People Column

SCHOLARS

Simar Bajaj, winner of the Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in Memory of I.F. Stone in 2024, won the Kavli Gold Award in the Science Reporting in the Large Outlet category from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for a freelance profile he wrote for The Guardian US on Joseph Sakran, a Baltimore trauma surgeon who was shot in the throat as a teenager and who has become a national advocate against gun violence, which he regards as a public health emergency. The AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards are among the most prestigious prizes in science journalism.

Hannah-Kathryn Walles, a photojournalist who won the Nathan S. Bienstock Memorial Scholarship this year, completed her six-week fellowship with The Associated Press in Rio de Janeiro in October. She wrote in a LinkedIn post that she documented a range of stories for the AP, including Brazil’s Rock in Rio music festival, an Indigenous ceremony, and an environmental cleanup project by a marine biologist. “Every assignment was an exercise in meeting the moment – stretching the boundaries of my skills as a photojournalist and deepening my understanding of Brazil’s dynamic political and social landscape.” Walles thanked the OPC Foundation, saying the fellowship helped her to grow as a photographer and gain “a deeper sense of vision and purpose in my work.” She has relocated to Rome, Italy, where she plans to continue working full-time in editorial and commercial photography.

Sarah Wu, the Roy Rowan Scholarship winner in 2019, has joined The Economist as a China correspondent in Beijing. She previously worked at Reuters, reporting on politics and society in Hong Kong, semiconductors and cross-strait relations in Taiwan, and the rise of the electric vehicle industry in China. Wu had an OPC Foundation fellowship in the Reuters bureau in Hong Kong.

Suman Naishadham, the H.L. Stevenson Fellowship winner in 2018, is moving to Spain to cover Spain and Portugal for The Associated Press. She had been covering environmental policy for more than three years at the AP focusing on water, drought and climate change in the U.S. West. Naishadham was also an AP desk editor and reporter. She had an OPC Foundation fellowship with Reuters in Mexico City.

AWARDS

Nanna Heitmann, winner of this year’s Danish Siddiqui Award, was a finalist in the Pulitzer Prize category of Feature Photography. She won for her images in The New York Times portraying life in Russia amid resurgent nationalism during the war in Ukraine. Heitmann won the Danish Siddiqui Award for “unflinching coverage” of the Russian side of the war in Ukraine, and won the Olivier Rebbot Award for 2020 for coverage of the pandemic in Russia. Separately, the New York Times staff won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for the same coverage of Hamas’ attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel’s intelligence failures last year that also garnered the OPC’s Hal Boyle Award.

FRONTLINE PBS won the 2024 Scripps Howard Journalism Award on Oct. 20 for its documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, adding yet another accolade for the film, which was produced by OPC Governor Raney Aronson-Rath, Michelle Mizner, Derl McCrudden and Mstyslav Chernov. The film also won this year’s Peter Jennings Award from the OPC, an RTNDA 2024 Edward R. Murrow Award, an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, and two BAFTA Awards. Columbia Journalism School honored Aronson-Rath with the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism in a ceremony on Nov. 14 that is now available to watch on YouTube.

UPDATES

OPC Governor Beth Knobel was featured in Fordham’s alumni magazine in a new column titled “What’s on My Desk” on Nov. 14. The series takes a look at interesting objects and keepsakes displayed by professors in their offices. Knobel, an associate professor who teaches multi-platform journalism, highlighted a “New York Mets shrine” on her bookshelf, complete with player bobbleheads and a miniature Shea Stadium, black belts in taekwondo, an autographed photo of Mikhail Gorbachev, a cork board displaying press passes from her 20-year career, and an Emmy Award statue that she won for her role as a producer in CBS News’s coverage of the 2002 Moscow theater siege. “What a privilege to be a #journalist and travel all kinds of cool places. It’s the most important job in the world!” she wrote in a post about the article on Bluesky.

