People Column

SCHOLARS

Two past OPC Foundation winners were chosen to be members of the 2025-2026 Report for America Corps. Jack Brook, the David R. Schweisberg Scholarship winner in 2018, will report for The Associated Press in Louisiana, especially New Orleans. He will focus on the Louisiana statehouse and its spending decisions on topics from levees and floodwalls to coastal evacuation highways that affect people across the state. Jake Kincaid, the Reuters Fellowship winner in 2020, will cover the local impacts of Trump administration funding and policy changes on institutions and community members across the San Diego region for the Federal Impact Reporter. He had an OPC Foundation fellowship with Reuters in Mexico City.

Annika Hammerschlag, the Irene Corbally Kuhn Scholarship winner in 2016, is now the Oceans and Climate correspondent for The Associated Press based in Seattle. Before joining the AP, she spent six years in West Africa as a freelance photographer, videographer and reporter. Previously she was the education reporter at the Naples Daily News.

UPDATES

Nilo Tabrizy, a visual forensics reporter for The Washington Post who serves as OPC governor, has been analyzing U.S. airstrikes in Iran along with the paper’s forensics team, using satellite images to pick through the aftermath of attacks on sites considered key to the country’s nuclear program. On June 23, Tabrizy and the team identified entry points for deep penetrating bombs as well as damage at aboveground facilities. The reporting includes an extensive timeline of attacks on all three sites, including the Fordow and Natanz uranium enrichment facilities and the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center, from B-2s with support from submarines.

Alexis Okeowo, an OPC Governor and contributing writer for The New Yorker, wrote a longform piece for the magazine on June 16 that follows up with women who accused alleged abusers of sexual assault during the height of the #MeToo movement in 2017. The piece is drawn from her upcoming book, titled Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama, that is slated to be published by Henry Holt and Co. on Aug. 5. In the piece, she delves into each of their cases, finding that high-profile survivors have faced retaliatory legal campaigns, defamation suits, smear tactics, the release of addresses and personal information (called doxing) and threats that caused some to relocate their families, among other disruptions. Okeowo found that #MeToo initially gave rise to more accountability, but retaliation and a lack of support systems have left survivors on their own. She wrote that perpetrators’ campaigns to deflect blame have a chilling effect on complaints against abusers. “Powerful men often have more resources to wage legal battles than their accusers. And the suits allowed them to cloud public opinion about even the most verifiable claims,” Okeowo wrote.

OPC Vice President Deborah Amos started writing about Ukraine from Lviv on her Substack on June 18, saying that she was embarking on an extended trip to report on “accountability, war crime trials, and the limits of justice.” Her work in Ukraine is supported by a grant from the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF). Amos rounded up local headlines for readers, mentioning a city council calling for restricted celebrations during a funeral for three soldiers who died defending Ukraine, a community art project to heal those with loved ones lost in the war, and a new training center for Ukrainian drone operators to learn how to shoot down Iranian drones. She wrote that the Israel-Iran conflict is already entangled with Ukraine, with five Ukrainians, including three children, killed in an Iranian missile strike south of Tel Aviv, and the potential for a war in Iran to change Vladimir Putin’s standing on the world stage. Amos’ Substack can be found here.

OPC Governor Azmat Khan, an investigative reporter with The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine and professor at Columbia Journalism School, spoke to Maurice Oniango of The Reuters Institute for a June 19 interview posted on the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) site. She talked about her award-winning reporting on civilian casualties of U.S. airstrikes, which won the OPC’s Ed Cunningham Award for 2017 and a Roy Rowan Award for 2021, as well as a Pulitzer Prize and other accolades. Khan also talked about her approach to interviewing survivors and families affected by war, saying it’s important to give sources experiencing trauma time to build trust and respond on their own terms. “Giving people space to tell their stories and really listening to them, not just asking the questions you’re interested in. This helps build trust and allows them to open up. Many survivors have never spoken to a journalist before or don’t know the rules,” she said.

OPC Governor and freelance filmmaker Singeli Agnew collaborated with New York Times Magazine staff writer Susan Dominus on a multimedia piece about a family that created an artificial intelligence avatar of a loved one who had been diagnosed with blood cancer. The June 13 piece, “Never Say Goodbye,” includes Agnew’s video of Peter Listro participating in generative AI training interviews with a company called StoryFile, which often works with foundations and museums to bring past figures to life, to help preserve his memory. The piece also includes footage of a sample session in which the avatar answers questions from his son. The family had stipulated with StoryFile that the avatar of Peter would only answer questions that had been posed while he was alive. “Everything he said, they would know, was something he believed to be true, rather than an extrapolation,” Dominus wrote.

