robert A. Erlandson told The Sun. “He was an example of The Sun at its best.”

OPC SCHOLARS

After several years with Bloomberg in Japan, Jacob Adelman, 2005 HL Stevenson winner, has returned to his hometown of Philadelphia where he is now a staff writer for the Inquirer covering real estate, urbanism and commercial development. He also covered real estate and land-use issues for the Associated Press in its Los Angeles bureau.

1998 Reuters Scholarship winner Kristina Shevory published a long piece in Playboy in August about Afghanistan’s commando units. These specially-trained fighters receive higher pay and are meant to be better-supplied than the regular Afghan National Army. After traveling with commandos in the field, however, Shevory reports that the elite units are stretched thin, especially for the job of facing enemies like Islamic State. A longtime freelancer, Shevory has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Newsweek and other outlets. She has previously worked for The Associated Press, the Seattle Times and TheStreet.com.

J.p. Lawrence, who won the H.L. Stevenson Fellowship in 2015, is now a reporter for the premium team at the San Antonio Express News. He’ll be covering military issues and writing explainer articles for the newspaper’s site behind the paywall. He worked most recently for the Albany Times Union. J.p. had an OPC Foundation fellowship with the Associated Press in Uganda.

Joseph Kabila is stockpiling riot gear and water cannons in a sign that more unrest may be in store for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, writes 2015 Stan Swinton Fellowship winner Miriam Berger in Foreign Policy. Kabila has shown no sign of preparing for elections amid fears that he will remain in power despite constitutional term limits that take effect at the end of the year. Berger is a freelance multimedia journalist. She recently reported from the DRC as a fellow with the International Women’s Media Foundation.

Max deHaldevang, Reuters Fellowship winner in 2015, is now on a year-long Atlantic Fellowship with Quartz. He’s joined in New York by Neha Thirani Bagri, 2016 winner of the Jerry Flint Scholarship for International Business Reporting, who is also an editorial fellow. DeHaldevang was an OPC Foundation fellow in the Reuters bureau in Mexico City. Bagri traveled to Bangladesh on an OPC Fellowship with the GroundTruth Project.

Jia Feng, Theo Wilson Scholarship winner in 2012, is now a communication officer with the International Monetary Fund. She writes on economic issues, with a focus on Asia, Middle East and the Fund’s policy. Feng had an OPC Foundation fellowship in the Reuters Beijing Bureau.

WINNERS

The Online News Association’s James Foley Award for Conflict Reporting went to freelance photographer and reporter Sima Diab. The New York Times won in the Breaking News category for its coverage of the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris. Pro Publica and the Virginian-Pilot won in Topical Reporting for their coverage of the long-term effects of Agent Orange exposure on US Navy veterans. The massive Panama Papers project, led by the Center for Public Integrity’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and Süddeutsche Zeitung, claimed an Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award. The Intercept’s reporting on Obama’s drone warfare program in Afghanistan earned a University of Florida Award for Investigative Data Journalism.

UPDATES

NEW YORK: CNN Digital has hired former OPC President Marcus Mabry as its next director. Mabry was previously at Twitter, where he oversaw its Moments platform; before that, he held several editorial roles at The New York Times. He led OPC’s Board of Governors from 2014 to 2016.

Tweets will now be subject to the same review and correction standards as other published materials, The Associated Press announced in September after a tweet about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton came under fire. OPC member John Daniszewski, the agency’s vice president for standards, wrote that “whether to delete or update tweets” had previously been left to news managers to decide on a case-by-case basis. The new rules “require removal and correction of any AP tweets found not to meet AP standards.”

When OPC member Lucy Westcott reached out online in search of stories of sexual harassment in journalism, she was soon “inundated with recollections of inappropriate jokes, comments on race and appearance, and unwanted touching and worse.” Westcott wrote about these reports, and her own experience of harassment, for Newsweek in August – after Roger Ailes resigned from FOX News due to harassment allegations. Westcott noted that journalists face dangers both in the office and on the job. Many continue working with their harassers because, as one victim said, “It feels so dangerous to burn bridges in journalism.”