OPC Governor Alexis Okeowo, a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, wrote a piece for the magazine, posted online on Oct. 30, about the legacy of Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina, who died in 2019. Okeowo wrote about Wainaina’s criticism of outside coverage of Africa, which was distilled in an essay in 2005 “How to Write About Africa” for Granta magazine, and “ruthlessly and amusingly took down the clichés of lazy writing and foreign correspondence about the continent.” They said Wainaina had been fed up with tropes about corrupt natives, crusading aid workers, celebrity activists, and conservationists, and the lack of context about political problems in African nations. Wainaina chose to become a writer because he wanted to see complex stories that did not erase or romanticize, that would depict the “messy and full” picture of himself and Africans that he knew, Okeowo wrote. “He wanted to write himself into existence. Many of us can relate.”

A New York Times piece with photographs and video from OPC Governor Juan Arredondo on Nov. 4 documented the aftermath of raids on immigrant families in poultry towns in Mississippi five years ago. The piece, written by Isabelle Taft and titled “Trump’s Big Immigration Raid Snared Them. They’re Still in Mississippi,” follows some of the family members from the raids in August 2019 that led to the detention of 680 workers at poultry plants. Some were deported but have since returned to the U.S., and others have cases still tied up in immigration courts with yearslong backlogs.

OPC member Vivienne Walt filed a piece for FORTUNE magazine on Oct. 31 about a small startup company using blockchain technology to shake up the $100 billion diamond industry. The company, HB Antwerp, which was launched four years ago by three Belgian-Israeli cofounders, wants to shift control and profits away from hubs like London, Antwerp, and Tel Aviv, “to the countries where the diamonds are actually found. They argue that Botswana, with just 2.6 million people and vast diamond reserves (and tourist-attracting elephants) has not gotten its fair share since Western companies began extracting its precious gems nearly 60 years ago,” Walt wrote.

OPC member Alice Driver spoke at the 2024 Texas Book Festival in Austin last weekend about her book, The Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company, an investigation into toxic labor practices at Tyson Foods which was published in September. She said she decided to start her investigation after talking with her mother, who works with Karin refugees from Myanmar in rural Arkansas, where many Karin work for Tyson. Driver said she had been working on an article about it, but faced resistance from editors, who “I think didn’t want me to finish it,” because “Arkansas is really run top to bottom by Tyson. If you want to feel absolutely bad about something, try writing about Tyson in Arkansas.” She said once large numbers of meatpacking workers started dying of COVID-19 in 2020, it became even more difficult as publishers became more afraid of lawsuits from Tyson. “So the fact that this is a book – I never thought it was going to happen. So, I’m glad to be here today and no one has sued me.” Her comments are available to watch on C-SPAN’s Book TV.

Keith Richburg, an OPC member and veteran Asia correspondent for The Washington Post, spoke to The Diplomat news site and magazine on Nov. 13 about President Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Richburg told podcast host Luke Hunt, during an interview recorded in Bangkok, Thailand, that he expects a “carnival of chaos,” in foreign policy. He said China likely favored Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris because Tim Walz had been vocal about holding China to account for human rights violations, which “Donald Trump couldn’t care less about any of that. He’s very transactional.”

Evan Ratliff, an OPC member and journalist who serves as CEO and co-founder of media company Atavist, wrote a guest essay in The New York Times on Nov. 10 recounting how he made an A.I. voice clone of himself. In a process he said took him less than an hour and powered by ChatGPT, he developed an A.I clone that called colleagues and friends for a podcast about the experience, titled Shell Game. “What I’ve learned is that interacting with A.I. voice agents will change how we interact with one another: who we trust, what we expect and what we need in our communications,” Ratliff wrote.

OPC member Chriss Swaney wrote a piece on Oct. 25 about a survey from International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) that revealed high levels of harassment and physical violence against reporters in the U.S. The report included responses from 610 reporters who attended 25 IWMF safety training sessions in 19 cities in 2024. Swaney spoke with OPC Past President Allan Dodds Frank for her story on WorkersCompensation.com, quoting him as saying he was not surprised by the report, and in part blamed rhetoric from President Donald Trump, “who continues to denounce the media as ‘Fake News,’’’ She cited grim figures from the U.S. Department of Education indicating undergraduate and graduate journalism programs nationwide are in decline, with an average of two U.S. newspapers per week shuttered from the beginning of 2019 and May 2022. Swaney spent more than 20 years as a reporter and editor for national and international publications, including Reuters, UPI, The New York Times and Gannett, and 13 years at Carnegie Mellon University as media and public relations director for the College of Engineering.

