People Column

By Randy Fung and Chad Bouchard

OPC SCHOLARS

John Ismay, 2014 Flint winner, is now the Veterans & Military Issues Reporter at KPCC Public Radio in Los Angeles. Ismay had an OPC Foundation fellowship with GlobalPost. He was also a contributor to the C.J. Chivers’ story in The New York Times of American military exposure to chemical weapons in Iraq.

Nizar Manek, winner of the 2012 I.F. Stone award, will now be at the Center for International Development at Harvard University. With a keen interest in Africa, he will be focusing on Egypt’s automotive sector. Manek was previously a Marjorie Deane Fellow at the Financial Times in London and Barron’s in New York. Manek is a frequent contributor to Africa Confidential.

Michael Miller, former OPC foundation fellow at the AP bureau in Mexico City, has taken on the Morning Mix team at the Washington Post. Michael won several Society of Professional Journalist Awards for his work the last five years with the Miami Times.

WINNERS

Heidi Levine became the first inaugural winner of the Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award for her work in Gaza. The award, which was in honor of Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photographer Niedringhaus, who was murdered by Afghan police in Afghanistan in April 2014.

Four-time recipient of the OPC’s Thomas Nast award, Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher, cartoonist for the Baltimore Sun and The Economist, received two awards in less than one month. He received Europe’s Grand Prix Award for cartoon of the year, and the 2015 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Kal has been an editorial artist for nearly four decades and his cartoons are widely distributed by CartoonArts International and the New York Times Syndicate.

Photographer Mads Nissen of the Danish newspaper Politiken received the World Press Photo of the Year 2014 for his image of a gay couple during an intimate moment in St Petersburg, Russia, where lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people live under the shadow of discrimination and harassment. The photo also won first prize in the Contemporary Issues category.

Syrian lawyer and human rights activist Mazen Darwish has been named as World Press Freedom Hero by the International Press Institute (IPI). Darwish has defended media freedom Syria for more than a decade, and carried out his work over the last three years from prison. The award was presented on March 28 in Yangon, Myanmar during IPI’s annual World Congress.

UPDATES

HOLLYWOOD, Calif.: Steven Spielberg will direct Jennifer Lawrence in a biopic based on the memoir of OPC member and war photographer Lynsey Addario. Addario won the OPC’s Olivier Rebbot Award in 2010. She also received the MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, and was part of a New York Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for International Reporting for work in Waziristan.

SEATTLE, Wash.: Three-time OPC Award winner Rajiv Chandresakaran, has announced he will leave the Washington Post to launch a startup in Seattle, in partnership with Starbucks, that will produce long-form documentaries focused on social impact. Chandresakaran recently co-authored a book about veterans, For the Love of Country, with Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz.

NEW YORK: Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent John F. Burns has retired after 40 years at The New York Times. Burns started reporting from his first overseas post in South Africa in 1976. He has since filed stories from bases around the world, including Moscow, Bosnia, China, Afghanistan and Iraq. He served as head of the Baghdad bureau during the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. During his career, he has written more than 3,000 articles and has won two Pulitzer Prizes for International Reporting.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

Ned Colt, a former NBC News foreign correspondent who covered Asia and other regions around the world, died after a stroke on Feb. 12 at age 58. He was instrumental in the networks coverage of the Iraq War, and was kidnapped for three days near Fallujah during his stint there. After leaving NBC in 2009, Colt worked at the United Nations reporting on the Syrian refugee crisis and with the International Rescue Committee. He joined NBC News in 1996 and worked in London, Beijing and Hong Kong. Colt is survived by wife, Cathy Robinson.

Maria Golovnina, Reuters bureau chief for Afghanistan and Pakistan, died in Islamabad on Feb. 23 at age 34. Golovnina joined Reuters in Tokyo in 2001 and worked in London, Singapore and Seoul. She was based in Russia from 2002 to 2005, and later became chief correspondent in Central Asia. She reported from Afghanistan during the 2009 presidential election and reported from Iraq. Golovnina moved to the London editing desk in 2010, and covered the war in Libya in 2011. She was found unconscious in Reuters’ Islamabad office, but could not be revived.