People Column

SCHOLARS

Jared Mitovich, winner of the Emanuel R. Freedman Scholarship this year, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in May, will join The Wall Street Journal as a full-time news associate based in New York this fall. He will join Christopher Kuo, the 2025 Seymour and Audrey Topping Scholarship winner, who has also been announced as news associate for the Journal. Both will start there in September.

Rafael Escalera Montoto, winner of the 2025 Jerry Flint Fellowship for International Business Reporting, is currently in Mexico City for his OPC Foundation fellowship with Reuters. He already landed a byline on April 10 in a piece co-written with colleague Anthony Esposito about the Bank of Mexico’s reaction to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which board members said would add uncertainty to inflation forecasts, and a greater possibility of a further exchange rate depreciation and economic weakening.

Three OPC Foundation scholars are among the New York Times 2025 fellows. Kailyn Rhone, the 2023 Reuters Fellowship winner, Sonia Rao, the 2024 Freedman Scholarship winner, and Simar Bajaj, the 2024 winner of The Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in memory of I.F. Stone, have been selected for the Times’ one-year Fellowship program starting in June. Rhone will be the paper’s business fellow, Rao will report from the National Desk about disability issues in America, and Bajaj will focus on health reporting.

Carlos Garcia, the 2025 Harper’s Magazine Scholarship winner, has been hired by The Wall Street Journal as a production assistant on its daily podcast “The Journal.” An audio producer focused on business reporting, he has been covering how U.S. migration affects the economy, a theme he also reported on for NPR.

Kate Selig, winner of the 2024 Irene Corbally Kuhn Scholar Award, has been selected as a reporting fellow for the 2025 Journalism Program of the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE). FASPE annually grants up to 90 fellowships to graduate students and early-career professionals in the fields of Journalism, Business, Clergy, Design & Technology, Law, and Medicine. Fellows participate in a two-week program in Germany and Poland. Selig is a reporting fellow on the National Desk at The New York Times, where she covers breaking news with a focus on extreme weather and climate.

Meena Venkataramanan, the Emanuel R. Freedman Scholarship winner in 2021, wrote a review for The Washington Post on April 12 on Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara. In the book, Vara collaborated with a chatbot to write essays on digital technology, surveillance capitalism and her family’s immigrant experience. “Across 16 chapters, Vara journeys through the evolution of the internet, ethical quandaries surrounding AI, and her own life with her characteristically piercing, yet unadorned prose,“ Venkataramanan wrote. Venkataramanan also wrote a piece for the Public Books site on April 17 about a neighborhood of London known as Banglatown, or Brick Lane, and its multicultural history as a refuge for Huguenots, Jews, and Bangladeshis.

UPDATES

OPC Vice President Sandra Stevenson joined Education Week as managing editor, overseeing visuals and immersive experiences in February. She previously was deputy director of photography at The Washington Post, where she managed a team of photo editors covering international, climate and health news. Over her career of more than two decades she was associate director of photography at CNN, assistant photo editor and picture editor at The New York Times. At the Times, she supervised digital photo editors on the news desk and contributed to the “Race/Related” newsletter and projects such as “Gender,” “This Is 18,” and “Overlooked.” In a welcome message Beth Frerking, editor-in-chief of Education Week, said staff was excited about “leveraging Sandra’s creativity, her strong journalism chops, and her dedication to mentoring and helping guide colleagues’ career growth. And we welcome – especially in these busy times – what several colleagues described as Sandra’s preternatural ability to stay calm under pressure.” Separately, Stevenson spoke and presented her work at the Women Street Photographers Festival on April 12, in a presentation titled “Beyond the Frame: Developing Photo Projects that Get Published.”

OPC member Steve Herman, chief national correspondent for Voice of America, wrote a piece for the April-May issue of the Foreign Service Journal on the silencing of colleagues and “de facto destruction” of the international news service. He called efforts to silence the VOA “nothing less than a betrayal of the ideals that gave birth to the institution and made it relevant throughout World War II, the Cold War and the decades after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.” On April 22, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s effort to scuttle the news service, and ordered that VOA journalists be allowed to resume their jobs.

OPC Governor Marc Lacey, managing editor of The New York Times, will participate in the paper’s Well Festival on May 7. The day-long event highlights reporting on health and wellness topics, and features mainstage interviews between Times journalists and health industry experts.

OPC member Ali Velshi, host and chief correspondent for MSNBC, has been working on a book that is slated to come out later this year. Recent website biographies about Velshi promoting speaking engagements have stated his book, Open Space: How The Second Great Space Race Will Shape Our Future, to be published by Knopf, will explore the implications of the new space race, focusing on its economic and military benefits. Velshi is author of Gimme My Money Back and co-author with Christine Romans of How to Speak Money. His most recent book, Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy, was published by St. Martin’s Press in May last year.

