People Column

SCHOLARS

Stephen Kalin, the Roy Rowan Scholarship winner in 2013, has been named to the 2024 class of Ochberg Fellows at the Dart Center at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Fellows attend seminars with leading experts in trauma science and journalism practice. Kalin is a foreign correspondent based in Dubai for The Wall Street Journal.

Alex Pena, the first Walter and Betsy Cronkite Scholarship winner in 2011, has joined The New York Times as a senior video journalist, focusing on breaking and continuing video news coverage. Most recently he was with VICE News and before that, he spent eight years at CBS News as a producer and digital journalist based in Miami.

Anupreeta Das, the Reuters Scholarship winner in 2006 who is now finance editor of The New York Times, has written a book titled Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World, slated to be published on Aug. 13. The book is billed as an examination of Bill Gates, “one of the most powerful, fascinating, and contradictory figures of the past four decades, and an eye-opening exploration of our national fixation on billionaires.”

AWARDS

Staff of The New York Times won the Pulitzer Award for International Reporting for the same coverage of the Israel-Hamas war that won the OPC’s Hal Boyle Award this year. Two past OPC award winners were also among the crop of Pulitzer winners. Hannah Dreier, the 2016 winner of the Hal Boyle Award, won the Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting for stories about migrant child labor in the U.S. for The New York Times, and Sarah Stillman, winner of the 2011 Joe and Laurie Dine Award, won the Pulitzer for Explanatory Reporting for reporting on inequality in the U.S. legal system for The New Yorker. Stillman spoke on a panel co-hosted by the OPC on May 6 about OPC member Adriana Carranca’s book, Soul by Soul. See the recap above or watch a recording of the program here.

Staff of the Outlaw Ocean Project, which won this year’s Roy Rowan Award for reporting on China’s shady seafood operation, also won the 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights journalism award for the same reporting in the International Print category.

UPDATES

ProPublica has named OPC Governor Ginger Thompson as the organization’s managing editor. Thompson has worked for ProPublica for 10 years, as reporter and then as chief of correspondence. In a release, the organization applauded her achievements, including establishing a department that manages recruitment and professional development, leading an investigative editor training program, and working closely with ProPublica’s diversity and inclusion committees. Thompson’s new role will include oversight of immigration coverage and the Washington D.C. bureau, among other duties. Before joining ProPublica, she worked at The New York Times for 15 years and served as a correspondent in Washington and as bureau chief in Mexico City. She has won several awards during her career, including the OPC’s 1995 Eric and Amy Burger Award for human rights reporting in Honduras for The Baltimore Sun.

OPC members Jon and Kem Sawyer are stepping down from their positions with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting this month after serving in key roles at the organization for many years. Jon, the organization’s founder and CEO, has been with the organization since its launch in 2006. Lisa Gibbs, vice president for philanthropic development at The Associated Press, will serve as the Center’s next CEO and president. She previously served as director of news partnerships and as global business editor for the AP. In an invitation for an event to celebrate the changes on June 3, Jon said Gibbs “shares our values and passion for the work and will also bring her own bold ideas to make the Center stronger.” Kem is stepping down as reporting fellows program director after serving the center since 2011. She has led the center’s Campus Consortium program, which “provided hundreds of fellowships for undergraduate and graduate students and developed a robust alumni network spanning the globe.” In addition Emily Pulitzer, who has chaired the center’s board since its beginning, is retiring. She will now be chair emeritus while continuing to serve on the board. Dick Moore, a longtime board member and great-grandson of the first Joseph Pulitzer, will replace her as chair.

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism has selected OPC member Marcus Yam as one of 24 Nieman fellows for 2024. The fellows from around the world will spend two semesters studying at Harvard University, where they will research climate change, the use of artificial intelligence in newsgathering, the proliferation of misinformation, campaigns to silence press freedom, among other issues. The cohort will begin this fall. So grateful to [the Los Angeles Times] for allowing me on this journey and [the Nieman Foundation] for this incredible opportunity,” he wrote in a tweet on May 10 on X. “Looking forward to spending an academic year at Harvard, exchanging ideas and growing with everyone!”

