People Column

By Trish Anderton

OPC SCHOLARS

Stephen Kalin, who won the Roy Rowan Scholarship in 2013, is now with the Reuters bureau in Baghdad covering political and some economic news. Most recently Stephen was with the Reuters Cairo bureau.

Max Strasser, 2008 Alexander Kendrick winner, has been named an editor of the op-ed section of The New York Times. Until recently an associate editor for Foreign Policy, Max spent several years in the Middle East, mostly in Cairo where he was the former news editor at Egypt Independent, the English-language sister paper of Al-Masry Al-Youm, Egypt’s leading newspaper. His writing has appeared online or in print in The Nation, The New Statesman, The London Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, Newsweek, and elsewhere.

AWARDS

OPC member Lynsey Addario received the Gaudium Award on Nov. 9 from the Breukelein Institute, a charitable organization in Brooklyn. The award honors people whose efforts in the arts and public service have “illumined the horizon of human experience.” Michele McNally, assistant managing editor for Photography at The New York Times wrote that Addario’s “contributions to the stories of conflict, and the consequential human tragedies it produces, elicit emotional and powerful responses.”

2012 Robert Capa Gold Medal Award winner Manu Brabo has won the British Journalism Award for photojournalism. Brabo, who shared a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography in 2013, is a freelancer who has photographed conflicts in countries including Libya, Egypt and Syria. Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of The Guardian, won the BJA’s Marie Colvin Award for courage in journalism.

OPC members Sheri Fink and Adam Nossiter have been honored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for their reporting on the Ebola epidemic. Fink and Nossiter won a silver medal in the Online division of the Kavli Science Journalism Award, which they shared with New York Times colleagues Pam Belluck, Kevin Sack, Daniel Berehulak and the Times graphics team, along with Dan Edge of Frontline. The awards honor distinguished reporting for a general audience by professional journalists.

Two-time Thomas Nast Award-winner Rob Rogers will be honored with the Clifford K. & James T. Berryman Award for Editorial Cartoons by the National Press Foundation in February. “Rogers has a vivid visual style that invites you in. He tackles really heavy issues with a light-handed visual touch,” the judges wrote. Rogers draws for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

2013 Robert Capa Gold Medal Award-winner Tyler Hicks, 2014 John Faber Award-winner Bulent Kilic, and 2014 Olivier Rebbot Award-winner Jérôme Sessini have all been recognized in the Spot News division of this year’s World Photo Awards. Kilic won first place in the single-photo category for his picture of a young woman injured in clashes in Istanbul. Hicks claimed second with a photo of Palestinian boys on a beach killed by an Israeli missile. Sessini claimed first and second place in the multi-photo stories category for his coverage of the crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 and the conflict in Ukraine.

UPDATES

NEW YORK: The New York Times tried a new way of measuring the impact of its content this year: it looked at the total amount of time spent on a story by all readers. OPC Governor Rukmini Kallimachi’s groundbreaking story on systematized rape within ISIS placed in the top 20 for 2015, as did the investigation of the Navy’s Seal Team 6 co-bylined by member John Ismay.

The Columbia Journalism Review named OPC member Martin Smith’s Frontline documentary Inside Assad’s Syria to its Best Journalism list for 2015. CJR writes that the video “ventures into regime-controlled regions of the war-torn country, providing a rare glimpse at daily life on that side of the civil war” and reminding us that “in any conflict, most people are driven by simple motivations of keeping their families safe and lives intact.”

OPC member Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff is the new communications director for Salon Media Group, returning to New York after seven years with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Public Affairs, Office of the Historian. In her spare time, she continues to write about French soccer and basketball, with pieces this fall for Vice Sport and CNN International, and serve as communications consultant for the Sport in the Cold War project.

OPC member Ruth Gruber will have photos on display at the Brooklyn College Library Art Gallery through Feb. 12. Gruber, who recently turned 104, was a pioneering photojournalist. She documented, among other things, the flight of Jewish refugees from Europe in 1944 and life in the Soviet Arctic in the mid-1930s. According to the New York-based International Center of Photography, which organized the exhibit, the images will include “never-before-seen color photographs and vintage prints, made over more than half a century, on four continents, alongside contemporary prints made from her original negatives.” After the exhibit closes in New York it will tour other parts of the country.

The New York Times has offered buyouts to its video staff, and layoffs are possible as part of an ongoing video-desk reorganization, according to Politico Media. The paper is also hiring new video talent and has installed Alex MacCallum, who was previously an assistant managing editor overseeing audience development, to head up the team.

NEW LONDON: OPC Governor Rukmini Callimachi will be the keynote speaker at Connecticut College’s 98th Commencement on May 22, 2016. Callimachi, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, was chosen by a committee of Connecticut College students, faculty and staff. She will receive an honorary degree.