Paul Caruana Galizia, winner of this year’s Cornelius Ryan Award, is joining the Financial Times as a reporter in its computational journalism team. His book about the assassination of his mother Daphne, A Death in Malta, won the Ryan award for the best book for on international affairs for 2023. With his brothers, he has received a Magnitsky Human Rights Award and an Anderson-Lucas-Norman Award for their campaign to bring her killers to justice. Caruana Galizia previously worked for Tortoise Media, where he investigated Russian influence on British politics, Iran’s treatment of dissidents in London, the former King of Spain’s financial affairs, and sexual misconduct investigations.

Poet Mosab Abu Toha, winner of this year’s Flora Lewis Award, spoke at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Oct. 30 about his experiences during attacks in Gaza over the last year, before fleeing with his family to Cairo and later to the United States. Pouya Alimagham, Middle East historian and MIT lecturer, moderated the event. Abu Toha won the Flora Lewis Award for his essays on Gaza for The New Yorker.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) on Nov. 8 expressed concern after Indian investigative journalist Rana Ayyub, winner of the OPC’s Flora Lewis Award for 2021, had her personal phone number leaked online and, separately, was harassed by local intelligence personnel during a four-day reporting trip in the northeastern state of Manipur in early October. CPJ called for Indian authorities to “swiftly investigate the doxxing of Ayyub and hold the perpetrators accountable.” Ayyub won the Flora Lewis Award for commentary in The Washington Post calling out Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s persecution of the Muslim minority.

SCHOLARS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AWARDS

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

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

UPDATES

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

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

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

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

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

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

SCHOLARS

Noelle Harff, the Walter and Betsy Cronkite Scholar Award Winner in 2024, returned home after a fellowship with Reuters in Argentina. In a message to the OPC Foundation in August, she reflected on her experience over the last six months as she began her final semester at the University of North Carolina. “As an economics major, I arrived with a fascination for finance, but exploring economics from Argentina has changed how I see the world,” she said. “Six months ago, the subway fare in Buenos Aires was 67 pesos. Today it’s around 630. From credit to crypto, I was never short on ideas. I was even able to break the news that Argentina won its 16th consecutive continental title during Copa America! Thanks to the OPC Foundation, those ideas turned to bylines.”

Olivia George, the Irene Corbally Kuhn Scholarship winner in 2022, was named Outstanding New Journalist by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) at its annual Sunshine State Awards presented in a ceremony at the Hollywood Central Performing Arts Center, Hollywood, Florida, on Aug. 17. George covers local government at the Tampa Bay Times, a job she started shortly after graduating from Brown in 2022.

AWARDS

The Radio Television Digital News Association (RTNDA) has announced that 20 Days in Mariupol, a documentary by FRONTLINE (PBS) and The Associated Press that won this year’s Peter Jennings Award from the OPC, has also won two RTNDA 2024 Edward R. Murrow Awards. OPC Governor Raney Aronson-Rath, the executive producer of FRONTLINE (PBS), was part of the team that produced the documentary, with Michelle Mizner, Derl McCrudden and Mstyslav Chernov. Chernov was also part of the team that won the 2022 Hal Boyle Award for AP coverage of Mariupol. The film also won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature earlier this year.

UPDATES

OPC Governor Alexis Okeowo, a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, is writing a new memoir slated for publication in August 2025. Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama, to be published by Henry Holt & Company, will examine Okeowo’s own history growing up in Montgomery as the child of Nigerian immigrants, weaving memoir with state history and reporting on present-day legislative battles. Okeowo also wrote a longform piece for the New Yorker on Aug. 26 about a cult leader in Kenya. The story follows a doomsday pastor named Paul Mackenzie, who is alleged to have led more than 400 followers in a starvation suicide pact, their bodies later found in mass graves in Kenya’s Shakahola Forest. He was arrested in April and along with co-defendants has pleaded not guilty to murder charges.