In his latest film for PBS FRONTLINE, OPC governor Martin Smith returns to his investigation of for-profit colleges. A Subprime Education examines the way Corinthian Colleges and other institutions persuade ill-informed people to borrow tens of thousands of dollars in pursuit of largely worthless degrees. The episode aired on Sept. 13. Smith first probed for-profit schools in a 2010 FRONTLINE episode, “College, Inc.” He is the founder of Rain Media, an independent documentary production company in New York City.

The Guardian U.S. announced major cuts in September in an effort to make up for a $4.4 million revenue shortfall. The company is offering buyouts to its unionized editorial staff, which will be followed by layoffs if necessary; it is also laying off people on the business side. According to Politico, about 50 jobs will be cut across the 150-person organization. In an email to staff, the company said “seismic shifts in the business model are adversely impacting our revenues.”

Former OPC governor Peter S. Goodman landed a front-page story in The New York Times in late September. The piece examined the roiling anger over global trade deals among American and European blue-collar workers, who have “borne the costs and suffered from joblessness and deepening economic anxiety.” Goodman announced his return to the Times as European economic correspondent in March, after a stint as global editor in chief of the International Business Times.

Michael Slackman has been named International Editor of The New York Times. Slackman replaces Joseph Kahn, who was given the newly reinstated role of Times managing editor. Slackman is a veteran foreign correspondent with postings including Berlin, Moscow and Cairo. The paper also announced that Susan Chira would leave her position deputy executive editor and write about gender issues for The Times.

SAGAPONACK, NY: OPC member Yvonne Dunleavy’s home in the Hamptons was the Wall Street Journal’s House of the Day in early October. Dunleavy used to rent the 1800-square-foot house to John F. Kennedy Jr. when she wasn’t using it. She and her husband are selling it now in order to travel more.

BOSTON: African dictators may soon be a thing of the past as the continent grows more prosperous and democratic, OPC governor Scott Gilmore recently wrote in the Boston Globe. “For most of the 20th century, Africa suffered approximately 20 successful coups per decade. This number has now dropped in half,” Gilmore explained. At the same time, “the GDP per capita in sub-Saharan Africa has more than tripled.” Gilmore is a social entrepreneur and an international columnist for Maclean’s Magazine.

PITTSBURGH: Father James Colligan, an OPC member, has published a book of his photos of Pope John Paul II’s 1981 visit to Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Colligan wrote about and photographed Japan for the Catholic News Service from the 1960s through the ‘90s. He now lives in Pittsburgh.

COLUMBIA, MISSOURI: OPC governor Michael Oreskes has been elected treasurer of the American Society of News Editors. Oreskes is senior vice president of news and editorial director at NPR. He previously worked at the Associated Press, the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times.

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: The weekly Saturday Paper published an extensive profile in September of OPC member Prue Clarke and her organization, New Narratives – Africans Reporting Africa. Clarke founded the organization as a model of independent journalism in Liberia; it now garners awards and regularly launches major stories in the national media. “A step back from the front line,” the paper writes, former war reporter Clarke “has found her space to make a difference.” In addition to her role as president of New Narratives, Clarke directs the International Reporting Program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

HONG KONG: Tara Joseph, Chief Correspondent for Reuters TV in Asia, was elected president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. She previously held the position in 2013-2014. Keith Bradsher, Hong Kong bureau chief for The New York Times, was elected First Vice-President. In a letter from the president in The Correspondent magazine, Joseph said the club planned to refurbish its headquarters and ramp up its social media efforts. Also on the to-do list: remaining vigilant about what she called the “worrying atmosphere for journalists working in the region.” Hong Kong, long a bastion of free speech, is now part of China and the Chinese government has been ratcheting up pressures on both foreign and domestic journalists.

Keith Richburg, 58, former globe-trotting correspondent for the Washington Post for 34 years, is the new director of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong. He succeeds Professor Yuen Ying Chan, the first director of the centre. Richburg says he intends to take journalism students on foreign reporting trips to show them the basics of foreign correspondence.

TOKYO: The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan is changing locations at least partly because of a sharp decline in the number of Western correspondents stationed in the country. The move is controversial because the new location is owned by Mitsubishi Group, the huge industrial conglomerate. Club president Peter Langan, a freelancer, says the new club in the Naka-dori section of Marunouchi, just a few blocks from the current location, will have better facilities including an interview room, photo studio, broadcast center and offices for bureaus.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

Past OPC President Roy Rowan died Sept. 13 in Greenwich, Connecticut at the age of 96. Please see pages 4 and 5 for a full-length remembrance.