For the first time in OPC member, author and photojournalist Steve Raymer’s career, which spans more than 110 countries and six decades, a person in one of his photographs recognized themselves and contacted him. Raymer, now a professor emeritus at the Indiana University Media School, took the photograph in Hanoi in 1994 while working on his book, Land of the Ascending Dragon: Rediscovering Vietnam. The photo depicts a couple with their daughter riding a motorcycle outside of the Metropole Hotel in Hanoi during the Tết Lunar New Year. The girl in the photo, Linh Do, had recognized her father in an image posted on Facebook, noted Raymer’s watermark and tracked him down. “Imagine how I felt when I got this email: ‘Dear Professor Ray, I am the little girl in the blue outfit in the picture you took 30 years ago this month in Hanoi?’ I couldn’t imagine it,” he said. Raymer, Do and her sister Hong Do Thuy have continued to correspond since that first email. He served as a young lieutenant in the U.S. Army in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969, and returned to the country 24 times since. “It’s my favorite country for lots of reasons. Part of it is the beauty and the beauty of the people too,” Raymer said in a piece for the IU Media School’s website.

OPC Vice President Azmat Khan and Governor Anup Kaphle participated in a panel about international reporting for the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) on May 17. Khan talked about her first experiences reporting in Pakistan in 2008, “pitching herself backwards” for local TV channels covering the U.S. election. “Having that opportunity to see the country through the lens of people who live there meant that I was working on stories that wouldn’t necessarily get told otherwise,” she said. Kaphle moved to the U.S. to study journalism and soon landed an internship at Newsweek International in 2006 and started studying at Columbia University. He said SAJA played an important role in his transition to international journalism with a fellowship with The Atlantic and received a grant to report in Afghanistan. “The goal was to tell stories that other people weren’t telling,” he said. Morgan Till, foreign editor for PBS NewsHour whose work won OPC awards in 2016 and 2021, also joined as panelist. SAJA board member Jennifer Chowdhury served as moderator.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

Longtime OPC member Robert Essman, who worked as art assistant and art director for LIFE magazine and later creative director for Businessweek, died on May 1 at the age of 87. Essman joined the OPC in May 1974, and this year was among the members who celebrated their 50^th year with the club. For an article honoring 50-year members in January, he recalled first meeting veteran correspondents who were OPC members at a club venue downtown, saying he was “quite young and a bit overwhelmed being in their company and even more impressed that they never made an issue of my youth!” Essman designed the OPC’s previous black-and-white logo was in use by the OPC club until 2017 and is still used by the OPC Foundation. He designed many other logos, including the 1976 New York City Bicentennial logo. During his tenure at LIFE, which began in 1962, he produced layouts covering banner stories such as Winston Churchill’s funeral in 1965, the Beatles in 1968, and the lunar landing in 1969, among others. After working as art director at Businessweek, he served as founding art director for People magazine from 1974 to 82. After retiring from People, Essman moved first to California and then Vermont, to be closer to his niece’s family.

SCHOLARS

Simon Bajaj, winner of the 2024 Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in memory of I.F. Stone, was named the 2024 recipient of the Society of Professional Journalists-New England Mark of Excellence Award in general news reporting for his NPR stories on New Zealand’s tobacco laws. The award honors the best in student journalism. He also won the Award for Excellence in Health Care Journalism from the AHCJ for a story he wrote for the Guardian on how a tiny town is paving the future of tobacco policy. In addition, he was named a finalist in science reporting for his STAT News story on lung cancer story.

Annie Todd, winner of the S&P Global Award for Economic and Business Reporting in 2020, and her colleague Makenzie Huber at the South Dakota Searchlight and Sioux Falls Argus Leader, were named finalists for the 2024 Livingston Award for Excellence in Local Reporting for their three-installment story The Lost Children. The Livingston Award is administered by the Wallace House Center for Journalism at the University of Michigan and honors young journalists. The awards honor the best reporting and storytelling by journalists under the age of 35. Read more about finalists from the OPC community in the Awards section below.

Euan Ward, the winner of the 2022 Rick Davis-Deb Amos Scholarship who is an OPC member and New York Times contributor based in Beirut, has been reporting on the Israel-Hamas war with 12 bylines for the Times in April alone. On April 29, he wrote about a barrage of Hamas rockets launched from Lebanon into northern Israel that were nearly all shot down, writing that the attacks were meant to show military capabilities, “an apparent attempt by the group to signal that it is still capable of striking within Israel’s borders even as it studies the latest proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza.”

