People Column

By Trish Anderton

OPC SCHOLARS
Congratulations to 2015 Flora Lewis Fellowship winner Makini Brice, who not only had her OPC Foundation fellowship extended in the Reuters bureau in Dakar, but has received a Reuters National Association of Black Journalists fellowship as well. The NABJ program recognizes “rising reporters, recent graduates or business professionals who demonstrate a clear commitment to a career in journalism and an ability to generate story ideas relevant for a Reuters audience, with a focus on multimedia, using text, video and/or graphics.” It will extend her stay for up to an additional nine months.

Devon Haynie, who won the Flora Lewis Fellowship in 2008, is now News Editor, International for U.S. News and World Report. The magazine is creating a new global team focused on news features and magazine-style journalism. In her new role, she’ll be covering international news stories and editing content from freelancers and others on staff. Devon spent her OPC Foundation fellow in the Johannesburg bureau of the Associated Press.

2013 Walter and Betsy Cronkite Scholarship winner Frederick Bernas recently co-bylined a story in The New York Times about a fictional candidate who has touched off a debate over race and politics in Argentina. “Omar Obaca” was invented by an advertising company as a satirical figure, and has become wildly popular. Bernas is working as a freelancer journalist, filmmaker and photographer in Latin America.

2009 Emanuel R. Freedman Scholarship winner Simon Akam is a visiting fellow at the Oxford University Changing Character of War program. He will use his time to work on his book The Changing of the Guard, an examination of the recent evolution of the British Army, to be published by Penguin Random House imprint William Heinemann. Simon spent his OPC fellowship in the Reuters bureau in Istanbul. He worked at The New York Times and subsequently spent several years in West Africa as a correspondent for Reuters and the Economist before joining Newsweek in the UK.

AWARDS

OPC member Marcus Bleasdale is a co-winner of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Fellowship. He was honored for “Financing the Failure of a State,” which documented the turmoil in the Central African Republic and how it is affecting citizens. He shares the award with fellow photographer Mary F. Calvert.

International columnist Mona Eltahawy, who lit the Press Freedom Candle at the 2011 OPC Awards Dinner, was honored at the Women’s Media Awards on Nov. 5. Eltahawy, a freelance writer and commentator on the Middle East, women’s issues and other topics, won the Speaking Truth to Power Award. PBS Newshour co-anchors Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff received the Pat Mitchell Lifetime Achievement Award.

UPDATES

NEW YORK OPC President Marcus Mabry has left The New York Times to lead Twitter’s curated trending news feature, Twitter Moments. He will oversee the U.S. curation team. Twitter describes the new handpicked Moments feature as “the best of what’s happening on Twitter in an instant.”

Mabry announced the news, appropriately, on Twitter. He had been Editor at large at the Times.

OPC Secretary Deidre Depke has joined American Public Media’s “Marketplace.” She will serve as New York Bureau Chief for the popular public radio offering. Depke previously managed a small consultancy working with new media startups and is a former editor of the Daily Beast.

After seven years, former OPC President David Andelman is stepping down as Editor of World Policy Journal. Andelman will become the Journal’s Editor Emeritus and will focus on book projects as well as expanding his speaking engagements. He will also continue in his role on the Board of Contributors of USA Today.

Longtime OPC member Micah Garen and documentary filmmaker Marie-Helene Carleton have finished work on a way for festivals and competitions to use a cloud-based video platform, ScreeningRoom, to host, share and comment on videos during the submission process. ScreeningRoom launched in April this year at the Hot Docs International Documentary Festival in Toronto. The company’s mission is to help build sustainability in the film and journalism community. Future plans include more web-based applications, including community fundraising and micro-payment digital distribution.

Abigail Pesta, Second Vice President of the OPC’s Board of Governors, has inked a deal with HarperCollins imprint Katherine Tegen Books to tell the extraordinary life story of Sandra Uwiringiyimana. As a child in Africa, Uwiringiyimana survived a machete massacre. She later came to America and began photographing her fellow survivors. Now in college in New York, she is becoming a voice for forgotten people around the world. Pesta says “We’ll tell her story in a young adult book that we will aim to get into schools across the country.”

