People Column

By Trish Anderton

OPC SCHOLARS

2014 Flint winner John Ismay got a front-page byline on a major investigative story in the June 7 New York Times, along with Mark Mazzetti, Nicholas Kulish, Christopher Drew, Serge F. Kovaleski and Sean D. Naylor. The piece takes an in-depth look at Seal Team 6, the Navy unit best known for killing Osama bin Laden and, as the story argues, “one of the nation’s most mythologized, most secretive and least scrutinized military organizations.” The Times pulled together “dozens of interviews” and government documents to build a case that the unit has become “a global manhunting machine with limited outside oversight.”

This has been an exceptional award season for 2006 Schweisberg winner Gregory Johnsen. Along with his BuzzFeed News colleagues, he won the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Coverage of Congress from the National Press Foundation for the story titled “60 Words and A War Without End.” Johnsen also won a Peabody Award for his collaboration with Radiolab on the same topic: the broad, malleable wording of the Authorization of Use of Military Force Act, approved by near-unanimous Congressional vote shortly after the 9/11 attacks, and how its interpretation has expanded military power and secrecy.

Accolades continue for 2009 I.F. Stone scholar Jonathan Jones and his colleagues at ProPublica, PBS Frontline and Rain Media, for “Firestone and the Warlord.” Besides Rain Media’s Marcella Gaviria getting a citation for the OPC’s Edward R. Murrow award this year, the team took first place in the 2014 Investigative Reporters and Editors award in the Large Multiplatform category, won an RFK Journalism Award and were named a finalist in the International Category for a 2015 Gerard Loeb Award. The story examines how Firestone managed to continue operating during the brutal Liberian civil war. The team used diplomatic cables, court documents and accounts from Americans who ran a rubber plantation as Liberia descended into chaos. This was the topic of Jones’s winning essay in 2009. The Loeb Award winners will be announced June 23 at its banquet at Capitale in New York City.

In the same month that 2015 Freedman winner Ben Taub graduated from Columbia School of Journalism, his thesis on the journey from Belgium to Syria and back for a teenage jihadi ran as a cover story in The New Yorker. Ben began his research two years earlier partially funded by a stipend he received as a candidate on The Voice. He joined the OPC even before becoming fellow, having been recruited by OPC Governor Rukmini Callimachi, who won two OPC awards last year. He has an OPC Foundation fellowship in the Reuters bureau in Jerusalem. See page 2 to read Taub’s thoughts and background about his work on the New Yorker story.

Nizar Manek, 2012 I.F. Stone winner, has published his exhaustive investigation of corruption in the Egyptian government in Africa Confidential. His story, co-bylined by Jeremy Hodge, tracks billions of dollars stashed in unaudited government accounts.

AWARDS

OPC member Rebecca Blumenstein, deputy editor-in-chief at The Wall Street Journal, will receive the 2015 Lawrence Minard Editor Award, named in memory of Laury Minard, founding editor of Forbes Global and a former final judge for the Loeb Awards. This award honors excellence in business, financial and economic journalism editing, and recognizes an editor whose work does not receive a byline or whose face does not appear on-air for the work covered.

OPC Second Vice President Abigail Pesta, a freelance journalist, has won a New York Press Club Journalism Award in the Feature Reporting category. Pesta’s story “Who Are You Calling a Bully?” probed the suicide of 12-year old Rebecca Sedwick in Lakeland, Florida and the subsequent prosecution of Katelyn Roman and Guadalupe Shaw for allegedly harassing her. The story, which ran in Cosmopolitan magazine, won a National Headliner Award earlier this year.

OPC Board member Rukmini Callimachi of The New York Times has won a Deadline Club Award from the New York City chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Callimachi’s story “Underwriting Jihad” won the Daniel Pearl Award for Investigative Reporting. The story revealed how Europe funds Islamist terror organizations by paying ransoms for its kidnapped citizens, sometimes under the guise of development aid.

Syrian journalist Mazen Darwish, who has been imprisoned since 2012, has won UNESCO’s Guillermo Cano Press Freedom Prize. Darwish co-founded syriaview.net, an independent news site banned by the government in 2006. He has also served as president of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression. In a press release, UNESCO cited “the work that he has carried out in Syria for more than 10 years at great personal sacrifice, enduring a travel ban, harassment, as well as repeated detention and torture.”

Sheri Fink, a member of the New York Times team that won the 2014 Hal Boyle award for its Ebola coverage, has won a PEN Literary Award for her book about Hurricane Katrina. Five Days at Memorial recounts the critical decisions made at a New Orleans hospital during and after the storm. It has won several other prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Sergei Loiko and Carol Williams of the Los Angeles Times, who won the 2014 Bob Considine Award for their coverage of the conflict in Ukraine, have won the Los Angeles Times Editorial Award for Beat Reporting. The Times said their reportage “takes guts, game – and a career’s worth of knowledge of the region.”

Don Bartletti, part of the Los Angeles Times team that won this year’s Robert Spiers Benjamin award, walked away with the Los Angeles Times Publisher’s prize. The Times said the story he co-reported on the lives of Mexican farm laborers “makes readers confront what they might prefer to ignore.”

Matthieu Aikins, who won the 2014 Ed Cunningham Award along with Sebastiano Tomada, has also been honored with the Livingston Award for international reporting. The Livingston Awards are given to outstanding journalists under the age of 35. They are sponsored by the University of Michigan and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Judges on the Livingston panel include OPC members Dean Baquet and Christiane Amanpour.

