People Column

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.