Yinka Adegoke, an OPC Governor and founding editor of Semafor Africa, wrote an article for Semafor on June 18 about prominent East African political activists who are suing the governments of Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda for allegations that they were abducted and tortured by Tanzanian security agents. Adegoke wrote that Boniface Mwangi, a veteran Kenyan activist, and Agather Atuhaire, a Ugandan human rights lawyer, filed lawsuits at the East African Court of Justice, the East African Legislative Assembly, and the International Criminal Court for incidents. The two have stated publicly that they were subjected to various forms of sexual torture and physical intimidation after being abducted in Dar es Salaam in May.

Stephen Kalin, an OPC Governor and foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, has been closely covering the wars in Yemen and the Israel-Iran war for the paper. On June 24, he co-wrote with colleague Saleh al-Batati about how Yemen’s Houthi militants, allies of Iran, had claimed that the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Iran did not include them, and that their operations against Israel would continue. He also wrote on the same day that Israeli attacks on Iran since June 13 had killed 610 people and injured 4,746 others, according to an Iranian Health Ministry spokesman. On June 23 alone, Kalin had eight bylines for the Journal related to the conflicts, and five more on June 24. Kalin is also an OPC Foundation scholar. He won a Roy Rowan Scholarship and had a fellowship with Reuters in 2013.

OPC member Kathy Gannon is covering the rise of militant groups flourishing in Pakistan and Afghanistan for her Substack. On June 2, she wrote about a group in Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan province that is carrying out attacks across the region. Gannon said the 15 million residents there are caught between the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP) and the Baluchistan Liberation Army (BLA), with the former accusing the latter of receiving training from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and funding from India. She said the “increasing frequency and ferocity of attacks, which are slowly creeping beyond the region and into international territory, is a testimony to the failure of America’s so-called War on Terror.” Gannon also spoke on a panel in Islamabad on June 7 about militant groups on Afghan soil that she said threaten regional security. Read Gannon’s Substack here.

OPC member Ruchi Kumar co-wrote a piece for The Guardian on June 12 about women working in the sugar industry in India still being pushed into having hysterectomies. The two reported that the women work long hours for low wages, and the threat of fines for missing or partial workdays pressures them to undergo hysterectomies to end menstruation and allow them to work longer hours. According to local NGOs, the rate of hysterectomies among women in one of India’s top sugar cane producers was 36 percent, compared with a national average of 3 percent. Separately, exploitation in Indian cane fields was the subject of the piece that won the OPC’s Joe and Laurie Dine Award this year, with Qadri Inzamam and Megha Rajagopalan reporting for The Fuller Project with The New York Times.

Mellissa Fung, an OPC member and filmmaker, wrote an opinion piece for the Toronto Globe and Mail on June 6 about U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s scuttling of a program to leverage women in all aspects of conflict, including peacemaking and reconstruction. In the piece, titled “By Alienating Women, America’s Military Is Undermining Itself,” Fung wrote about Hegseth’s tweet in late April declaring the department had ended the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) program, which he called “yet another woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative that overburdens our commanders and troops – distracting from our core task: WAR-FIGHTING.” She added that “Hegseth’s ignorant post is still up on X, suggesting the Trump administration is foolhardily committed to making America’s military small again – while the rest of us understand that having women at the table increases the likelihood of enduring peace.”

OPC member Elena Becatoros reported from Afghanistan for The Associated Press on June 14 about Pakistan’s crackdown on foreigners, which has led to migration of nearly 1 million Afghans since the campaign started in October 2023. Becatoros spoke with displaced families at Torkham camp, run by Afghanistan’s Taliban government, where people are allowed to stay for up to three days before moving on. Camp officials said 150 families were arriving daily from Pakistan, a decrease from the 1,200 families that arrived each day about two months beforehand.

OPC member Vivienne Walt wrote two pieces about ocean conservation for TIME magazine in June from Nice, France. On June 14, she wrote about ways that artificial intelligence could help humans save their oceans. From a U.N. Oceans Conference, Walt reported on dire conditions of plastic pollution, dead zones, and the projected collapse of marine species, and how generative AI tools such as virtual modeling of oceans, tracking data on individual fish, and monitoring of fishing vessels could tackle those complex issues. On June 16, she wrote about the detrimental effects of the 1975 film Jaws on marine conservation. June 20 marked the 50th anniversary of the thriller, which was shown in theaters with a new introduction by director Steven Spielberg. Walt wrote that ocean advocates lament the film’s effect on perception of sharks as villains or mindless killers, which led to a global campaign against sharks that has decimated many species.