WASHINGTON, DC: National Geographic announced 180 layoffs in November, soon after 21st Century Fox expanded its ownership stake in the company. Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of 21st Century Fox, tweeted that only four of the cuts came at the magazine while the rest were at the National Geographic Society. Fox now owns 73 percent of the company, while the National Geographic Society controls the remaining 27 percent.

OPC member Evan Osnos was invited to appear at the recent National Book Festival. Osnos spoke on the rise of individualism and ambition in China, the subject of his book published earlier this year, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China.

LOS ANGELES: More than 80 Los Angeles Times staffers accepted buyout offers in late November, in an exodus felt throughout the paper. “Nearly every department got hit,” wrote CNN Money, “including metro, national and international desks, as well as sports, obits, food, education, business beats and the editorial page.” The paper’s parent company, Tribune Publishing, had signaled the impending cuts in October; it also owns the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun.

Carol Williams, who shared the 2014 Bob Considine Award with Sergei Loiko for their coverage of the conflict in Ukraine, has accepted one of the early retirement buyouts at the Los Angeles Times. Williams writes that she plans “to stay engaged in international affairs with a focus on Russia” and is also in the process of moving to the Seattle area. The 2014 award was her third from the OPC. Also taking buyouts are former Baghdad bureau chief Tina Susman, who appeared on an OPC panel about female war reporters in 2013, and London bureau chief Henry Chu.

OPC member Rachel Boynton’s 2005 documentary about American campaign tactics in the Bolivian presidential race, Our Brand is Crisis, has inspired a Hollywood drama of the same name. The fictionalized Our Brand is Crisis stars Sandra Bullock and Billy Bob Thornton and was released on Oct. 30 to mixed reviews. If you missed Boynton’s documentary, which gets an impressive 92 percent favorable rating on RottenTomatoes.com, it’s available on Amazon.

NEW ORLEANS: It’s not uncommon for OPC members to win prizes; however, being a prize is considerably rarer. The 2015 New Orleans Film Festival offered a consultation with Simon Kilmurry as part of its prize in the Documentary Features category. The winner was first-time Spanish director Irene Gutiérrez. Kilmurry himself received the OPC’s Edward R. Murrow award earlier this year.

DES MOINES, IOWA: 2012 OPC Lifetime Achievement Award winner Tom Brokaw will headline a key business event in Des Moines just days before the Iowa presidential caucuses. The former NBC News anchor will address the Greater Des Moines Partnership’s annual dinner on Jan. 25.

MOSCOW: 2011 Madeline Dane Ross Award-winner Andrew Higgins is joining the New York Times Moscow bureau as a correspondent. He previously covered the human crisis from Germany and the economic crisis in Greece for the paper. Higgins has been a foreign correspondent for The New York Times since 2012. Before joining the Washington Post in 2009, Higgins worked at The Wall Street Journal, The Independent and Reuters news agency.

HONG KONG: The South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s venerable daily, has been bought by Chinese online giant Alibaba in a move that raises concerns for the paper’s editorial freedom. The English-language paper has a history of reporting on sensitive issues such as political protests and human rights. While Alibaba says it will not interfere with the Post’s operations or censor stories, some analysts have expressed concern over whether the company will soften its China reporting in order to curry favor with the government.

MANILA: OPC member Jaime FlorCruz was recently profiled in The Standard (Philippines), which traced his remarkable launch as a journalist. In 1971, as a 20-year-old business student, FlorCruz went to China for a study tour. While he was abroad, then-President Ferdinand Marcos suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Months later, Marcos would declare martial law. FlorCruz and 14 other student leaders stayed in China rather than face possible arrest at home. He studied Chinese history and learned Mandarin. As China began re-opening to the outside world, his skills came into demand. FlorCruz got hired by Newsweek and went on to become CNN’s Beijing bureau chief and the most senior foreign correspondent in China. FlorCruz retired in 2014 and is now working on his memoirs.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

Barry Schweid, who covered some of the biggest international stories of the 20th century as diplomatic correspondent for the Associated Press, died on Dec. 10 from complications of a neurological condition. He was 83. Schweid wrote about the Camp David talks that resulted in a historic 1977 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. He also chronicled the collapse of the Soviet Union while traveling with Secretary of State James Baker.

New York Times reporter Tom Buckley, who covered Vietnam for the paper and later wrote a book on U.S. relations with Central America, died on Nov. 19 from lung cancer. He was 87. In a nearly 30-year career at the Times, Buckley worked his way up from copy boy to U.N. correspondent and war reporter. He would also cover national and local news and even file book, movie and TV reviews.