Meg Bernhard, the Flora Lewis Fellowship winner in 2020, is the 2024 recipient of the Spurrier-Winiarski Wine Writer-in-Residence Award. Bernhard will be awarded $50,000 to support her three-month residency at UC Davis, where she will pursue a research and writing project delving into the intersection of climate change and labor in the global wine industry. She is a Las Vegas-based journalist, essayist and author of the 2023 book, Wine.

Serginho Roosblad, the 2017 winner of the Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in Memory of I.F. Stone, had his directorial debut on PBS on April 30 with a piece on FRONTLINE, titled Documenting Police Use of Force, covering the Associated Press investigation into deaths in the U.S. that followed incidents in which police used “less lethal force.” Roosblad is a video producer for the AP Global Investigations team.

Tom Finn, the H.L. Stevenson Internship winner in 2013, has joined BBC News as a news editor and visual journalist. He had spent the previous nine years at Reuters, the last four as a special products editor at the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Finn had an OPC Foundation fellowship in the Reuters bureau in Cairo.

Mariano Castillo, winner of the Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in 2008, is returning to his alma mater as a professor in the journalism department at Texas A&M University. He is currently a senior director of news standards and practices at CNN. Castillo had an OPC Foundation fellowship in the Reuters bureau in Mexico City.

AWARDS

Mohammed Salem of Reuters, the winner of this year’s Olivier Rebbot Award, has also won the 2024 World Press Photo of the Year award. His winning photo depicts a Palestinian woman cradling the body of her five-year-old niece in the Gaza Strip. That photo was among the images he submitted for the OPC awards. The photo was taken on October 17 last year at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.

In addition to OPC Foundation scholar Annie Todd, The Wallace House Center for Journalists at the University of Michigan on April 24 also announced that OPC member Nicolas Niarchos has been named as a Livingston Award finalist in the International Reporting category for work in The Nation. Also among the international reporting finalists are Lynzy Billing, who won the OPC’s 2022 Ed Cunningham Award for The Night Raids, a film she discussed during an OPC program at Columbia last September, and Renata Brito of The Associated Press, one of this year’s OPC Kim Wall Award winners. Brito won the Kim Wall Award with colleague Felipe Dana for “Adrift,” a multimedia piece that follows migrants bound from Africa to Europe who are lost at sea or land thousands of miles off course in the Americas. OPC member Lila Hassan was named as a finalist in the National Reporting category for work with KCRW public radio in California along with colleague Allison Behringer. Winners will be announced on June 11.

UPDATES

Steve Herman, an OPC member and senior correspondent with Voice of America, is set to publish a new book in June about his years covering U.S. presidents. According to publisher Kent State University Press, Behind the White House Curtain makes the case that a healthy and peaceful democracy relies on public access to accurate, unbiased information, “and that journalists can and should play a key role in pressing government officials to be truthful and transparent.” The book will weave together memoir and history, examining the inner workings of the White House press corps and the historic and current relationship between U.S. presidents and the press.

OPC member Doreen Carvajal wrote a piece for the Mexican website Diariojudio.com on April 7, filed from Arcos de la Frontera in Spain, about her family’s Sephardic Jewish identity, which was kept secret for generations under cover of a Catholic identity. She wrote about her quest to investigate her family, the Carvajals, and to reclaim “ancestral memories, history and DNA clues that I believe had been faithfully passed down for generations of my family.” Carvajal said her family left Spain during the Inquisition, and raised as Catholics in Costa Rica and California. “I wanted to understand why my family guarded secret identities for generations with such inexplicable fear and caution,” she wrote.

Jill Langlois, an OPC member and freelancer based in São Paulo, Brazil, interviewed the country’s environment minister about her crackdown on illegal logging and mining for the Yale School of the Environment on April 18. She wrote that Marina Silva, a former rubber tapper and senator from the state of Acre, had campaigned against those nillegal operations when she held the same position during Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s first term in 2003. Silva, recently named one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2024, told Langlois that the international community plays a key role in the survival of the Amazon. “If we reach zero deforestation in the Amazon and the world does not reduce its CO2 emissions, the forest will still be turned into a savanna,” she said.

Haley Willis, an OPC member and video journalist on the New York Times visual investigation team, contributed to a piece for the Times on April 25 that analyzed visual evidence and internal communications to show that six Western aid groups had humanitarian sites hit by Israeli attacks, even after locations were shared with the Israeli military. The video said that aid groups used a process called “deconfliction” to inform the Israel Defense Forces (I.D.F.) about their locations to avoid accidental attacks. Despite those warnings, as well as banners and other markings to identify humanitarian sites, the military said the attacks were the result of “internal failures” and has only targeted military targets. The piece cited a United Nations count of more than 200 aid workers killed in the war in Gaza.