South African journalist Allister Sparks, who covered apartheid for The Washington Post and The Observer (UK), died in Johannesburg on Sept. 19. He was 83. Sparks covered South Africa for opposition newspaper The Rand Daily Mail from the late 1950s until 1981, when he began writing for foreign publications. After Nelson Mandela became president, Sparks served as an editor at the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

Barry Came, who covered many of the world’s major stories, from the Lebanese civil war to the Entebbe airport hijack drama, died on March 23 in Rome. No age was given. Came got his start as a freelance reporter in Beirut, covering the 1973 Arab-Israeli war for Newsweek. He joined the magazine’s staff and won an OPC award in 1976 for his continued coverage of Lebanon’s civil war. Came transferred to Hong Kong and then Rio de Janeiro. Eventually he moved to Canada to work for Maclean’s Magazine. He finished his career in Rome working for the UN.

Ian Traynor, Europe editor for The Guardian, died on August 27 in Brussels at age 60. Traynor became a stringer for the paper in 1988, covering central Europe. He moved from Vienna to Bonn to Berlin to Moscow to Zagreb, covering German reunification, the Balkan wars, and the rise of the EU. Traynor became Europe editor, based in Brussels, in 2007. “Ian was one of the finest reporters of his generation, who brought a rare level of knowledge and expertise to his work,” said Katharine Viner, The Guardian’s editor-in-chief.

Takeji Muno, a World War II correspondent turned antiwar activist, died on Aug. 21 in Saitama, just northwest of Tokyo. He was 101. Muno covered the war in China and Southeast Asia for Asahi Shimbun. He resigned on the day the conflict ended, expressing regret that he had parroted imperial propaganda rather than wrote the truth about Japan’s flagging war effort. He spent the rest of his life advocating for pacifism.

OPC SCHOLARS

Alexander Saeedy, winner of the 2015 Fritz Beebe Fellowship, is back in Brussels where he was an OPC Foundation fellow in the Reuters bureau last summer. He is now a policy reporter with DeHavilland covering committees inside the Parliament and European Council and writing a daily press briefing.

2015 Irene Corbally Kuhn Scholarship winner James Reddick has become editor-in-chief of the Phnom Penh-based Khmer Times. Reddick started at the paper several months ago after finishing his j-school Masters at UC Berkeley. He has also lived and reported in Beirut.

Congratulations to 2012 Walter & Betsy Cronkite Scholar Lauren Rosenfeld, who has been nominated for two News and Documentary Emmy Awards for her work as producer on Al Jazeera America’s Forgotten Youth: Inside America’s Prisons. The Faultlines film, which explores what young inmates face when they’re placed in adult prisons – including alleged physical and sexual abuse – received a bronze medal in the Investigative Report category at the New York Film Festival.

Congratulations to 2011 Theo Wilson Scholarship winner Diksha Madhok for being named a runner-up in the Outstanding Business Story category in the annual awards presented by the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA). Diksha is the India editor at Quartz where she covers gender, popular culture and business. Before coming to Quartz, she worked for Reuters in New Delhi.

Natalie Bailey, who won the Jerry Flint Scholarship for International Business Reporting in 2011, attended the 21st International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa in July. She currently handles advocacy, strategy and communications for UNICEF’s HIV program division.

2009 Stan Swinton Scholarship winner Michael Miller has been named to the Local Enterprise team at The Washington Post. Miller has spent 18 months on the Morning Mix blog, where he “established himself as one of the Post’s most able, accomplished and hard-working reporters,” editors wrote in an announcement of his new position. Previously, Miller was a senior writer at the Miami New Times.

Brad Wong, who won the 2002 David R. Schweisberg Memorial Scholarship, helped produce a project on stateless Hmong refugees in the United States for Equal Voice, an online publication of the Marguerite Casey Foundation. The refugees came here as children but lost their green cards due to committing crimes. Unlikely to be deported because the U.S. and Laos don’t have a repatriation agreement, they’re now stuck in limbo. Wong is a news editor at Equal Voice.