OPC Governor Singeli Agnew directed a four-part series for PBS that follows high school students across the country as they grapple with critical questions about democracy. The first episode, “Chasing Victory,” premieres on Tuesday, Oct. 8 at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time on PBS and the next three episodes will air each Tuesday in October at the same time. The series, created by Retro Report, will also stream on Amazon Prime. Agnew and her team spent more than 145 days on the ground with students and teachers across the US over the last year. “While it’s easy to get discouraged about the state of politics in this country, this new generation of voters shows us what it means to be civically engaged and civil,” Agnew said. “After decades spent following war and conflict, this was one of the more inspiring projects I’ve been part of.” The Wrap flagged the series as one of their “60 Most Anticipated Shows of Fall 2024.”

Brian Byrd, an OPC Governor, a program officer at the Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts (FORE) and a freelance photographer, recently wrote an article for Hot Mirror Magazine about Paul McCartney’s photo exhibit “Eyes of the Storm.” The exhibit, which ran from May to August 2024 at the Brooklyn Museum, featured images captured by McCartney during The Beatles’ rise to global fame in late 1963 and early 1964. In his piece, Byrd, a lifelong Beatles fan, described approaching the exhibit with both excitement and trepidation. He wrote, “To my delight and surprise, McCartney’s photographs revealed an even more nuanced and human story than I had hoped.” Byrd was particularly captivated by images depicting quiet, intimate moments with the band’s inner circle of “confidants, protectors and loved ones who formed the Beatles’ inner sanctum during this whirlwind period.” Byrd highlights photography’s power to “actively shape perception, memory, and cultural narratives,” and notes how “in the act of observing, we often become part of the story ourselves, forever altering the narrative we seek to document.” Hot Mirror, the online photo publication where Byrd’s article appeared, serves as an educational partner of the BarTur Photo Award. The OPC is collaborating with this award to create new opportunities for OPC member photographers, with a particular focus on supporting freelancers.

OPC member Stephen Shepard is publishing a book titled Salinger’s Soul: His Personal & Religious Odyssey, which examines how J.D. Salinger’s private life influenced his famous stories. Shepard writes that Salinger’s son, Matt, has been sorting through the unpublished writing his father left behind after his death in 2010. Most of these stories will be released soon, and are heavily influenced by his years in seclusion. Salinger’s Soul recounts his traumatic experience in World War II, as well as his transition from the Judaism of his youth to his embrace of a mystical form of Hinduism known as Vedanta. The book is available for Kindle and is slated for publication in print on Sept. 10.

A book by OPC member Adriana Carranca has been named as a finalist for the Christianity Today Book Awards. Soul by Soul, which was discussed at a book talk co-hosted by the OPC at Book Culture on May 2, follows the rise of evangelical Christian missionaries secretly trying to convert Muslims in Kabul. Winners will be announced in December. Carranca will be participating in a series of book events this fall, including a discussion at CUNY on Sept. 17 and an online discussion hosted by New America on Oct. 9. She received the OPC Foundation’s 2018 Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in Memory of I.F. Stone.

PRESS FREEDOM

To mark the 10-year anniversary of American-Israeli journalist Steven Sotloff’s murder by a member of ISIS, Marc Marginedes, a Spanish reporter who was in captivity with Sotloff, wrote a piece for TIME magazine remembering Sotloff’s courage, “humor, and relentless quest for justice, despite the incredible dangers they’d experienced.” He said over the six months they were held captive together, he had witnessed “how this young and brilliant journalist, 14 years younger than me, had dealt with the harrowing situation he was put in with serenity, efficiency, honesty, and enormous bravery, becoming an example for me and, very likely, for others.” Sotloff was killed on Sept. 2, 2014, just two weeks after American journalist and video reporter James Foley was killed by ISIS. In an opinion piece for The New York Times to mark that anniversary, Diane Foley, James’ mother, said on the day of his murder she “felt almost more rage against our government than I did against his killers,” adding that it seemed “that Jim was considered collateral damage by our political leaders. The government has claimed that it did all it could to bring Jim home, but I refused to accept what I saw as its inaction.” She said since her son’s death, she has tried to direct her grief to enable hope and change. “To be moral, we must have courage, and we must speak out about our loved ones captured and wrongfully imprisoned overseas.”