OPC member Vivienne Walt wrote a profile on April 16 for TIME magazine about Duma Boko, who was elected President of Botswana in what she called a “seismic election upset” in October last year. She wrote that the 55-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer ousted the party that had ruled for nearly six decades since its independence from the United Kingdom. Walt said voter frustration with political corruption and flagging global diamond prices set the stage for his victory. Her profile was part of a TIME roundup of “100 Most Influential People of 2025.” Walk writes for TIME and FORTUNE from Paris.

Dana Thomas, an OPC member and freelancer based in Paris, reported for The New York Times in article published digitally on March 25 that appeared in print on April 1, about an exhibition at the Louvre-Lens in France that examines the relationship between art and fashion, including artists’ clothing and what they illustrate about their place in society. “The Art of Dressing: Dressing Like an Artist” features 200 artworks and fashion items and runs through July 21. Thomas wrote that the show explores clothing and gender identity, with pieces on writer George Sand and Andy Warhol, as well as pieces from Louise Abbéma and Georges Achille-Fould’s “shocking” 1893 portrait of her mentor, Rosa Bonheur wearing brown pants and a smock.

OPC member Keith Richburg wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post on April 7 about President Donald Trump’s use of name changes as a political tool, and how the move has apparently empowered other conservative global leaders to follow suit. He said Trump’s executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” and the stripping of Alaska’s Indigenous name of Denali as Mount McKinley, echoes the conservative Australian opposition leader Peter Dutton’s promises to remove Aboriginal names at Australian military bases, and a movement in New Zealand’s Parliament to ban the use of the country’s Indigenous Māori name, Aotearoa. “Trump seems to enjoy the name game, and he’s inspiring fellow autocrats and would-be autocrats to join in,” Richburg wrote.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

Richard Bernstein, an author and former correspondent for TIME and The New York Times who attended and spoke at many OPC events and shared expertise on Asia and Europe, died on March 31 in New York at the age of 80. Bernstein started writing about Asia for TIME magazine in 1973, and opened the magazine’s first bureau in China as Beijing bureau chief in 1979. He started working at the Times In 1982, and during his tenure there he served as bureau chief for the United Nations, Paris and Berlin, and as national cultural correspondent and book critic. In an OPC program that gathered Hong Kong correspondents in December 2018, Bernstein expressed nostalgia for his years there, saying Westerners who became journalists after studying Mandarin and China at the time formed a fellowship of “China watchers,” adding that “it never stopped thrilling me to just be in this place.” A recap and video of a 2018 panel on the future of Taiwan that he participated in is available here.

SCHOLARS

Two former OPC Foundation scholars were among the winners of the recently announced Society of Professional Journalism Best in Business Awards for 2024. Alex Saeedy, the first Fritz Beebe Fellowship winner in 2015, won the Banking/Finance large division award for an article he wrote for The Wall Street Journal entitled, “Overworked: How Wall Street Pushes Young Bankers to the Edge.” Jacob Adelman, the H.L. Stevenson Scholarship awardee in 2005, won the Investing/Markets medium division for the article “Investing Annuities” for Barron’s.

Olivia Carville, the Roy Rowan Scholarship winner in 2018, has been working on a documentary about online child safety for the last two years that is showing from April 4 to 10 at DCTV’s Firehouse cinema in Lower Manhattan. The screening on April 7 includes a Q&A with Carville and Bloomberg investigations editor Robert Friedman. Can’t Look Away, directed by award-winning filmmakers Matthew O’Neill and Perri Peltz, follows a team of lawyers battling tech giants on behalf of families whose children suffered devastating harm linked to social media. The screening is sponsored by the New York Financial Writers’ Association.

UPDATES

OPC Governor Azmat Khan co-wrote a piece for The New York Times on March 4 with colleague John Ismay detailing the Trump administration’s moves to close the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office, which handles policy surrounding risks to non-combatants during airstrikes and other operations, and the related Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which deals with training and procedures. Citing three defense officials, Khan and Ismay wrote that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was preparing to eliminate jobs for more than 160 Defense Department employees dedicated to mitigating and investigating civilian casualties. Khan has won multiple OPC awards and other accolades for her extensive reporting on harm to civilians during U.S. military operations around the world.