WINNERS

OPC member Christiane Amanpour will receive the Burton Benjamin Memorial Award in November for “extraordinary and sustained achievement in the cause of press freedom.” The CNN correspondent has “consistently used her own journalism and worked behind the scenes to defend the rights of journalists and uphold press freedom all over the world,” said Sandra Mims Rowe, chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which gives out the annual award.

You can add the Gerald Loeb Award to the clutch of prizes won by the Associated Press for “Seafood from Slaves.” The team of Margie Mason, Martha Mendoza, Robin McDowell and Esther Htusan also claimed a Pulitzer Prize and the OPC’s Hal Boyle and Malcolm Forbes Awards earlier this year for exposing the suffering of workers held captive by the Southeast Asian seafood industry. The Loeb Awards, which are given each year by the UCLA Anderson School of Management, recognize stories that “inform and protect the private investor and the general public.”

OPC member Lynsey Addario has won the top Literary Award from the Wisconsin Library Association for her 2015 book It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War. The awards honor Wisconsin authors. Addario’s photos are also part of the National Geographic Women of Vision traveling exhibit, along with the work of 2008 Olivier Rebbot Award winner Stephanie Sinclair.

Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews, an OPC member and CBS News senior vice president of news administration, has received the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Presidential Award of Impact. “She is a strong example of how tenacity, commitment and truth seeking can succeed,” wrote NAHJ President Mekhalo Medina. Ciprian-Matthews has previously served as foreign editor, senior broadcast producer for the “CBS Evening News,” and senior producer for foreign coverage.

UPDATES

Correction: In the July-August Bulletin, we reported that OPC governor Steven Herman has a new posting as VOA’s Senior Diplomatic Correspondent. While this is true, we incorrectly listed his new station as the United Nations in New York. In fact, Herman will be working from the State Department in Washington.

NEW YORK: OPC Governor Rukmini Callimachi was recently interviewed in Wired Magazine. Senior editor Caitlin Roper describes Callimachi’s use of social media to inform her reporting on ISIS and calls her “arguably the best reporter on the most impor­tant beat in the world.” Callimachi says she uses Twitter and the encrypted app Telegram to better understand the group. While she’s received pushback from readers and editors who feel she is giving ISIS a voice, she argues that “my reporting doesn’t deny that they’re perpetrating crimes against humanity, but I think that our job as journalists is to understand and to bring gray where there is only black and white. Because there’s always gray.”

OPC member Norman Pearlstine is now vice chairman at Time Inc., focusing on “international growth opportunities for the company’s brands and content.” He previously served as Time’s executive vice president and chief content officer, after a stint as chief content officer at Bloomberg L.P. Pearlstine previously served nearly 40 years as a reporter and editor, including a decade as editor-in-chief at Time Inc.

OPC member and OPC Foundation Vice President John Daniszewski, who has led international coverage at the Associated Press for more than a decade, is the AP’s new editor at large for standards. Daniszewski has logged more than 20 years as a reporter and editor in 70-plus countries in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. He became the AP’s international editor in 2006.

The top editor at the AP, Kathleen Carroll, will retire at the end of the year. Carroll has been the news agency’s executive editor for 14 years and previously was chief of Washington and international bureaus for Knight Ridder.

New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger is refuting claims that the newspaper is considering “ending the print edition of its Sunday magazine, folding the Metro section, making the weekly book review section online-only and leasing out space in its Midtown headquarters.” Sulzberger addressed the assertions, which came in a New York Post story, in a memo to staff. He added, however, that the Times is adapting and that “this may result in changes in the size and shape of our operation, changes that we are committed to keeping you informed about.” At least 49 journalists accepted buyout offers from the paper in July.

Now that CEO Roger Ailes has departed under a cloud of sexual harassment allegations, are changes ahead at Fox News? Anousha Sakoui of Bloomberg notes that the network’s aging audience will likely push it to diversify its programming to broaden its base. Sarah Ellison at Vanity Fair speculates that the network will moderate its tone, refocusing around high-profile anchor Megyn Kelly and paring away more ideologically-driven stars like Bill O’Reilly.