OPC member Aurora Almendral, a London-based editor with NBC News Digital, has been covering the Israel-Hamas war for the network, most recently with a story on April 24 about the release of a video from Israeli American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin. She wrote that Goldberg-Polin had been among the 250 hostages taken on Oct. 7, seen injured by a grenade blast before being loaded into a truck during attacks at the Supernova music festival in southern Israel near kibbutz Re’im. The video taken from captivity showed 23-year-old Goldberg-Polin, whose left arm is severed below his elbow, angrily asking the Israeli government to bring home the hostages. Almendral also filed stories as part of the NBC team on Iran’s retaliatory attack on Israel on April 13, and the killing of seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen on April 6.

OPC member Eric Reidy, the migration editor for The New Humanitarian, wrote about the passing of the 6-month mark of the Israel-Hamas war on April 8, enumerating the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, missing or injured by that date, with nearly all of the 2.3 million residents in Gaza displaced and more than 60 percent of homes damaged or destroyed. “When the guns eventually do fall silent, there are resounding questions about what will be left and what governing entity or arrangement will assume responsibility for what happens next in the devastated territory and to its battered people,” he wrote. Reidy was among the freelancers who received an OPC micro-grant to weather COVID-19 hardships in 2020.

Photos from OPC member Bing Guan have appeared in many stories covering pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, with images publsihed frequently in The New York Times, The Intercept and The Buffalo News, among others.

OPC member Sarah Schröer López has been covering the protests for German public broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR). On May 1, the outlet published her story with a recounting of police operations to remove and arrest protesters who had taken over Hamilton Hall. Schröer López is currently a student at Columbia journalism school and joined the OPC last month.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

Terry Anderson, an Associated Press correspondent who was held captive in Lebanon for almost seven years during the Lebanese Civil War, died on April 21 at the age of 76. Anderson was Beirut bureau chief for the AP on March 16, 1985, when armed men pulled him from his car and kidnapped him. He was released in 1991. Before his abduction, he worked for the AP in Japan and South Africa before beginning a two-and-a-half-year stint in Lebanon in 1983. After his release, he owned a blues bar in Athens, Ohio and ran unsuccessfully for the Ohio State Senate in 2004. He built more than 50 schools in Vietnam after establishing the Vietnam Children’s Fund, and contributed to the Father Lawrence Jenco Foundation, named for a fellow hostage who was the director of the Catholic Relief Services in Beirut, which supports community service projects in Appalachia. Read about a memorial service for Anderson on May 8 in Upcoming Events above. The program will be streamed live on the OPC’s YouTube channel.

Richard Leibner, a longtime OPC member and supporter of the OPC Foundation, died on April 12 at the age of 85. He was an agent whose company, N.S. Bienstock, brokered contracts in the television news industry and represented hundreds of news staff members. During his career, Leibner served as agent and adviser to Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, Ed Bradley, Morley Safer, Bob Simon, Steve Kroft, Diane Sawyer, Norah O’Donnell, Paula Zahn, Anderson Cooper and Fareed Zakaria, among others. A remembrance on the OPC Foundation’s website said that the foundation had “lost a valuable friend,” who was an annual guest at Awards Luncheons as he hosted staff from N. S. Bienstock or the Richard Leibner /Carole Cooper Family Foundation. In 2012, he endowed the Nathan S. Bienstock Memorial Scholarship to honor one of the agency’s co-founders. N.S. Bienstock was purchased by the United Talent Agency (UTA) in 2014 but retained the Bienstock name. Leibner retired in 2021. He served on the committee of the OPC Awards Dinner several times in the late 1990s.

SCHOLARS

Francis Tang, the David R. Schweisberg Memorial Scholarship winner in 2023, has been hired as news reporter at the Japan Times. Tang has an OPC Foundation fellowship in the Reuters bureau in Tokyo.

Anna Jean Kaiser, the Sally Jacobsen Fellowship winner in 2021, celebrated her one-year anniversary as the Florida correspondent for Bloomberg, where she covers the business and politics. Before her time at Bloomberg, she was a staff reporter on the business desk at the Miami Herald. She previously freelanced in Brazil.

After two and a half years at the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Annie Todd, winner of the S&P Global Award for Economic and Business Reporting in 2020, is headed to the Cascadia Daily News in Bellingham, Washington, where she will cover criminal justice.