Reuters safety adviser Ryan Evans was killed in a strike on a hotel in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on Aug. 25. Two of the agency’s journalists were treated in a hospital, and one of them was seriously injured. Evans, a former British soldier, advised journalists on safety around the world, including in Ukraine, Israel and at the Paris Olympics. He was 38.

This installment, catch up on news about OPC Foundation scholars Noelle Harff and Olivia George; and OPC community members Raney Aronson-Rath, Alexis Okeowo, Singeli Agnew , Brian Byrd, Stephen Shepard and Adriana Carranca.

SCHOLARS

Dani Morera Trettin, the 2024 Flora Lewis/Jacqueline Albert-Simon Scholarship winner, landed his first byline in Reuters in June after covering the Meta Conversations conference in Brazil and writing about the latest WhatsApp AI features for businesses. Since then, he has filed stories from Brazil on Olympics news, opposition to the tightening abortion ban, Sao Paulo’s Japanese neighborhood, and sharks that tested positive for cocaine. In a post on LinkedIn, he thanked Katie Paul, a former OPC Foundation scholar who won the 2007 Irene Corbally Kuhn Scholarship and is now with Reuters in New York, for “all the editorial and emotional support in the process.”

Cadence Quaranta, the David R. Schweisberg Scholarship winner in 2022, is starting as a reporter for TaiwanPlus, an English-language media new site based in Taipei. She has spent the last year in Taiwan on a Fulbright grant.

Jacob Kushner, who won the OPC Foundation’s Nathan S. Bienstock Memorial Scholarship in 2013, is joining the Columbia Journalism School faculty as the Newsday/Laventhol Visiting Assistant Professor of Journalism. He will teach reporting and long-form magazine writing in the fall semester. An award-winning freelance journalist, Kushner is based in Nairobi. He had an OPC Foundation fellowship in the AP bureau in Nairobi. In May, the OPC and Grand Central Publishing hosted a discussion of his new book, Look Away at the Rizzoli Bookstore in Manhattan.

J.p. Lawrence, the H.L. Stevenson Fellowship winner in 2015, is now a reporter at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis covering southwest Minnesota. In a tweet expressing his excitement on his first day at the new job, he said it was “wild to have a childhood dream come true.” He spent more than six years as a down-range reporter with Stars and Stripes. Lawrence had an OPC Foundation fellowship with AP in Uganda.

Artis Henderson, the 2010 Irene Corbally Kuhn Scholarship winner, has been named a 2024 Fulbright-National Geographic Award recipient. She will spend eight months in Shark Bay in Western Australia studying marine stromatolites, the world’s oldest living microorganisms. Her project will include the voices of the Malgana people – traditional custodians of Gatharragudu, the Malgana name for Shark Bay. Marine stromatolites play a key role in understanding both early conditions on Earth and the potential for life on Mars and are in danger of disappearing within the next 30 years due to climate change. Henderson had an OPC Foundation fellowship with AP in Dakar.

The 2005 David R. Schweisberg Scholarship winner, Emily Steel, and her colleagues Sydney Ember and Mike Baker at The New York Times, won the Michael A. Dornheim Award at the National Press Awards for their insider look at issues facing air traffic controllers in their investigative piece, “Flight Risks.”

Edward Wong, an author and New York Times correspondent who won the 1998 David R. Schweisberg Scholarship, published a book in June about mysteries in his personal family history as a lens to examine 80 years of history in China. The Atlantic named At the Edge of Empire as a top summer read, and it ranked as the number one release in Chinese history on Amazon.