Reported.ly, the social media news company headed by former NPR staffer Andy Carvin, shut down operations on Aug. 31 after financial backer First Look Media withdrew its support. The project was an effort to create a brand around the style of breaking-news curation and investigation Carvin pioneered on Twitter during the Arab Spring. Carvin said the team will now “explore our options” for re-launching independently or at another news organization.

BuzzFeed has split into two departments – BuzzFeed News and the newly-formed BuzzFeed Entertainment Group – as it looks to solidify its dominance in digital video. The move has sparked speculation that the company may cut back on its commitment to news. BuzzFeed reportedly fell significantly short of its revenue goals last year and slashed its targets for this year.

WASHINGTON, DC: OPC member Kimberly Adams wound up in the news herself when she and a fellow journalist administered CPR to a bystander at a conference. Adams was at the joint convention of the National Association of Black Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists when the man collapsed. She and Florida-based photojournalist Brandon Bryant performed CPR until paramedics arrived. According to local WTOP News, doctors told Bryant that he and Adams had saved the man’s life.

Relatives of Marie Colvin have filed suit against the government of Syria, claiming the late Sunday Times of London correspondent was deliberately targeted for death in February 2012 because of her reporting. The civil lawsuit claims Syrian officials were able to pinpoint Colvin’s location through a combination of electronic tracking and intelligence from an informant. The military then shelled the site, killing Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik. The wrongful-death lawsuit seeks punitive and compensatory damages. Colvin spent 26 years covering wars around the world and was known for her bravery.

ATLANTA: CNN has launched a new division devoted to aerial drones. CNN AIR, as it’s called, has already generated footage for numerous stories, including coverage of the Flint lead crisis and the Republican national convention. “We were able to show perspective, breadth and scope,” CNN’s Greg Agvent told Poynter.org. “We’re able to use the drone to capture things that you simply cannot capture from a helicopter, which would create that much more noise and cost you that much more money.”

ROCHESTER, NH: The James W. Foley Freedom Run honors the legacy of freelancer James Foley, who was murdered by ISIS in 2014. Organizers of the Oct. 15 event are seeking journalists to run on the Journalists for Freedom team – either in Rochester or by doing a virtual run wherever you are. For more information, go to www.FoleyRun.org. Foley was working as a freelance correspondent when he was kidnapped in northwestern Syria in November 2012.

LOS ANGELES: Breitbart News, which caters to the racist, nationalist “alt-right,” is weighing a European expansion after the U.S. presidential election. France, Germany and Brussels are possibilities, Breitbart editor-in-chief Alexander Marlow told Politico. “Throughout Europe right now we’re seeing this populism and nationalism make a comeback,” he added. Breitbart currently has a London office.

TORONTO: Titanic and Avatar director James Cameron is on board with OPC member Simcha Jacobovici’s latest project, Search for Atlantis. Principal photography is already underway on the documentary about efforts to locate the famed “lost city.” The production is a joint project of Discovery Canada, National Geographic Channel and Toronto’s Associated Producers. The two-hour documentary special, a follow-up to 2011’s Finding Atlantis, will air this winter on the National Geographic Channel.

LONDON: Nearly 270 staffers at The Guardian, including 70 in the newsroom, have accepted buyouts as the paper struggles to stem a tide of red ink. The company aims to slash costs by 20 percent over three years, according to Politico, while shifting to a membership model to encourage readers to pay for the news. The paper’s parent company, Guardian Media Group, announced record losses of $264 million in late July.

NEW DELHI: Bobby Ghosh, who won an OPC Best Commentary citation early this year, is the new editor-in-chief of the Hindustan Times. He was previously a senior editor at Quartz and has been a regular commentator on CNN.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

French photographer Marc Riboud died in Paris on Aug. 30. A protege of pioneering candid photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, Riboud roamed the world for decades, shooting trouble spots but almost always focusing on ordinary people rather than the powerful. His iconic images include one of a laborer painting the Eiffel Tower, framed by iron beams, and one of a young woman presenting a flower to rifle-wielding National Guard members at a Vietnam War protest. “He was comfortable with any subject,” Jean-François Leroy, founder of the Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival, told Time magazine, “and even 50 years later, his work has not aged one bit.”

