People Column

By Trish Anderton

AWARDS

OPC members Felix Golubev and Simcha Jacobovici have won the Canadian Association of Journalists Prize for their documentary, “Tales from the Organ Trade.” The film, which won the OPC’s Edward R. Murrow award last year, shows how a kidney is sold on the illegal organ market and reaches a transplant recipient. Along the way, it challenges assumptions about the ethics of the organ trade. Golubev and Jacobovici were honored along with Ric Esther Bienstock, also an OPC member.

OPC member Jerome Delay has won an Associated Press Media Editors Award for his photograph of two young refugee girls from the Central African Republic. “Once again, we see innocent children amid conflict,” the judges said. “But we also see hope. We see that even amid bleak circumstances, friendship blooms.” Delay is AP’s chief photographer for Africa. He has won or shared the OPC’s John Faber Award three times.

OPC members Gerard Ryle and Rod Nordland have been honored with SOPA Awards from The Society of Publishers in Asia. Ryle won the Excellence in Explanatory Reporting award in Group B for “People’s Republic of Offshore.” The investigative story explored leaked documents to shed light on the hidden offshore holdings of China’s elite. Nordland received an Honorable Mention in the Group A Excellence in Human Rights Reporting award for “The Ballad of Zakia and Mohammad,” the story of an Afghan couple facing death threats for attempting to marry against her family’s wishes.

The US Marine Corps Correspondents Association has posthumously honored OPC member Georgette Louise “Dickey” Chapelle with the 2015 Brig. Gen. Robert L. Denig Sr. Distinguished Service Award. Chapelle got her start as a war photographer in Okinawa and Iwo Jima in World War II, and then covering the Marines in Vietnam in the early 1960s, often traveling with the troops. The Milwaukee Press Club inducted Chapelle into its Hall of Fame on Oct. 24.

2010 David Kaplan Award winner Richard Engel has won the Fred Friendly First Amendment Award from Quinnipiac University. The award, named for the former CBS News president, honors defenders of free speech. “Fred used to say that the job of the journalist is to explain complicated stories,” Friendly’s widow, Ruth, told Engel. “That’s what you do, Richard. You illuminate and elucidate the news, at times risking your life.”

The late CBS News correspondent Bob Simon was also honored at Quinnipiac’s 22nd annual Fred Friendly First Amendment Award luncheon. Simon was recognized with the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award. “We all think of him as the quintessential foreign correspondent,” said Jeff Fager, executive producer of 60 Minutes, who accepted the award on behalf of Simon’s family. “He wasn’t seeking the spotlight. He thought of himself as just a regular reporter. He never inserted himself into the story.” Simon died in a car crash in February in New York. Among his many awards was the OPC’s President’s Award for lifetime achievement, which he received in 2014.

UPDATES

OPC member and former OPC Bulletin columnist Susan Kille is on the waiting list for a lung transplant at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center as she continues battling a rare lung disease. Kille left her part-time job at The New York Times in January due to her health issues. “Should I win this lottery and get a transplant, I could have a different and improved life for some years ahead,” she writes. Please join us in wishing Susan the best of luck in her quest for recovery.

NEW YORK: OPC board member Peter S. Goodman wrote a Modern Love column for The New York Times on July 9. The piece deals with how he and his wife, Deanna Fei, have navigated challenges – first, the demands of his career as a foreign correspondent and hers as a writer, and then the experience of having a premature baby with significant health needs. His wife’s book, Girl in Glass, has just been published. It’s about the health struggles of their child, Mila, and the surrounding political and social issues. Mila’s birth made national headlines when AOL CEO Tim Armstrong referred to her as a “distressed baby” and blamed her for increasing the company’s health costs. Happily, Goodman, his wife and nearly three-year-old Mila are all doing well now.

New York Times columnist and OPC member Roger Cohen is moving from London back to New York this month. Cohen, who was born in London, moved to Europe to work on his recently-published memoir, The Girl from Human Street, which was featured during an OPC book night in January.