Wall Street Journal reporter Alexander Saeedy, the Fritz Beebe Fellowship winner in 2015, is now covering banking for the paper. He previously covered credit markets, financial distress and sovereign debt for the Journal. Before that, he covered corporate bankrupt for Reorg, and was a senior reporter for Leveraged Commentary & Data. Before covering finance and economics in the U.S., he was a reporter in Brussels, covering European politics. His fellowship for the OPC Foundation placed him at the Reuters’ bureau in Brussels at the height of the Greek debt crisis.

AWARDS

In addition to winning this year’s Peter Jennings Award from the OPC, the FRONTLINE (PBS) documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. OPC Governor Raney Aronson-Rath was part of the team that produced the documentary, produced in collaboration with The Associated Press, marking her sixth OPC award since 2015 for her work with FRONTLINE (PBS), and several citations over the same period. 20 Days in Mariupol’s production team includes 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.

OPC member Alice Driver won a J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Award in the Work-in-Progress category for her book, The Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company. The award comes with a $25,000 prize, presented by the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Krithika Varagur, an OPC member and the winner of the Sally Jacobsen Fellowship in 2019, won the OPC’s Madeline Dane Ross Award for her piece in Harper’s Magazine, which follows the story of “what happens when you fall in love, but your genes are incompatible.” That article, titled “Love in the Time of Sickle Cell Disease,” involved a year of reporting from Nigeria.

UPDATES

The New York Times has hired OPC member Cassandra Vinograd as a news editor in London. She has reported news from Africa, Europe and the Middle East for almost 20 years, starting with The Associated Press in West Africa, and later working as an editor with The Wall Street Journal in Brussels and then in London, where she has freelanced and covered defense, foreign affairs and politics for the AP. She also previously worked for 60 Minutes and NBC News and was part of the NBC team that won a 2014 Peabody Award for coverage of ISIS and Emmy nominations for coverage of the 2016 attacks in Brussels and Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.

OPC member Mady Camara wrote a piece for The New York Times on March 24, along with colleague Ruth Maclean, about the presidential election in Senagal that “many young people see as a chance to overhaul the political and economic order.” The election was beset by sudden changes, with incumbent President Macky Sall calling off the election three weeks beforehand, then reversing that decision, and releasing a rival, Ousmane Sonko, from jail along with a man Sonko was supporting for president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye. Faye won the election, with early counts showing he had garnered 54 percent of the vote.

Prue Clarke, an OPC member who is co-founder and executive director of New Narratives, a women-led organization that supports local news and independent journalism, noted that the group supported an investigation in Liberia, published on March 22, into the use of cleaner cookstoves to improve health and reduce environmental impact from cookpots on open fires. “Cookpots are often used in confined areas with little ventilation, exposing families to air pollution which causes diseases such as asthma, lung disease, pneumonia, and cancer,” wrote reporter Tina S. Mehnpaine, with support from New Narratives.

Anand Gopal, a club member and past OPC Award winner, wrote a longform story for The New Yorker’s March 18 issue about a U.S.-supported prison camp in Syria where tens of thousands of survivors and supporters of ISIS have are being held indefinitely in horrific conditions. Gopal wrote that about fifty thousand people, more than half of them children, are currently imprisoned in Al-Hol, a place that the United Nations has called a “blight on the conscience of humanity.” He described atrocious conditions at the prison, which is effectively under the control of its ISIS inmates. including assassination squads, makeshift Sharia courts where judges order floggings and executions, and bodies of murdered detainees regularly turning up in ditches. Gopal is a four-time OPC Award winner, most recently winning the 2021 Ed Cunningham Award for his examination of how Afghan women have been affected by waves of war.

OPC member James Brooke will speak about Ukraine and Russia on April 9 for an online chat at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Berkshire Community College. Brooke lived and worked in Kyiv and Moscow for a total of 14 years as correspondent for The New York Times, Voice of America and Bloomberg, among others. The event will begin at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Registration is free, and the program will be recorded and posted on the OLLI YouTube channel afterward.

