People Column

By Susan Kille

OPC SCHOLARS

Frederick Bernas, winner of the 2013 Walter and Betsy Cronkite Scholarship, was a producer for Seizing Solar Power, a December story for Al Jazeera English’s Witness series about one woman’s efforts to harness solar energy in rural Argentina. Bernas had an OPC Foundation internship in The Associated Press bureau in Buenos Aires.

In a New Yorker piece in December, Elizabeth Dickinson, who won the 2007 Harper’s Magazine Scholarship honoring the memory of I.F. Stone, considered whether Oman’s institutions are strong enough to survive Sultan Qaboos bin Sa’id, the country’s ailing long-time ruler of Oman. Dickinson, who is based in the Arabian Peninsula, is part of Deca Stories, a new writers’ cooperative modeled on photo cooperatives – particularly the member-owned Magnum agency – that changed the rules of photojournalism.

Two OPC Foundation scholars working with GlobalPost have received special funding for reporting projects in 2015. Lauren Bohn, based in Istanbul and winner of the 2012 H.L. Stevenson Fellowship, will be reporting a yearlong series on women and minority rights in the post-Arab spring through support from the Ford Foundation. Jacob Kushner, who is based in Nairobi and won the 2013 Nathan S. Bienstock award, will take on a series of investigative reports with the help of a small team of local African journalists through the support of the Galloway Family Foundation.

Greg Johnsen, winner of the 2006 David R. Schweisberg Memorial Scholarship, and two of his colleagues at Buzzfeed were awarded the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress by the National Press Club. Johnsen now works at BuzzFeed News’s foreign desk and is based in Istanbul.

WINNERS

Dennis Redmont, an OPC member who is a veteran foreign correspondent and news executive, was awarded a Life Career Achievement Argil prize Dec. 12 by the European Union’s office in Rome and the national associations of Journalists of Italy. Redmont was honored for his four decades of work with the AP, reporting from 80 countries, followed by a teaching career at Graduate School of Journalism and Public Broadcasting at Perugia University, and also for his development of the Young Leaders program in Italy and the United States in his capacity as head of Media and Development at the Council for the United States and Italy. The citation read: “he trained a generation of professionals during 15 years of teaching, acting as a great mentor and communicator, as well as reporter and correspondent.” Redmont served four times as president of Italy’s Foreign Press Association. Other honorees this year included Giuseppe Tornatore, the director of Cinema Paradiso, for his role in spreading Italian culture.

UPDATES

SEATTLE: George Bookman, who joined the OPC in 1958 as a financial reporter for Time magazine, turned 100 on Dec. 22. He celebrated the landmark during the preceding weekend with family and friends here, where he moved last year to be close to his son. The OPC was among those who sent best wishes and he responded by wishing club members “the very best in the New Year.” Bookman had a remarkable career in journalism and public relations while generously giving time to the OPC and other organizations working to improve journalism. He headed OPC’s Admissions Committee for many years and served on its Board and its Freedom of the Press Committee. He is a former president of the Deadline Club, appeared in the Financial Follies of the New York Financial Writers’ Association, belonged to Sigma Delta Chi and is a long-time member of the Silurians. As he was turning 94, he finished his autobiography, Headlines, Deadlines and Lifelines, which was published in 2009.

SANTA FE, N.M.: After a December item in the New York Post reported that Time Inc. was cutting ties to Richard Stolley by allowing his contract as senior editorial adviser to expire, the past president of the OPC emailed from his Santa Fe home that ties are continuing. “My plans are still a little vague, but one thing I will continue doing is writing stories for the Time Inc. magazines,” he said. This year he was published in Real Simple and Time and a third piece is to run in Fortune. Stolley was named senior editorial adviser upon his retirement in 1993 as Time Inc.’s editorial director. Stolley joined the company in 1953 as a reporter and went on to serve as assistant managing editor and managing editor of Life, founding editor of People and director of special projects for Time Inc. He serves on the Medill Board of Advisers at Northwestern University, his alma mater, and is on the faculty of the Yale Publishing Course. “As for Time Inc.,” he wrote in his email, “I had a wonderful career there and wish it only the best in these difficult times.”

JERSEY CITY, N.J.: After 97 years in New York, Forbes began a new chapter in December by moving about 350 employees to a new glass tower here from the 60 Fifth Avenue building in Greenwich Village it occupied for 49 years. Forbes had sold its former headquarters in 2010 to New York University and had signed a five-year lease that expired in December. In July, a consortium of Asian investors had the winning bid to buy a majority stake in Forbes Media.

LEXINGTON, Va.: “News Ethics in a Time of Terror and Violence” was the topic of a keynote address by Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews, an OPC member, in November at Washington and Lee University’s 58th Institute in Ethics in Journalism. In March 2001, Ciprian-Matthews was named vice president of CBS News, where she coordinates all day-to-day news coverage, both foreign and domestic. Her previous posts at CBS News include foreign editor, senior editor for CBS Evening News and senior producer for foreign coverage. She has also worked for CNN and National Public Radio’s Spanish-language news program, Enfoque Nacional.