New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. has outlined plans for his succession. Sulzberger, 64, told the paper’s employees during his annual “State of The Times” speech that a deputy publisher would be named within two years. Sulzberger underlined that his family is “deeply committed to The Times for the long term,” according to CNN Money. New York Magazine reported in August that there were three contenders for the job: Sulzberger’s son Arthur Gregg “A.G.” Sulzberger; his nephew David Perpich, 38; and Sam Dolnick, 34, the son of Sulzberger’s cousin.

VICE News has launched its fourth European website. VICE News Italy joins the company’s existing operations in the U.K., France and Spain. Editor-in-Chief Jason Mojica tells the Guardian that further expansions are planned in the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil and Australia before the end of the year. “These aren’t outposts for American journalists to go work out of,” Mojica adds. “They are local teams who know the lay of the land and are surfacing true enterprise journalism and stories that are generally unreported in mainstream media.” Things are busy at VICE: it’s launching four new verticals in 2016 – health, money, travel and gaming – according to TheMediaBriefing.com, and a U.S. TV network plus a dozen European ones, CNBC reports.

VICE has hired OPC member Alberto Riva to be its U.S. Managing Editor. He will be based in Brooklyn. Riva had previously been senior world news editor at International Business Times, where he supervised reporters and freelancers around the globe and helped coordinate content between the IBT and Newsweek after the latter’s purchase in 2013.

Time magazine has promoted OPC member Bryan Walsh from foreign editor to international editor. Walsh told Politico he was focusing on “trying to integrate the international edition with the brand as a whole” and “trying to figure out how we can best grow our audience globally.” He added that the magazine is expanding its bureau in India to produce content for the large numbers of English speakers there.

BOSTON: OPC member Aaron Schachter, who shared the 2014 Lowell Thomas Award with Marine Olivesi, is leaving Public Radio International’s “The World” for a post at the network’s parent company, WGBH Boston. Schachter will serve as executive producer and editor in WGBH Radio’s expanding newsroom.

ATLANTA: OPC member Lynsey Addario gave a sold-out talk at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in late October, where some of her photos are also on display in the “Women of Vision: National Geographic Photographers on Assignment” exhibit. The talk was part of the Atlanta Celebrates Photography festival.

CBS News correspondent Lara Logan drew a standing room only crowd for her featured address at the Radio Show in Atlanta on Sept. 30. Logan recently signed a new two-year deal with CBS News, according to the New York Post. She is still battling to recover from injuries she suffered in a sexual assault while covering the Tahrir Square uprisings in Egypt in 2011, and was hospitalized earlier this year. Logan and her crew won the 2006 David Kaplan Award for their reporting from Ramadi, Iraq.

BERLIN: Berlinica Publishing, founded by OPC member Eva Schweitzer, is bringing out a new title in December. Leipzig! One Thousand Years of German History celebrates the “city of books and music,” where Martin Luther debated the future of Christianity and J.S. Bach composed cantatas. The author is Leipzig novelist and tour guide Sebastian Ringel.

OPC member Anders Melin’s recent Bloomberg story on the $32 million pension payout that is likely coming to Martin Winterkorn, the disgraced former head of Volkswagen, was widely cited by other media outlets. Winterkorn, Germany’s second-highest paid CEO, stepped down in September after the stunning revelation that the company had outfitted millions of its diesel cars with software designed to fool emissions tests.

OPC member Gail Edmondson began a new job Oct. 1 as global editor at the management consulting firm Bain & Company. The position is based in Berlin. Edmondson was formerly a foreign correspondent at BusinessWeek.

LISBON, PORTUGAL: Dennis Redmont, an OPC member, has succeeded in declassifying the Political Police dossier compiled on him when he was an AP foreign correspondent under the dictatorship of Portugal’s Antonio Salazar. He wrote about his file, and the anti-government activists he covered in those years, in a story for Politico.com. “The Portuguese have not forgotten about their past,” Salazar writes. “They endlessly debate the dark days of the Salazar “Estado Novo” in their now uncensored media – like the mournful national Fado music that echoes in the country’s heart.”