The print edition of Line in the Sand, a book by Dean Yates, an author and former Reuters journalist whose memoir was featured at an OPC book night in 2023, is now available in the U.S. and Canada. The book recounts his experience grappling with post-traumatic stress disorder and his 7-year recovery process after events that include terrorist bombings in Bali in 2002, the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, and the deaths of two of his Reuters colleagues who were shot and killed from an American helicopter while he was serving as bureau chief in Baghdad. In an email, Yates said readers of his book from multiple occupations and life circumstances have been responding strongly to the concept of moral injury, “a wound to the soul, a condition that shatters people’s sense of self. It has similarities to PTSD but is a distinct affliction. All that’s needed is for someone’s idea of what’s right to be violated strongly enough.” Line in the Sand can be ordered through the Independent Publishers Group website (IPG), Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

Kevin “Kal” Kallaugher, cartoonist and winner of multiple OPC awards, has launched a twice-weekly newsletter featuring the best of his work from the last 50 years. He said in an email that the Substack will feature “loads of interesting cartoons along with insights, backstories, hidden gems, interviews and more.” Kallaugher won the OPC’s awards for best cartoons for 2020, 2013, 2004, 2002 and 1998, as well as Citations for Excellence for 2008, 2017 and 2024.

SCHOLARS

Evan Gorelick, the Fritz Beebe Fellowship winner for 2025, has been hired by The New York Times as a staff writer for The Morning, the Times’s flagship daily newsletter.

Isabela Fleischmann do Amaral, the S&P Global Award for Economic and Business Reporting winner for 2025, has won a NAHJ Ruben Salazar Scholarship. The Scholarship Fund was established in 1986 to assist young Latino journalists. She will receive scholarship dollars and attend a sponsored trip to the 2025 national conference held July 9-12, 2025, at the Hilton Chicago. Isabela also has a Bloomberg summer internship in Los Angeles.

Laura Robertson, the Sally Jacobsen Scholarship winner in 2024, has won the 2025 Nellie Bly Award from the New York Press Club with her story “Death and Profit in New York’s Jail Infirmaries.” The winners receive an engraved plaque and were honored at the New York Press Club annual Awards Dinner on June 2 at the Cornucopia Majesty yacht.

Noelle Harff, the Walter & Betsy Cronkite Scholarship winner in 2024, has been selected as business journalism intern for summer 2025 by Dow Jones News Fund. The business fellowship takes place in New York City where the journalists learn how to cover the major economic forces, practice writing, pitching and interviewing skills.

Rachel Nostrant, the Edith Lederer Scholarship winner in 2023, is starting a new job at the Houston Chronicle as an energy reporter, with a focus on oil and gas. Prior to her new role, she was a disability reporting fellow at The New York Times.

Hayley Woodin Hastings, the Freedman Scholar Award winner in 2022, has been awarded the King Charles III Coronation Medal – a prestigious recognition of her outstanding contributions to Canada and the communities she serves. As the youngest and second female editor in the 36-year history of Business in Vancouver, Hayley has broken new ground in journalism while advocating for diversity and representation. She also co-founded Mákook pi Sélim, an Indigenous storytelling magazine amplifying Indigenous voices and supporting reconciliation efforts. She has also recently joined the board of the British Columbia and Yukon Community Newspapers Association.

Hakyung Kim, the Fritz Beebe Fellowship winner in 2022, has joined the Financial Times as a reporter on the Unhedged team. Previously she worked at CNBC as a markets reporter. She had OPC Foundation fellowship with the WSJ in Seoul in summer 2022.

Business Insider has hired Charles Rollett, the Jerry Flint Scholar Award winner in 2017, as its San Francisco tech correspondent focusing on Big Tech and AI. He was formerly with TechCrunch. Rollett had an OPC Foundation fellowship with The Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong.

Jeff Horwitz, an award-winning journalist and winner of the Fred Wiegold Scholarship in 2009, is joining Reuters in a new role of tech investigations reporter. Most recently, he was with The Wall Street Journal where he led the reporting on the Facebook Files, a 2021 series that exposed how Meta was aware that its social-media platforms were harming teenage girls and other users but failed to take action. The series won a George Polk Award and a Gerald Loeb Award. Last year, Horwitz shared a Loeb Award for “The Dark Side of Meta’s Algorithms,” a series that revealed how Instagram and Facebook connected networks of pedophiles and served them disturbing content. He will be based in San Francisco. Before the Journal, Horwitz was a financial and enterprise reporter for The Associated Press in Washington, where he broke stories about how former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had secretly worked to advance Russian interests.

AWARDS

The Reuters team that won this year’s Malcolm Forbes and Morton Frank Award has also won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. The series, “Fentanyl Express,” revealed how easy it is to procure Chinese chemicals used in the production of synthetic opioids. The reporting team legally acquired chemicals and equipment needed to produce a large quantity of fentanyl.