Former New York Times reporter Sydney H. Schanberg, whose coverage of the Cambodian genocide inspired the movie The Killing Fields, died on July 9 at age 82 in Poughkeepsie, NY. Schanberg started at the Times as a copy boy and remained for a quarter-century. He became New Delhi bureau chief in 1969 before shifting to coverage of the conflicts in Vietnam and Cambodia. In 1979 he recounted the starvation and hard labor faced by his Cambodian reporting partner, Dith Pran, under Pol Pot. The story was turned into a movie, and Schanberg helped Dith get a job as a Times photographer. Schanberg won a Pulitzer, two OPC Awards and numerous other prizes.

Michael Elliott, an international reporter, editor and anti-poverty campaigner, died July 14 in Washington, DC at age 65. Elliott held top editorial positions at TIME International, Newsweek International and The Economist. He spent two years in Hong Kong and witnessed the 2004 South Asian tsunami from his hotel window in Phuket. His interview with U2 singer Bono put the rock star on the map as a humanitarian. Elliott left journalism in 2011 to become president and CEO of ONE, Bono’s global anti-poverty organization.

Foreign correspondent and freedom-of-information advocate James S. Keat died in Towson, Maryland on July 6 at the age of 86. Keat joined The Baltimore Sun in the 1950s and spent several years dividing his time between reporting from India and covering the American civil rights movement. He later became foreign editor and then assistant managing editor of the Sun. He was known for his passionate support of government transparency.

Longtime L.A. Times foreign correspondent Stanley Meisler, 85, died on June 26 in Washington, DC. Over his decades with the Times, Meisler reported from points around the globe including Nairobi, Barcelona, Paris, Mexico City, Toronto and the United Nations. A self-taught expert on art, he wrote a book about painters in Paris in the 1920s, as well as volumes on the United Nations and the Peace Corps.

OPC SCHOLARS

“Sometimes they called me a ‘cat herder,’” 2005 Emanuel R. Freedman scholar Marina Walker Guevara says about the task of coordinating 376 reporters at more than 100 news outlets on one of the highest-profile journalism projects of the decade: the Panama Papers. In an interview with Pro Publica, Guevara said she frequently had to push the reporters to share information with other outlets. Guevara is the deputy director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which spearheaded the global investigation into 11.5 million leaked financial and legal records.

WINNERS

OPC Governor Anjali Kamat shared the 2016 National Association for Multi-Ethnicity in Communications Vision Award in the Documentary category with former colleagues from Al Jazeera America. The AJAM team won with the Fault Lines episode “Baltimore Rising,” an investigation into police brutality allegations leading up to the 2015 death of Freddie Gray in custody.

Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who lit the Candle of Concern for missing, imprisoned or slain journalists at this year’s OPC Awards Dinner, has won a Nieman Fellowship. He will use the year-long Harvard University program to study U.S.-Iran relations and their impact on Middle East policy. Rezaian was released in January after more than a year in captivity in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison.

2012 Best Multimedia News Presentation Award winner Tom Jennings is also a 2017 Nieman Fellow. Jennings is an independent producer and director for PBS FRONTLINE. He’ll study new nonfiction storytelling techniques, including virtual reality, and the need for updated ethical standards in documentary product

UPDATES

NEW YORK: Lack of economic diversity poses a threat to photojournalism, OPC Governor Paul Moakley told Time Magazine in a May 4 article. “Many people I encounter from non-Ivy League schools are stifled by not having a path to break through,” said Moakley, Time’s deputy director of photography. “It is very elitist in a sense, and we have to be careful about that as editors, as curators and as photographers.” While little is known about the economic backgrounds of the world’s news photographers, a recent World Press Photo report found nearly 65 percent of the photographers surveyed originated from Europe and North America, and only 15 percent were women.

Associated Press standards editor Tom Kent is celebrating a long-planned retirement – while taking on a new role as president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Kent will be based at the broadcaster’s headquarters in Prague. He worked for the AP for more than four decades, including stints as Moscow bureau chief and international editor.

OPC member David Callaway is stepping down as Editor in Chief of USA Today to hit the street – or, more precisely, TheStreet. Callaway will be CEO of the digital financial media company, which owns TheStreet.com, Stockpickr.com, BankingMyWay.com and other properties. Before taking the helm at USA Today in 2012, Callaway worked at MarketWatch and at Bloomberg, where he led its European team.

