March 29, 2024

People Column

February 2015

By Susan Kille

OPC SCHOLARS

Frederick Bernas, winner of the 2013 Walter and Betsy Cronkite Scholarship, belongs to a collective of 30 photographers who produced The Warld Cup, an exhibit shown in Brazil and Argentina documenting poverty and hardship in Brazil while the country’s government spent vast sums to stage the World Cup. The collective is seeking partners to produce a book and take the exhibition around the world.

Olivia Crellin, who won the Theo Wilson Scholarship in 2014, has a five-month fellowship with BBC News in Washington. Last summer, Crellin had an OPC Foundation fellowship with The Wall Street Journal in Madrid.

Gregory Johnsen, who received the 2006 David R. Schweisberg Memorial Scholarship, was a guest on the “Charlie Rose” show in January for a panel discussion on Libya, Yemen and the four-year anniversary of the Arab Spring. Johnsen is the author of The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia.

WINNERS

OPC Board member Rukmini Callimachi was a winner of the George Polk Awards in Journalism for 2014. Callimachi, who writes for The New York Times, won the award for international reporting for exposing how European nations funded the Islamic State by secretly paying millions of dollars in ransom for kidnapped citizens. Other awards announced Feb. 16 also had an international focus. Six reporters for The Times won the health reporting award for risking their health and safety while providing the earliest and most reliable coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa:Helene Cooper, Daniel Berehulak, Sheri Fink, Adam Nossiter, Norimitsu Onishi and Ben Solomon. A three-year investigation into international tax dodges won business reporting honors for The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a group of 120 journalists from 58 countries and 42 news organizations, working as part of The Center for Public Integrity. Rania Abouzeid, an Australian-Lebanese, won the foreign reporting award for “The Jihad Next Door,” an authoritative account of the rise of the Islamic State, published online by Politico Magazine. James Verini won the award for magazine reporting for a piece published online by National Geographic on the seeming futility of U.N. intervention in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Garry Trudeau, the creator of the “Doonesbury” comic strip, won the Polk career award.

With six of 14 awards, public broadcasters were again the big winners Jan. 20 when the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards were presented. Perhaps more notable is that Netflix won its first award while broadcast networks received no honors. Two duPont awards went to projects that won OPC honors last year: NPR’s “Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt” and “Sea Change: The Pacific’s Perilous Turn” by The Seattle Times. Other duPont awards for international coverage included Frontline for “Syria’s Second Front” and Netflix for Virunga, a documentary about rangers in the Congo who protect endangered mountain gorillas. Abi Wright, an associate member of the OPC board, administers the awards, which are regarded as the broadcasting equivalent of the Pulitzer Prizes.

Buzzfeed News in January named Joshua Hersh, who was the Middle East correspondent for the Huffington Post, as the site’s second Michael Hastings National Security Reporting Fellow, a one-year appointment given in honor of Hastings, an award-winning journalist killed in a car accident in 2013.

UPDATES

HONG KONG: Being called “an absolute prick” and a “piece of shit” by a former public relations executive elicited a classy response from Keith Bradsher, an OPC member who is Hong Kong bureau chief for The New York Times. In the February issue of Car and Driver, Jason Vine, who worked for Chrysler, Ford and Nissan, said he became friends with most journalists covering the auto industry. “The only ones I didn’t become friends with were assholes – like Keith Bradsher of The New York Times,” Vine said, going on to add the descriptions above. Bradsher responded on the website of media blogger Jim Romenesko that he has been “quietly grateful” to Vine for acknowledging his reporting by telling other journalists, although not him, that Ford engineers referred to a safety feature as “Bradsher bars.” Bradsher said: “If Jason comes through Hong Kong, I’ll certainly invite him to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club and try to buy him a beer.”