UPDATES

Politico has posted a wonderful tribute to the campaign photography skills of longtime OPC member David Hume Kennerly. “I Want to Be With the Circus” – the title is Kennerly’s own expression of his hunger to get behind the scenes – showcases his work over countless elections, from Senator Robert Kennedy flashing the victory sign shortly before being assassinated in Los Angeles, to Barack and Michelle Obama sharing a rare intimate moment on the night of his inauguration. Kennerly’s comments on each photo add fascinating insights into both the images and the candidates they capture.

Simon Kilmurry, co-winner of the OPC’s 2014 Edward R. Murrow Award along with Rachel Boynton, has been appointed Executive Director of the International Documentary Association. Kilmurry previously served as Executive Producer of POV, the PBS documentary series.

OPC Award-winning photographers Marcus Bleasdale and Marcus Bleasdale will travel to seven countries this year to help raise awareness of retinopathy of prematurity, a preventable form of blindness that affects premature babies. The photographers will visit Australia, Fiji, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan and Uganda to document the devastating impact of avoidable blindness. An exhibition of their photographs, Time to See, will be sent around the world starting in late 2015. The effort is sponsored by The Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust and partner Standard Chartered.

OPC member Roy Gutman is the first Western journalist to land an interview with Syrian rebel leader Zahran Alloush. Gutman, working with colleague Mousab Alhamadee, sat down with the Army of Islam commander in Istanbul. He reported that Alloush, who has previously denounced democracy as a corrupt system, struck a far more moderate tone, saying “If we succeed in toppling the regime, we will leave it to the Syrian people to choose the form of state they want.”

NEW ORLEANS: OPC member Dean Baquet delivered the commencement address at his alma mater, St. Augustine High School in New Orleans. “The goal is not to just tell somebody’s story,” he advised journalism students at the school in a pre-graduation chat. “It’s to come as close to telling the truth as you can.” The son of a New Orleans restaurateur, Baquet started his journalism career at the Times-Picayune after attending Columbia University.

NEW YORK: John Corporon, OPC president from 1996 to 1998, who is credited with dramatically improving the club’s finances, reports from the heart of Park Slope, Brooklyn, that at age 86, he is feeling better every day. He has had five surgeries within the past year. “But none of the ailments were life-threatening and a current kidney stone attack is under control,” he reports.

OPC Foundation board member Jim Gaines has been hired to lead content operations at The Atlantic’s branded-content division, Atlantic Re:think. Gaines, a former top executive and editor at Time Inc. who was managing editor of Time, Life and People magazines, has more recently worked as a top editor at Reuters.

BOSTON: OPC member Charles Sennott was featured on the Memorial Day edition of PBS NewsHour, along with coverage from the organization he founded, the GroundTruth Project. Sennott was talking about Foreverstan, GroundTruth’s project on the war in Afghanistan.

JAFFA, ISRAEL: Lea Bouchoucha, who joined the OPC in 2014 while a journalism student at NYU, started a job as an editor at I24 News, an international news channel that broadcasts in French, English and Arabic, in early June. The newsroom is in Jaffa, Israel. Lea, who was born in France, works for I24’s French service.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

Leonard Saffir, who served as OPC president from 1988 to 1990, died Jan. 3 in Lake Worth, Fla. at age 84. Saffir was a foreign correspondent and columnist who founded four newspapers and wrote three books. He reported from New York, Dallas and Tokyo for the International News Service. Saffir was a public relations consultant for Ferdinand Marcos, and developed a strategy that helped Marcos get elected president of the Philippines in 1965. Saffir became disillusioned with the president long before details about Marcos’s graft came to light. In 1988 he wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times titled “Imelda and Freddie Really Took Me In.” Saffir won accolades from the Sigma Delta Chi Professional Journalistic Society for distinguished journalistic achievement, and received multiple awards from the New York Press Association and the Public Relations Society of America. He authored Power Public Relations, How to Get PR to Work for You, Power Public Relations: How to Master the New PR, and PR on a Budget.

Former foreign correspondent Fred Brown died peacefully in his sleep on March 31 in Jamestown, NY. Brown’s first overseas reporting assignment was with the Far East Network, covering Tokyo. He spent the rest of his career with the Voice of America, working in locations ranging from Nigeria to India to Lebanon. In Lagos, Nigeria, he covered the civil war and the unconditional surrender of Biafra, which he described as his first and biggest scoop in his 2013 memoir, My Family, My Life. “A happy man who loved his work, Fred possessed a sharp mind and a keen sense of humor –   laughing particularly hard at his own jokes. He is fondly remembered by friends around the world,” reads his obituary in the Jamestown Post-Journal.

Malawian journalist and press freedom activist Raphael Tenthani, 43, was killed in a car accident outside Blantyre on May 16. Tenthani was a contributor to the Associated Press and BBC. His weekly “Muckraking” column tackled controversial issues. He won several awards, including the United Nations Media award in 2010. Tenthani was once arrested for reporting that then-President Bingu wa Mutharika had moved out of his official residence because he feared it was haunted. “He was fearless in the pursuit of truth and any cause in which he believed,” wrote fellow columnist Thom Chiumia. “He was everything a great journalist should be.”