AWARDS

OPC Governor Beth Knobel has won the 2024 Diversity in Journalism History Research Award for her history paper “Breaking Barriers: Ed Bradley’s Early Years in Radio.” The award, given by the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), honors an outstanding paper in journalism or mass communication history that address issues of inclusion and the study of marginalized groups and topics. Judges said her submission “wove oral history, archival broadcast media, and traditional print journalism sources into a vivid narrative of overcoming structural inequality in the radio industry.” Knobel will receive a cash prize during a gala on Aug. 7 at the AEJMC National Convention in Philadelphia.

UPDATES

OPC Governor Rod Nordland spoke on a July 11 podcast that centers on a type of brain tumor, glioblastoma, which Nordland has grappled with since he had a seizure in India in the summer of 2019. The podcast, Glioblastoma AKA GBM Podcast, covered his storied career in journalism, his personal battle with the daunting diagnosis, and his advocacy for disability awareness. Nordland wrote about his experiences with the disease in Waiting for the Monsoon, which was published by Mariner Books in March this year. He was Kabul bureau chief for The New York Times and worked as a foreign correspondent in more than 150 countries. Previously, he was Newsweek’s chief foreign correspondent, serving as Baghdad bureau chief from 2003 to 2005. His work has won the OPC’s 1999 Ed Cunningham Award for reporting from Kosovo for Newsweek, a Pulitzer Prize for news reporting, two George Polk awards, and many other honors. He is also the author of The Lovers: Afghanistan’s Romeo & Juliet.

Sewell Chan, an OPC member who has served as editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune since October 2021, has announced he will join Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism as the next executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. In a post on LinkedIn, he said he was excited to take the helm of the CJR, which he believes “has the potential to advocate for journalists worldwide as they confront pressing challenges – technological disruption, authoritarianism, misinformation, attacks on the free press – while explaining to the public why journalism matters more than ever.” He will join CJR on Sept. 16.

A book by OPC member and photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg is slated to be released on Sept. 3. Legacy of Lies, El Salvador 1981-1984 will feature a series of black and white images that were not published while he was covering the Salvadoran War for TIME magazine. “The book, beautifully printed by Kehrer Verlag, has essays by Alma Guillermoprieto, Jon Lee Anderson, Carlos Dada and Scott Wallace,” Nickelsberg said.

OPC member Alice Driver will also have a book published on Sept. 3. The Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company is an investigation into toxic labor practices at Tyson Foods, the largest meatpacking company in America, and follows the story of immigrant workers who fought back. Driver won a J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Award in the Work-in-Progress category for her book earlier this year.

OPC member Dian Zhang will speak at the Asian American Journalist Association (AAJA) convention in Austin, Texas next week on pitfalls and biases in AI tools. Zhang, a senior data reporter for USA Today, uses data and quantitative analysis to tell stories and weaves news reporting with technical skills such as Python programming, scraping, and data visualizations. She has covered a wide range of topics including business and finance, crime and justice, politics and more.

Peter Schwarztein, an OPC member and author who serves as Global Fellow at the Wilson Center and fellow at the Center for Climate and Security, is slated to publish a book in late September. The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence from Island Press will cover some of his most harrowing experiences while covering climate conflicts, including pursuit by kidnappers, beatings, police detention, and getting kicked out of some countries. He visited Iraqi towns where ISIS used drought as a recruiting tool, interviewed desperate farmers who turned to piracy in Bangladesh, and grappled with security forces who blocked him from a dam along the Nile that brought Egypt and Ethiopia to the brink of war.

André Liohn, who won the OPC’s Robert Capa Gold Medal in 2012 for his work in Libya, spoke at the Bronx Documentary Center on July 27 after a screening of a documentary, You Are Not a Soldier, that focuses on Liohn’s experiences as a war photographer. He held a Q&A session with attendees and discussed current risks for photographers working in an increasingly fractured industry as well as the importance of documentary work. His photos have appeared in Der Spiegel, The New York Times, Newsweek, The Guardian, El Pais, TIME, Stern and more. His video work has been broadcast on BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera English and France 24, among others.