OPC member Judith Matloff recently published a year-long investigation into a group of white investors who promised Native tribes big windfalls from legal cannabis. The deals fell apart and the tribes are still picking up the pieces. The story was co-published by The Guardian and High Country News magazine, and received support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

An artificial intelligence company asked a federal court in California on March 24 to dismiss a lawsuit brought by a group of writers that includes OPC member Charles Graeber. Graeber, along with Andrea Bartz and Kirk Wallace Johnson, sued Anthropic in August last year, claiming the company used pirated versions of their works and others to teach the chatbot Claude to respond to human prompts. Anthropic told the court that their use of the authors’ work qualifies as fair use, because it transforms them into something new. Graeber and other plaintiffs have asked the court to represent a larger group of authors whose work they allege were also used inappropriately.

Jeanne Carstensen, an award-winning author, freelance journalist and OPC member based in San Francisco, spoke to WEKF public radio in Baton Rouge’s “Talk Louisiana” on March 31 about her new book, A Greek Tragedy. The book reconstructs the deadly shipwreck of an overloaded boat full of refugees from Syria and other countries in October 2015 near the Greek island of Lesbos. She said during the interview that 76 people drowned in that incident, but more than 30,000 migrants have died in the Mediterranean since 2014. She spoke to many survivors, including “a loan officer from Kabul, and an artist from Syria, and a psychologist from Syria who was about to open a kindergarten when war broke out in that country,” she said. “We just don’t get to know who these people are because we see them in media, and they look bedraggled when we see them getting out of a boat or crossing a border. So in this book I’m able to introduce people to these full human beings.” A Greek Tragedy was published by One Signal Publishers on March 25.

OPC member Sewell Chan, the executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, wrote a piece about the March 31 shuttering of the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit newsroom founded 36 years ago. He said CPI’s collapse over the last year followed a budget shortfall, departure of its chief executive and editor in chief, and a failed attempt to merge with The Markup. CPI has ceased publishing and might send its archives to the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), an anti-corruption watchdog group. Chan wrote that CPI’s most recent piece, “Forty Acres and a Lie,” was co-published in June 2024 with Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal. The project reviewed Reconstruction-era documents to reveal how formerly enslaved people were given land toward the end of the Civil War, and then had the land seized back less than two years later. The project won awards for its innovative reporting, including use of artificial intelligence tools.

Lila Hassan, a freelance journalist and OPC member based in Brooklyn, wrote for the news website Drop Site on March 4 about journalists’ efforts in Gaza to collect evidence of war crimes before they are destroyed. She profiled Soliman Hijjy, a 37-year-old freelance visual journalist who has been collecting drone footage, photography and videos, and conducting his interviews with survivors into an archive with backups scattered across many locations that he said was intended “to remember details of history you’d expect to be erased.” Hassan cited bans in Israel and Egypt on unembedded international journalists and investigators into Gaza, and the quiet removal of journalists’ posts from Gaza on X and Meta platforms.

Lynzy Billing, winner of the OPC’s 2022 Ed Cunningham Award, will premier a new film in New York on April 28 that focuses on healthcare in Afghanistan through the eyes of medical professionals who have worked through decades of war and its aftermath. The film, titled Long Night, reveals how heathcare continues to operate “in a society often overlooked by the media – and where hospitals are busier now than ever, treating victims of explosive remnants of war, many of them children.” After its North American premier in New York, which will feature a Q&A with Billing, it will be shown in Washington, D.C. on April 30 and Los Angeles on May 4. Billing won her OPC award for The Night Raids, a film she discussed during an OPC program at Columbia in October 2023.

SCHOLARS

2024 Emanuel R. Freedman Scholarship winner Sonia A. Rao has completed a three-month fellowship in Reuters’ Nairobi bureau. She wrote in an email that during her stint there she covered the impeachment of Kenya’s deputy president, deteriorating Somalia-Ethiopia relations, Somaliland’s elections, and more. “I pitched several features, including one that allowed me to travel to the coast and interview Kenyan villagers who have turned to seaweed farming as climate change has decimated other industries,” and contributed to reports on the killing of Ugandan Olympian runner Rebecca Cheptegei and a suicide bombing in Mogadishu.

The Sally Jacobsen Fellowship winner in 2020, Annie Rosenthal, has been named as Virginia Spencer Davis fellow at High Country News. She will be covering rural communities, agriculture, migration and borderlands. She spent the last three years covering the border communities in West Texas for Marfa Public Radio and Report for America. Her radio stories have appeared on NPR and Marketplace, and have earned five regional Edward R. Murrow awards.

Olivia Carville, the Roy Rowan Scholarship winner in 2018, and her colleague Cecilia D’Anastasio have won the 2025 George Polk Award for technology reporting for their Bloomberg Businessweek stories about child safety online. Their investigation revealed how predators have used the Roblox gaming platform to groom and exploit children, how “sextortion” scammers blackmailed teens via Instagram, and how drug dealers sold fentanyl to kids using Snapchat.