PALM BEACH, Fla.: On Jan. 21, Robert Nickelsberg, an OPC Board of Governors member, talked about his nearly 30 years of photographing Afghanistan for Time magazine and other publications at FOTOfusion, an annual conference at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre. Afghanistan: A Distant War, his book about his work in Afghanistan, won the 2013 OPC Olivier Rebbot Award. On Jan. 28, Nickelsberg was a panelist at Boston University during a discussion of the Future of Long-Form Visual Journalism.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif: In an interview with Capital New York posted Jan. 30, Jonathan Dahl explains why he left The Wall Street Journal, where he was editor-in-chief of WSJ.Money magazine and executive director of page one, in October to become managing editor of Ozy, a digital news startup. “I couldn’t resist the challenge,” he said. “No question, The Journal was great to me – it was home for three decades. But from the first, Ozy struck me as utterly new and original. We’re a digital magazine that focuses on fresh trends and people who aren’t getting covered anywhere else. We’re not afraid to go long, to go global. And we’re also not afraid to staff up and build resources, which, sadly, is a huge struggle in my industry these days.”

NEW YORK:
The New Yorker’s move in January from 4 Times Square to One World Trade Center completed the downtown migration of 3,400 Condé Nast editors, writers and advertising executives at 18 magazines. The company occupies 1.2 million square feet from floor 20 through 44. It will soon have a new neighbor. Time Inc., the magazine unit spun off from Time Warner last year, is moving across the street this year to 225 Liberty Street.

Sheila Nevins, an OPC member and president of HBO Documentary Films, was one of three women honored in early February at the fifth annual Athena Film Festival presented by Barnard College’s Athena Center for Leadership Studies and Women and Hollywood. Nevins’ productions have won 47 Emmys, 21 Oscars, and 31 Peabody Awards. Also, she won a personal Peabody for excellence in broadcasting.

Four OPC members are among 150 photographers and 75 editors, curators, gallerists and book publishers offering young photographers two days of free private critiques in April during the third annual New York Portfolio Review. The event is sponsored by The New York Times’ Lens Blog and the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. Santiago Lyon, director of photography for The Associated Press and a former OPC Board of Governors member; Paul Moakley, an OPC Board of Governors member and deputy director of photography at Time; Vaughn Wallace, deputy photo editor at Al Jazeera America; and Jonathan Woods, senior multimedia editor at Time, have agreed to do critiques. Lyon will also speak about building an editorial portfolio.

Lynsey Addario, an OPC member, is a photojournalist known for her work covering conflicts and human rights issues but she is now drawing attention for her writing. An excerpt from It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War, a book published in early February by Penguin Press, was published Feb. 1 in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. In the excerpt, entitled “What Can a Pregnant Photojournalist Cover? Everything,” Addario writes that while pregnant with a son born in 2011, she accepted all assignments except military embeds and hid her pregnancy as long as she could: “I adamantly didn’t want any of my editors or colleagues to know that I was pregnant until I could no longer hide it. I worried about being denied work or treated differently.” Addario received a MacArthur fellowship in 2009 and in 2010 won the OPC’s Olivier Rebbot Award for “Veiled Rebellion: Afghan Women” in National Geographic.

Amar Bakshi, an OPC member pursuing a law degree at Yale University, worked with collaborators in Iran to have his Shared Studios collective stage “Portals,” an art project to foster conversation by providing a “portal” between New York and Tehran. For two weeks in December, people in New York could step inside a customized shipping container at Lu Magnus Gallery and converse with someone in Tehran, while images of each party were projected onto a wall. Text translation was provided. Bakshi, a former journalist who served on the OPC board, said he wants to create a network of these shipping containers around the world.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

Peggy Polk Sullivan, an OPC member who spent 32 years with United Press International, died Jan. 13 at her home in New Orleans. She was 79. Sullivan, known professionally as Peggy Polk, reported on politics, religion and the arts and made headlines herself. While a junior at Radcliffe College, she became the first woman to complete 10 parachute jumps and earn a license from the U.S. Parachute Association. Sullivan joined UPI in Albany, N.Y., and went on to work in Boston, New York, Washington, Moscow, Madrid and Rome, where she spent 18 years as bureau manager and covered Italian politics including the wave of terrorism in the 1980s, wrote about Italian fashion and closely covered the papacies of Paul VI and John Paul II. After leaving UPI in the mid 1990s, she worked for a year
on publications for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and then joined Religion News Service, where she worked exclusively on the Vatican until 2005. In 2006, she married Scott Sullivan, a former Newsweek correspondent who won an OPC award in 1984.