OPC First Vice President Calvin Sims presided over the International House 2016 Awards Gala on June 7, honoring American Express Chairman and CEO Kenneth I. Chenault; Japan Society President Motoatsu Sakurai; and philanthropist and longtime International House Trustee Kathleen Burns. Sims is the president of International House, a residence which challenges its tenants to become the next generation of global leaders. He previously worked at the Ford Foundation and in several roles at The New York Times, including reporting from Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Seoul and Jakarta.

Past OPC presidents (and current members) Michael Serrill and David A. Andelman have assumed leadership roles on the board of the Society of the Silurians. Andelman has been elected first vice president, while Serrill will serve as second vice president. The Silurians are a New York-based organization for veteran journalists. Founded in 1924, they are among the oldest press clubs in the nation.

OPC member Marcus Brauchli chaired the jury for the Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia. Also on the jury were OPC members Dorinda Elliott and Michael Elliott, as well as Bobby Ghosh of Quartz, who won a citation for the Best Commentary Award earlier this year. OPC member Norman Pearlstine is Chairman Emeritus of the jury. This year’s prize went to Sudarsan Raghavan of The Washington Post for a year-long series of articles on Afghanistan. Raghavan is a two-time OPC Award winner.

OPC Third Vice President Pancho Bernasconi recalled slain photographer Chris Hondros in a recent Time magazine story. “I’m struck most by Chris’s ability to be present and in the moment,” Bernasconi said. “It’s what made him such a profoundly talented photographer but it’s what also made him such dear and important friend to so many of us.” Hondros and fellow photographer Tim Hetherington were killed in Libya in April 2011. Bernasconi is vice president for editorial at Getty Images and was a longtime editor of Hondros’ work.

Two years after changing their rules to allow certain magazines to enter five journalism categories, the Pulitzer Prizes will likely continue to evolve, says administrator Mike Pride. “Two questions we are asking ourselves are: How well and how fairly can our juries judge the works of various media – newspapers, news sites, magazines – against one another?” he told Poynter.org in a recent interview. “How well does journalism from various media fit our Plan of Award and categories?” But, Pride concluded, “further expansion is probable.” This year The New Yorker became the first magazine to win a Pulitzer, taking home awards in both the feature writing and criticism categories.

Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising was a watershed in the history of foreign correspondence, OPC Governor Liam Stack wrote recently in The New York Times. Even though communication links between Dublin and London had been cut, the Times printed more than 50 stories about the five-day rebellion. The paper supplemented the news from Ireland by talking to Irish-American leaders and people who had recently returned from the country. “We talk about technology allowing us to do things so quickly in journalism today, but here is a major story on an event that leads the Sunday magazine of the paper the week that it occurred,” Dr. Robert Schmuhl of the University of Notre Dame tells Stack, calling that a “pretty amazing” accomplishment.

PHILADELPHIA: NPR’S Deborah Amos, an OPC Governor, was the master of ceremonies for this year’s Eisenhower Awards. The ceremonies honored Doctors Without Borders and Shahid Mahmud, chief executive officer of Interactive Group.

DURHAM, NC: Did the United Nations start a 2010 cholera epidemic that has claimed thousands of lives in Haiti? OPC member Jonathan Katz writes in Slate that a map released by the CDC shows the center of the epidemic as the location of a UN peacekeeping base established by soldiers from Nepal after the Haiti earthquake. Neither the UN nor the CDC wants to acknowledge the origin of the epidemic, which is still raging today, he explains. Katz is currently writer in residence at Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute.

LOS ANGELES: Journalists are in “a war to continue to tell the truth,” OPC member Christiane Amanpour told a audience at the annual Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture at UCLA. While members of the news media face violence around the world, she added, “merchants of doubt” in the U.S. spread false narratives to sow confusion. Amanpour, CNN’s chief foreign correspondent, was a friend of the slain Wall Street Journal reporter and is a longtime supporter of the Daniel Pearl Foundation.

Transfixed, a documentary co-produced by OPC member Felix Golubev, debuted this spring in Los Angeles and New York. The film focuses on the relationship between a straight man, John, and a transsexual woman, Martine, both of whom have Asperger’s syndrome. The couple struggles in the face of Martine’s risky sex-reassignment surgery. The Los Angeles Times called Transfixed a “sensitively wrought profile in courage, hope and self-respect that’s truly transfixing.”