In addition, the Wall Street Journal team that won the OPC’s William Worthy Award for its reporting on Russian spying operations and Evan Gershkovich’s wrongful detention was also a finalist the Pulitzer’s International Reporting category, and Washington Post staff that won the Shireen Abu Akleh award for reporting on the war in Gaza was a finalist in the same category.

Raney Aronson-Rath, an OPC Governor and editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE, on May 1 celebrated the program’s ten News & Documentary Emmy Award nominations this year. The nominations include documentaries on police use of force, the mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, violence in Gaza in 2023, adoption in South Korea and the rise of of Xi Jinping in China. In a release, Aronson-Rath said the nominations “are a testament to our filmmakers, whose ability to marry in-depth, investigative reporting with captivating documentary storytelling creates programming that educates the American public on issues facing our nation and world.”

UPDATES

Steve Herman, an OPC member who is retiring from Voice of America, has been named as the inaugural executive director of the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation at University of Mississippi. He will begin serving in his new role on July 7, leading the center’s mission of “engaging students, journalists and the public in addressing media literacy and journalistic integrity.” Herman recently wrote about the Trump administration’s gutting of his former employer after more than 1,300 colleagues were placed on indefinite leave with pay on March 15.

Sewell Chan, an OPC member and editor and journalist who recently left his position as executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, has been named senior fellow for the USC Annenberg Center for Communication Leadership & Policy (CCLP), where he will focus on press freedom in the U.S. and abroad. Chan previously served as editor at the Texas Tribune, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Geoffrey Cowan, director of the CCLP at USC Annenberg, said in a release that “we look forward to working with him on issues related to journalistic integrity, media and democracy, and new models for local news.”

OPC member Nicolas Niarchos wrote a longform piece on May 19 for The New Yorker about a displaced family’s 500-mile saga to find safety in Sudan. The piece, “Escape from Khartoum,” follows the family of nine as they survive weeks of bombings, hunger, and violence to escape to the Nuba Mountains, marked by perilous checkpoints and theft.

OPC member Lori Valigra has continued writing about so-called forever chemicals, or PFAS, in Maine for the Bangor Daily News. In May she wrote about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s moves under the Trump administration to fight contamination, but wrote that scientists and environmental experts found the plan lacking in details on budget or timelines. She also wrote on May 8 that a state-funded $11 million wastewater treatment project to remove those chemicals has been put on hold. Valigra reports on the environment for the BDN’s Maine Focus investigative team, a position supported by a fund at the Maine Community Foundation.

Adi Ignatius, an OPC member who serves as editor at large of the Harvard Business Review, announced on June 2 that the publication would launch a new subscription service for senior leaders, titled HBR Executive. He said in a press release that the new service “aims to help CEOs and their top teams tackle the most pressing issues of our time – from the rise of AI to rapidly shifting political and geopolitical landscapes.” Separately, HBR has also launched a new podcast, HBR IdeaCast, which will feature Ignatius as co-host with executive editor Alison Beard.

OPC member John Maxwell Hamilton, a professor of mass communications at Louisiana State University, spoke on the RealClearPolitics radio show on May 1 about his piece about Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s, titled “’Abundance’ Is Good Advice for Democrats.” Hamilton called on the Democratic Party to generate new ideas that reach across the spectrum of U.S. politics, and to solve problems like housing shortages with more efficient policies. Hamilton spoke during a book night in April 2021 about his book, Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda.

Daniella Zalcman, an OPC member and photojournalist, had several of her photographs featured in an April 30 Washington Post piece marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Her images depict many of the people profiled in the piece as they recount their stories and describe their current lives in Vietnam.

New York Public Radio and WNYC archives posted a piece of OPC history on May 23 with an audio recording of a 1968 program with David Hallenstein, sitting in for Seymour N. Siegel, moderating a panel of journalists who interview Ambassador Piero Vinci, Permanent Representative of Italy to the United Nations. The panel includes William Otis of The Associated Press, Ruggero Orlando of Radiotelevisione Italiana, and Michael Berlin of the New York Post. The participants discussed Italy’s role in the Nuclear nonproliferation treaty, China’s possible inclusion in the United Nations, and Paris talks on the Vietnam war.

Adriana Teresa Letorney, founder of Visura.co and recent OPC panelist, has launched a new short documentary, Disrupted, on the declining state of the media industry and its impact on freelance visual journalists. Visura.co is a platform for visual journalists and storytellers to connect with a global network and license their images directly to buyers. The film is available to watch online here.

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.