Stuart Loory, a White House and Moscow correspondent who was an early hire at CNN, died Jan. 16 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 82 and suffered from lung cancer. Loory worked in Washington and Moscow in the early 1960s for the New York Herald Tribune, served briefly as a science writer for The New York Times and became White House correspondent for the Los Angeles Times during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, earning a place on Nixon’s “Enemies List.” After leaving the Los Angeles Times, he taught journalism at Ohio State University and was managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. He joined CNN as head of the Washington bureau in late 1980, shortly after the 24-hour news channel went on the air. His credibility and contacts were seen as crucial in getting CNN, which many at the time saw as a dubious undertaking, off the ground. He opened CNN’s Moscow bureau in 1983 and four years later was tapped to lead “World Report,” which gave American viewers a sampling of overseas news broadcasts. He finished his broadcasting career in 1997 as executive vice president of Turner International Broadcasting in Russia and then taught journalism at the University of Missouri, where he edited the magazine Global Journalist. His books included 1968’s The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam, with David Kraslow, a Los Angeles Times colleague.

Jacques Lhuillery, who had served since July 2012 as Tokyo bureau chief of Agence France-Presse, died Jan. 18 at age 61 in France after a battle with cancer. Lhuillery began his tenure with AFP in 1979. Before arriving in Japan, he had postings in Tehran, Madrid, The Hague, Beirut, Lagos and Abidjan. He was celebrated by his colleagues for his passion for journalism and for his excellent imitations of French presidents.

Al Webb, an American reporter awarded a military medal for battlefield heroism while covering the war in Vietnam, died Jan. 25 in Banbury, England. Webb, who was 79, spent most of his career as a reporter, editor and bureau chief for UPI. His death was attributed to complications of pneumonia and diabetes. Webb, Charles Mohr of The New York Times and David Greenway of Time received the Bronze Star for helping to evacuate a gravely wounded Marine during the Tet Offensive in 1968. He covered many major stories, including the civil rights movement in the United States, the early NASA space missions, the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in Guyana. His overseas postings for UPI included London, Brussels, Hong Kong and Beirut. In the early 80s, Webb moved to U.S. News and World Report and returned to London, where he met his wife and settled. He became a British citizen and, according to friends, became a rare American to embrace the game of cricket.

Sandy Socolow, a longtime executive at CBS News, died on Jan. 31 in New York City. He was 86. His sons said the cause was complications of cancer. Socolow, a New York native, began a 30-year career at CBS in 1956 as a writer for the morning news. He soon found himself writing for a midday news program and forming a lifelong bond with its host, Walter Cronkite. Socolow held powerful positions at CBS including co-producer and executive producer of the “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite,” Washington bureau chief and vice president of CBS News, in which he supervised all hard news; but perhaps his biggest role was as liaison to the network’s biggest star. It was a role he continued to play until Cronkite died in 2009, with the two teaming on various projects after Cronkite’s retirement. When Socolow was honored in December with the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society of the Silurians, his former colleagues spoke of his brilliance and described him as the conscience of CBS News.

Arnaud de Borchgrave, a foreign correspondent who became the confidant of world leaders, died Feb. 15 in Washington after a battle with cancer. He was 88. Born a Belgium count, he volunteered during World War II to serve in the British Royal Navy. He later gave up his aristocratic title to become a U.S. citizen in 1957. After the war, he was hired by United Press and became bureau chief in Brussels, succeeding Walter Cronkite. He joined Newsweek in 1950 and spent decades as a correspondent and editor who parachuted into global hotspots, including, by his count, 17 wars. De Borchgrave’s exclusive reports, personal daring and expense accounts were legendary. His back-to-back interviews with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1971 brought one of his five OPC awards. He left Newsweek in 1980 after a disagreement over his coverage of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Next, he co-wrote with Robert Moss, a former journalist with the Economist, two best-selling novels, The Spike and Monimbo. Although he never worked at a newspaper, in 1985 he became editor The Washington Times, which had been recently launched by the
Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, a religious group often referred to as a cult. He retired from The Washington Times in 1991 and became the top executive at the much-diminished United Press International. Subsequently, he became editor at large at the Times and UPI, which was purchased in 2000 by the Unification Church’s news affiliate. In his last column for UPI, dated Dec. 21, 2014, he urged America to detach itself from the problems of the Middle East and instead focus on problems at home.