LONDON: Francesco Guerrera, former global finance editor at The Wall Street Journal, will join Politico Europe as associate editor and chief financial correspondent. Politico launched its European arm last spring, and plans to roll out a financial services news product early next year to tie together coverage of EU politics and regulatory policy with the world of finance.

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA: The McClatchy newspaper company is closing its remaining foreign bureaus in Beijing, Mexico City, Istanbul and Berlin, and reorganizing its Washington, DC bureau, it announced on Oct. 12. “Our foreign correspondents, many of our most veteran reporters, will return to the U.S. to play prominent roles at home,” the company said in a memo. The Washington operation will “place most of its emphasis on regional stories and political coverage.”

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO, CALIFORNIA: Robert Nickelsberg, an OPC Board of Governors member, is known for his photographs of conflicts in places like Kashmir, Iraq, Sri Lanka, India and Afghanistan. But recently he documented a more intimate struggle: his father’s death at home in California. The photos ran on the Al Jazeera America website along with Nickelsberg’s comments and those of his father’s hospice nurses. Nickelsberg expresses admiration for the hospice workers, noting how well they work as a team and quoting their insights on death and dying.

WASHINGTON, DC: The National Journal will cut 25% of staff and reorganize into a paid subscription service, Atlantic Media has announced. Some of the departing staffers will go to The Atlantic, which is expanding and absorbing some of the Journal’s functions. The company had already gone digital-only with the 46-year-old magazine earlier this year, cancelling its print edition.

OPC member Sandy Ciric sat on the judging panel for the 2015 Women Photographers of Washington exhibit, which debuted at D.C.’s FotoWeek in early November. The show, which features 26 images on women’s issues, will later make the rounds of universities and galleries across the United States.

BEKAA VALLEY, LEBANON: OPC member Alessandria Masi of the International Business Times wrote an interesting story in early November about Hezbollah’s non-denominational military unit. The Saraya al-Muqawama, or Resistance Brigades, gives Sunnis and Christians a way to fight alongside Hezbollah’s Shiites. “Lebanon is my country… I am patriotic. I wanted to join the resistance and Hezbollah came by and they offered the ideology of resistance,” explains one brigade member. A Hezbollah recruiter says enrollments are rising due to concerns about the strength of Islamic State in the region.

TEL ALO, SYRIA: OPC member Roy Gutman probed a new set of U.S. allies in Syria and found their loyalties mixed and their priorities often poorly aligned with the Obama administration’s goals. The administration has recruited a local tribal militia and a Kurdish force to help roust Islamic State from its home base in Raqqa, Syria. Gutman found the groups downplayed the importance of Raqqa and wanted to pursue their own agendas, including fighting Wahabi Islam and capturing an unrelated stretch of land that is strategically important to the Kurds. The differences in goals, Gutman writes, “are the latest sign that Obama administration decisions to fix one problem could have long-term and unintended implications.”

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

Susan Topping, daughter of longtime OPC member Seymour Topping, has died of cancer at age 64. An actor and dancer, Topping performed in Joseph Papp’s theater company and other companies in New York and Los Angeles. She was also a lighting designer, choreographer, director and writer, and was well known for her animal rescue work. “She was a very special person and a real fighter,” Seymour told TheMountainMall.com.

BBC and ITN reporter Sue Lloyd-Roberts died Oct. 13 at age 64. Lloyd-Roberts was known for going undercover in dangerous locations. According to the Guardian, she was the first journalist into Homs, Syria in 2011, having herself smuggled in under a false ID and pretending to be deaf and mute. She continued to report from China after being given a seven-year sentence in absentia for a story she did on the human organ trade in 1994. “She went to dangerous places to give a voice to people who otherwise would not be heard,” BBC director general Tony Hall told the paper.