OPC member Judith Matloff has been working as a consultant for an HBO pilot comedy about war correspondents. The show-runner for the project is actress Amanda Peet.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

Neil Hickey, a past OPC member and awards judge, died on March 22 in Mahopac, New York at the age of 92. Hickey started his career in journalism in Baltimore, serving for three years as a naval officer aboard a destroyer during and after the Korean War, and then resuming his career as a reporter in New York. He reported from Vietnam, the 1991 war in Kuwait, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Cuba, the Baltics, Northern Ireland, Singapore, and around the U.S. He was New York bureau chief for TV Guide, and served as editor-at-large for the Columbia Journalism Review and was adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was welcomed as a new member of the OPC in 1962. Hickey was a judge for the OPC Awards for a number of years spanning from about 2007 to 2019. His book, Adventures in the Scribblers Trade, was published in February 2015. His wife, Lisa Lane, a champion chess player, died on Feb. 28 at the age of 90.

SCHOLARS

Jesse Coburn of Streetsblog NYC, who was the winner of the Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in Memory of I.F. Stone in 2016, won the 2023 George Polk Award in Local Reporting for the “Ghost Tags: Inside New York City’s Black Market for Temporary License Plates,” the product of a seven-month investigation that uncovered an extensive underground economy in fraudulent paper license plates that motorists used to evade detection while driving on suspended licenses, dodging tolls and tickets and committing other more serious crimes. The awards will be presented at a gala luncheon on April 12.

AWARDS

Rest of the World, a nonprofit publication covering global technology where OPC Governor Anup Kaphle serves as editor-in-chief, received two nominations in this year’s National Magazine Awards. The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) announced on Feb. 15 that the publication was nominated in the categories of Design and General Excellence, Literature and Politics. The organization will announce winners April 2 at Terminal 5 in New York City.

Jane Ferguson, an author, PBS NewsHour correspondent and OPC Award winner who spoke about her work at an OPC book night last October, was awarded the inaugural Neal Conan Prize for Excellence in Journalism. The award is named for Conan, an American radio journalist who spent nearly four decades in multiple roles including host of Talk of the Nation. The award includes a $50,000 prize. In a tweet about the award, Ferguson said his “legacy is incredible – for public broadcasters, foreign correspondents, storytellers who care deeply about the world.” Ferguson spoke with award-winning veteran reporter Elizabeth Becker at an OPC book night on Oct. 19 to discuss No Ordinary Assignment. A recap and recording of the program is available here.

UPDATES

OPC Governor Daniella Zalcman will have her photographs on display as part of the Xposure International Photography Festival in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates from Feb. 28 to March 5. The festival includes presentations from 150 visual storytellers from around the world. The work Zalcman will have on display is titled “Signs of Your Identity: Forced Assimilation Education for Indigenous Youth,” a project she started in 2014 after she traveled to Canada for a story about HIV rates in First Nations communities. Zalcman also spoke on a panel for The Institute for Women’s Leadership (IWL) on Feb. 7 on the role that different forms of media play in the fight for human rights and issues that women journalists face in their work. She is the founder of Women Photograph, a non-profit that works to elevate the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists.

OPC member David Hume Kennerly will also have his work featured at the Xposure festival. He is slated to deliver two talks at the festival. The first, “Behind the Scenes of History” will take place on Feb. 28 and the other, “Behind Closed Doors in the Oval Office” with President Barack Obama’s official photographer on March 5. Kennerly served as President Gerald Ford’s personal photographer during his administration.

The Associated Press announced on Feb. 5 that Mary Rajkumar, an OPC Governor, will co-lead AP’s global investigations team and “work across the organization to develop and produce in-depth investigative projects.” Rajkumar will be joined by Jeannie Ohm, who has guided visual storytelling and analysis for the global investigations team since 2020. She has been with the AP since 2013. Rajkumar, who joined the AP in 2007, has been working as editor for the global investigations team and led the team that produced “Seafood from Slaves”, an investigation into forced labor that won two 2015 OPC awards and a 2016 Pulitzer Gold Medal. Stories she edited have won a total of eight OPC awards.

Ahmed Baider, a past OPC Award winner with VICE News, has been reporting for international media outlets covering the Red Sea crisis in Yemen. His work with production teams on the ground has included video reports for TRT World on the effects of conflict on civilians, Yemeni history, humanitarian aid, and an ITV News report on cargo shipping disruption around Yemen, among others. He wrote in an email update that “more work, interviews, and multimedia features will be published in the coming weeks.” Baider was part of the VICE News Tonight team that won the 2021 Edward R. Murrow Award for reporting in Yemen, along with Isobel Yeung, Amel Guettatfi and Javier Manzano.