OPC Board of Governors member Martin Smith’s latest documentary aired on PBS’s Frontline on May 26. Obama at War examines how a president who pledged to extract the U.S. from military conflicts has nonetheless found his administration mired in them. Newsweek called the film “first-rate,” adding that it was “crisply written, reported and produced.”

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

Marlene Sanders, a trailblazing television journalist for ABC and CBS, died of cancer on July 14 at the age of 84. Sanders became the first woman to anchor a network newscast when she filled in for Ron Cochran in 1964 at ABC, where she worked for 14 years. She was also the first female television journalist to report from Vietnam during the war in 1966. She is the mother of CNN and New Yorker journalist Jeffrey Toobin, who wrote on his Facebook page the “she informed and inspired a generation. Above all, though, she was a great Mom.” Sanders co-authored Waiting for Prime Time: The Women of Television News. She taught at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and New York University.

Former Associated Press foreign correspondent Stevenson Jacobs, 37, died on June 8 in New York of an apparent heart attack. Jacobs covered political unrest in Haiti in the mid-2000s following the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Before that, he wrote for the AP in Jamaica and served as an editor and reporter in Puerto Rico. “He was kind-hearted, hard-working and people trusted him enough to tell him their most intimate stories,” said Paisley Dodds, a former AP Caribbean news editor, as quoted by the AP. Jacobs was a partner and head of business development at ShearLink Capital at the time of his death.

Dick O’Regan, a longtime correspondent in Europe for the Associated Press, died in Geneva on June 1 at the age of 95. O’Regan got his start working for newspapers in Britain as a teenager, according to the AP. He decided to move to the U.S. during the early part of World War II, and during the voyage he saw a Nazi U-Boat torpedo a British Navy ship. He wrote a story and offered it to the Philadelphia Bulletin, which not only ran the piece but offered him a job. After a stint at the paper and another at the United Press in New York, he signed on with the AP and was sent to Germany to cover the aftermath of the war. He advanced to bureau chief in Vienna and later Frankfurt, where he oversaw news and business in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Eastern Europe and the Balkans. He eventually became director of AP operations in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

Longtime Associated Press reporter and editor Laura Myers died on June 19 at age 53. Myers grew up in Nevada and launched her career at the Reno Gazette-Journal in 1984. She began working for the AP in 1988, eventually becoming a top member of the editorial team. Myers was one of three senior editors in charge of war coverage during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. When not working as a journalist, Myers traveled extensively and pursued humanitarian activities, training journalists at Arabic and French-language newspapers in Algeria and building houses with Habitat for Humanity in Uganda and Mongolia. “She put her career on hold for years at a time to help the needy,” said former AP Washington bureau chief Sandy Johnson.

Journalist and author Donald Neff died in York, Pennsylvania on May 10 at the age of 84. Neff began his journalism career in York in 1954. He joined the Los Angeles Times in 1960, working as a Tokyo correspondent, and then moved to Vietnam to cover the war for Time magazine. During his 14 years at Time, he served as bureau chief in Houston, Los Angeles, Jerusalem and New York. He wrote numerous books, including a trilogy about the Arab-Israeli conflicts of 1956, 1967 and 1973. In a review of his Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy Towards Palestine and Israel Since 1945, Foreign Affairs magazine wrote: “Neff succeeds in showing the intensity of the political debates in the bureaucracy and the broader public arena. Even those who disagree with Neff will have to acknowledge the thoroughness of his research.”

Veteran CBS Radio correspondent David Jackson, 70, passed away July 2 at his home in Kula, Hawaii. Jackson covered some of the biggest international news stories of his time. He was on the scene during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989; he was also present when Pope John Paul II was shot in 1981, and in Germany when the American hostages being held in Iran were released in 1981. “He helped CBS News deliver the best broadcast journalism in the world,” read the letter announcing his departure from CBS in 1999.