Mark Anderson, the Emanuel R. Freedman Scholarship winner in 2014, has been hired by Bloomberg News as Asia technology editor based in Hong Kong. He had been Asia-Pacific news editor for Agence France-Presse for the past two years. Before that, he was Africa editor for The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and business editor for The Africa Report. He also worked for The Guardian in London.

UPDATES

Friends and family of longtime member and former OPC Governor Rod Nordland are raising funds for his care as he continues to battle glioblastoma, an incurable brain cancer. In a GoFundMe campaign, his partner Leila Segal said that against the odds, Nordland has survived for five years after his diagnosis, but no longer has means to support himself. She appealed for donations to “ensure he can live the last part of his life with dignity. It’s also for me – so I can care for him and stay by his side.” The campaign raised $17,000 of a $45,000 goal in its first 24 hours. The link to donate is here.

OPC Vice President Peter Spiegel has joined The Washington Post as managing editor and will oversee national and local newsroom departments. An announcement on Jan. 30 said starting on Feb. 24, he would oversee coverage of national politics, the federal government, national security, the judiciary, immigration, race, health and science. Spiegel most recently served as U.S. managing editor for The Financial Times, overseeing its editorial operations in the U.S. and the Americas.

OPC Governor Stephen J. Adler, wrote a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review on Feb. 20 about the dangers of “anticipatory compliance” in newsrooms in light of President Donald Trump’s second term, “and the ascendancy of billionaire press antagonists.” Adler, board chair of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and founding director of the Ethics and Journalism Initiative at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, wrote that media self-censorship “represents one of the most insidious means by which people with power can squelch news reporting that doesn’t serve their interests. You don’t have to arrest or fire reporters—you just have to make them increasingly afraid that you will.” Adler will serve as moderator during the upcoming panel at NYU on March 10, titled “Ethics of Overseas Reporting.”

Filipino tech workers demanded protections in an AI bill after Rest of the World, a global newsroom where OPC Governor Anup Kaphle serves as editor-in-chief, published reporting in November that led to investigations and the termination of a worker. A group of activists, Code AI, said in a press conference that Rest of the World’s work prompted the founding of the group. The report last year described AI tools, including AI co-pilots and sentiment analysis deployed for American Express and Meta, that made work more demanding, according to the workers.

Yinka Adegoke, an OPC Governor who is the founding editor of Semafor Africa, has been covering the effects of tariffs and other Trump administration policies in Africa for the publication. He filed a piece on Feb 12 about the unraveling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which would reduce the number of workers focused on the whole continent to about a dozen workers as the whole agency shrinks from 14,000 workers to 294. Adegoke wrote that the seven countries to be hardest hit would be DR Congo, Ethiopia, Liberia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda, according to development analysts. In all but two of these countries, USAID’s focus is categorized as “emergency response,” he wrote. Separately, Adegoke moderated a panel at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Jan. 30 about the incoming U.S. administration with three experts on development and policy in Africa.

The Volcker Alliance, a nonprofit focused on workers in the public sector, announced in late January that William Glasgall, an OPC member and senior vice president of the organization, would retire. “Over more than a decade at the Alliance, Bill developed and managed our robust public finance portfolio, supervising the publication of numerous working papers and studies, including four Truth and Integrity in State Budgeting reports.” Glasgall is a veteran business journalist and former managing editor at Bloomberg News. He joined Volcker in 2014 as director for the group’s State and Local Program.

OPC member and photojournalist Nicole Tung showed photos at the Indian Photo Festival in the State Gallery of Art in Hyderabad in January and told attendees that she became interested in photography and conflict reporting at an early age. She said she was particularly interested in how conflicts among neighbors can arise, and in figuring out how they might be resolved. “Growing up in Hong Kong, I saw the 24/7 news coverage in Afghanistan and Iraq post-9/11, and a part of me wanted to get a better understanding of that region and what people were fighting for,” The New Indian Express quoted her as saying.

The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma announced that two OPC members, Ruchi Kumar and Monica Montero, are among this year’s cohort of journalists and students for the Reporting Institute on Childhood and Forced Migration in Europe. The three-day training institute, funded by Columbia Global at Columbia University, will feature researchers, clinicians, practitioners and award-winning journalists for panels, and workshops to “deepen reporting on children and families impacted by forced migration and displacement.” Montero, a journalist and visual storyteller based in Spain, holds a Master’s degree in Journalism from Columbia University and has written for Al Jazeera, El País, and T Magazine, among others. Kumar is an independent journalist reporting on conflict, politics, climate, and gender from South Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.