VIENNA: OPC Governor Lara Setrakian sat on the jury of the Editors Lab Final hackathon at the Global Editors Network Summit. Winning teams from regional competitions around the world gathered in Vienna to build news apps at the three-day competition. Indonesia’s Tempo magazine team emerged victorious, with a project inspired by the country’s intractable forest fires. The game Green Saviour: Stop the Haze aims to explain what causes forest fires and how they affect health and the environment.

BANGKOK: OPC Governor Steven L. Herman is the Voice of America’s new Senior Diplomatic Correspondent. Herman is leaving Bangkok, where he is currently VOA’s Southeast Asia Bureau Chief/Correspondent, for an office at the United Nations in New York. He has spent 26 years reporting throughout Asia, where his stations have included Seoul, New Delhi and Tokyo.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

This month we remember several journalists who have made significant contributions to the profession and to the OPC.

Former OPC Governor and OPC Foundation Treasurer Donald Underwood died at home on June 2 at the age of 86. As a staff correspondent and editor for Life magazine, Underwood reported from England, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He worked on a major photographic essay with Alfred Eisenstaedt on the Ford Motor Co. when it went public. He left Life in 1966 to teach journalism at the University of Utah, and then returned to New York to establish an internal TV network at Merrill Lynch. Underwood was an OPC Governor from 1996 to 2001 and was active on the Freedom of the Press Committee. He professionalized the Foundation’s money management and helped put it on solid financial ground.

OPC member John Bausman died on June 9 at age 92. Bausman joined the Associated Press in 1950, covering Europe from cities including Warsaw, Budapest and Frankfurt. He final overseas assignment was as chief of the Moscow bureau from 1968 to 1972. He went on to cover the United Nations and work in the World Services Department until his retirement. He then spent several years teaching English and journalism in Shanghai, China on a Fulbright fellowship. Bausman joined the OPC in 1997.

Longtime OPC member Henry Warshow died on Sept. 11, 2015 at age 85. Warshow joined in 1955. Warshow worked for Army Times and the Stars and Stripes in Europe in the mid-1950s. He went on to a position in public relations at New York’s Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn. He then went into the textile business. Warshow remained an active and engaged member of the OPC until his death.

Former OPC member David Lamb died on June 5 at the age of 76. Lamb began his work as a foreign correspondent in Vietnam with United Press International in 1968. He moved to the Los Angeles Times in 1970 and would remain until his retirement in 2004, filing from more than 100 countries and writing several books along the way. Lamb “not only captured the human micro-drama behind cataclysmic world events, he lifted it to an epic scale,” OPC member and Times assistant managing editor Kim Murphy told The Washington Post.

Foreign correspondent and journalism teacher John “Jack” Virtue died on June 3 at age 81. Virtue got his start with United Press International covering Cuba. He moved on to run bureaus in Sao Paulo and Mexico City. Virtue spent most of the 1980s as executive editor of El Mundo, a daily paper in San Juan. He then became a journalism trainer throughout Latin America in a program sponsored by USAID, teaching more than 8,000 journalists from 14 countries.

Telemundo assistant producer and aspiring journalist Jonathan Camuy, 24, was among those killed in the Pulse Club massacre in Orlando on June 12. Camuy was a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. He had moved from Puerto Rico to Florida to pursue a career in television.

This month, read about OPC scholar Marina Walker Guevara, awards news about OPC Governor Anjali Kamat, OPC award winner Tom Jennings and Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian; updates on OPC Governors Paul Moakley, Lara Setrakian and Steven L. Herman, First Vice President Calvin Sims, Third Vice President Pancho Bernasconi, past presidents Michael Serrill and David A. Andelman, and club members David Callaway, Marcus Brauchli, Dorinda Elliott, Michael Elliott, Jonathan Katz, Christiane Amanpour, and Felix Golubev. This month’s People column also includes remembrances of OPC colleagues who passed away, including OPC Governor and OPC Foundation Treasurer Donald Underwood, as well as former and current club members John Bausman, Henry Warshow and David Lamb.