OPC member Dexter Roberts, the director of China affairs at the Mansfield Center at the University of Montana, spoke to NPR as part of a piece about the Evergrande Group, a large Chinese real estate developer, which a Hong Kong court ordered to be liquidated after failing to restructure the $300 billion it owed investors. Speaking to reporter Scott Neuman, he called the company’s fall a “controlled implosion,” adding that “China has known for a long time that their economy was imbalanced and too reliant on debt, with the real estate sector the most indebted industry of all and Evergrande the poster child for the most indebted company in that sector.” Roberts also spoke to the BBC for a piece about the Evergrande collapse. He is author of The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World.

SCHOLARS

Kailyn Rhone, the 2023 Reuters Fellowship winner, who had an internship with The Wall Street Journal in the spring of 2023 is returning to the Journal as a finance reporting fellow for the next 12 months. She had an internship with Reuters last summer.

Portia Crowe, who won the Reuters award in 2014, is joining the Reuters Dakar bureau as a West and Central Africa correspondent. She had an OPC Foundation fellowship at the Reuters bureau in Nairobi. She was featured in an OPC Bulletin profile in 2020 and joined an OPC Foundation panel in 2021 on the future of global journalism.

Jad Sleiman, the 2013 David R. Schweisberg Scholarship winner, recently got his job back at WHYY, an NPR member station in Philadelphia. Despite excellent reviews, he had been fired from his job as a reporter at The Pulse, a nationally syndicated health and science program, when his bosses discovered clips of his work as a stand-up comic online and deemed them offensive. He did his comedy routine under an assumed name and never mentioned his employer or his day job. The arbitrator “performed an in-depth analysis” of the clips and found that many of them were funny or an “astute critique” of power – though they also ruled that Sleiman must delete the clips.

Jeff Roberts, the Reuters winner in 2010, has been named Fortune Magazine’s new finance editor, overseeing stories that track the intersection of money and power. His focus will include how tech – notably crypto and AI – is changing finance. Jeff had an OPC Foundation fellowship in Paris.

AWARDS

The PBS FRONTLINE documentary Afghanistan Undercover, which won the OPC’s David A. Andelman and Pamela Title Award last year, won a Dupont Columbia Award, which was celebrated in a Jan. 25 ceremony. The piece focuses on the work of correspondent Ramita Navai and photographer Karim Shah as they documented the conditions for women after the Taliban returned to power.

The Associated Press team that won a Hal Boyle Award last year for the entry titled “Erasing Mariupol” also won a Dupont Award, in collaboration with PBS FRONTLINE, for the series of stories titled “20 Days in Mariupol.”

UPDATES

Laurie Hays, an OPC Governor, is now serving as CEO and Editor in Chief for The Fuller Project, a global newsroom dedicated to groundbreaking reporting that catalyzes positive change for women.

OPC Governor Anup Kaphle spoke to the Nepali outlet Ukaalo News in December to talk about the state of Nepali media, its challenges, and what may be needed to fix what’s broken.

OPC member James Brooke is now the Russia-Ukraine correspondent for The New York Sun. Writing twice a week for the New York-based news site, Brooke draws on his six years in Kyiv, reporting for his own business newsletter, and eight years in Moscow, first as Bloomberg bureau chief, then as VOA bureau chief.

Hasan Oswald, a filmmaker who works with OPC member Fahrinisa Campana, provided updates on a film titled Mediha, in which the titular teenage Yazidi girl who had just returned from ISIS captivity documents herself to process trauma while rescuers search for her missing family members. The film won the Grand Jury Award at DOC NYC last year, and has been invited to screen at the UN in February, where Mediha will speak. The film has also been invited to serve as the opening film at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in March as its UK premiere and to be part of the Activist Competition at Movies that Matter. The film will be screened in at least 30 festivals in the coming months. Oswald and Campana both received OPC grants in 2020 to help freelancers during the pandemic. OPC members Annelise Mecca and Alexander Spiess were also producers on the film, along with Stephen Nemeth.

Adriana Zehbrauskas, a past recipient of a Citation for Excellence in the Robert Capa category and a panelist at an OPC event, announced on Jan. 6 that she will serve as the Howard G. Buffet Visiting Professor of Visual Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University this semester. “It’s a huge honor (and responsibility) to help form a new generation of creative and ethical photojournalists,” she wrote. Zehbrauskas spoke on an OPC panel at Columbia University in 2016 with other female photojournalists discussing their in-depth documentary work.