VIENNA: Barbara Trionfi on Jan. 1 became executive director of the International Press Institute. Trionfi, a Milan native who holds degrees in Chinese studies and international relations, replaces Alison Bethel McKenzie, who had been executive director since 2009. McKenzie worked at The Boston Globe and was Washington Bureau chief for The Detroit News, executive editor at Legal Times and managing editor of the Nassau Guardian, in the Bahamas. In 2008, she spent a year as a Knight International Journalism Ghanaian helping journalists to improve their reporting skills in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election.

David A. Andelman, a past president of the OPC, reports the publication of a new Centenary Edition of his most recent book, A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today. Sir Harold Evans, the former editor of The Sunday Times, has written a new foreword. Andleman, editor-in-chief of World Policy Journal, in his updated introduction writes about lessons for today’s world, pointing to the Middle East fracturing along lines that should have been seen a century in the past. “The lessons are as vital today to President Obama as they should have been to his predecessor 100 years ago,” Andleman said.

Cam Simpson, an OPC member who is a senior international correspondent for Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek, is among the journalists interviewed in Secrets of Prize-Winning Journalism 2014, an e-book from the Poynter Institute containing interviews with the winners of some of the most prestigious journalism contests of 2014. Simpson discussed his work on Apple’s supply chain, which won a Gerald Loeb Award and the Joe and Laurie Dine Award from the OPC.

As a Christmas gift to his Twitter followers, Quentin Sommerville, the BBC’s Middle East correspondent, posted a link to a YouTube video that shows the risk of standing near 8½ tons of burning heroin, opium and hashish. High on the fumes, Sommerville repeatedly dissolves into giggles and is unable to finish the report. The video, entitled “Don’t Inhale,” was recorded four years ago but not previously released.

For almost a century, entries for the Pulitzer Prize had one major requirement: the project had to be printed in a newspaper. Since digital-only news websites became eligible in 2008, ProPublica, Politico and The Huffington Post have won Pulitzers. In December, the Pulitzer board agreed to allow online and print magazines that meet certain criteria to enter investigative reporting and feature writing categories. The board also decided to allow news organizations when nominating their own employees to include journalists who belong to a news partner that do not qualify to compete for the prizes. For example, this would allow a newspaper to include a television correspondent who contributed to a project. Mike Pride, Pulitzer Prize administrator, said the changes acknowledge shifts in the news industry.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

Matthew Franjola, a reporter and photographer for the AP who was among the last Americans in Saigon as it fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975, died Jan. 1 in Hartford, Conn. He was 72 and died after a long illness. Franjola, who spoke Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian languages, went to South Vietnam to work for a war supplies company as U.S. military involvement began escalating. He met journalists and soon became a stringer for the AP. David Hume Kennerly, an OPC member who worked for UPI in Vietnam, told the AP that Franjola’s fluency in Vietnamese saved their lives. Franjola overheard South Vietnamese soldiers speaking among themselves that they would leave the two Americans pinned down as Vietcong fighters approached. “That information led us to get out,” said Kennerly, who later became White House photographer for President Gerald Ford.

Richard C. Hottelet, the last surviving “Murrow Boy,” died Dec. 17 at his home in Wilton, Conn. He was 97. “Richard C. Hottelet was the ultimate CBS News reporter,” Jeff Fager, CBS News chairman and executive producer of 60 Minutes, said in a statement from CBS. “He was one of the true gentleman reporters, a real ‘Murrow boy,’ an elegant combination of reporter and storyteller.” The Murrow Boys were a group of celebrated radio journalists working for CBS during World War II under the direction of the legendary Edward R. Murrow. Hottelet, who covered the D-Day invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, had a distinguished 40-year career covering international news for CBS, including 25 years as United Nations correspondent. Hottelet was among the more than two dozen contributors to As We See Russia by Members of the Overseas Press Club of America, a book published in 1948 by E.P. Dutton & Co., with an introduction by Robert Considine, then president of the OPC.

An aftermath of combat reporting may have contributed to the death of Dominic Di-Natale, who covered international news for Fox News and was found dead on Dec. 10 in Jefferson County, Colo., after an apparent suicide. He was 43. Ernesto Londoño, a member of The New York Times editorial board, wrote a column about his friendship with Di-Natale and what the correspondent had told friends about a progressive neurological illness that included seizures, blurred vision, temporary memory loss, persistent headaches and a bleak prognoses. Di-Natale had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in October 2012 and began quietly seeking treatment before noticing other ailments. A brain scan ordered by a neurologist, Londoño said, “indicated that he had brain damage that may have been caused by concussions he suffered following a mortar attack in northern Iraq in 2009 and a bullet that ricocheted off his helmet in Afghanistan in 2011.” Londoño, a former correspondent in the Middle East for The Washington Post, said Di-Natale “was happiest in war zones, and often restless in the United States.” Di-Natale reported from Osama bin Laden’s compound after bin Laden was killed and from Egypt’s Tahrir Square during the 2011 uprising against President Hosni Mubarak. Over Thanksgiving, he reported from Ferguson, Mo., where white police officer Darren Wilson killed unarmed teenager Michael Brown. He resigned from Fox News on Nov. 30.