March 29, 2024

People Column

May 2015

May 2015
By Randy Fung and Chad Bouchard

OPC SCHOLARS

2008 H.L. Stevenson winner Mayank Bubna has been hired to work for the Joint Operations Center in the UN Mission in South Sudan, a small team that plans military and humanitarian operations across the country, and is the information hub for the mission. Since his OPC Foundation win in 2008, Bubna has worked for defense think tanks in New Delhi, the advocacy group Enough Project on his first trip to South Sudan, an academic appointment in Switzerland,  and Small Arms Survey, among others in Afghanistan. He continues to freelance.

Jeff Roberts, 2010 Reuters Fellowship winner, was named a 2015-2016 Knight-Bagehot Fellow. Now covering technology and policy for Fortune Magazine, Roberts also has worked for GigaOm, paidContent and Reuters. He had an OPC Foundation fellowship in Paris. Roberts has a law degree from McGill University and a master’s from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The Knight-Bagehot Fellowship provides full tuition and a $55,000 stipend for the nine-month program that involves graduate courses at Columbia’s schools of business, law and international and public affairs.

Yale University has taken note that Fritz Beebe Fellowship winner Alexander Saeedy will soon embark for Brussels, where he will work as a foreign correspondent for the Reuters bureau after his graduation from the school this spring with a B.A./M.A. in history. “Larry Martz took me out to lunch, and we discussed the future of journalism,” Saeedy told Yale News in an interview about the fellowship. “The whole event just made me feel like I was making a big leap into adulthood, being treated as someone who writes and thinks about the world.” Saeedy was a staff writer for the Yale Herald starting in his freshman year. In his winning essay for the fellowship, he explored the growth of low cost air carriers in Europe and explained why there hasn’t been a similar growth in the United States.

Derek Kravitz, 2014 I.F. Stone winner, is one of three co-authors of the Columbia Journalism Review’s analysis piece critiquing Rolling Stone’s story about an alleged rape on the University of Virginia campus. Reporters from other media raised doubts about the plausibility of the story soon after its publication and the magazine retracted it. Rolling Stone then contacted Columbia about conducting an investigation into what had gone wrong. Kravitz and co-writers Sheila Coronel and Steve Coll found that the magazine allowed avoidable “failures of reporting, editing and supervision.”

Jonathan Jones, who won the 2009 I.F. Stone scholarship, along with his colleagues at ProPublica, PBS Frontline and Rain Media, won the 2014 Investigative Reporters and Editors award in the Large Multiplatform category for “Firestone and the Warlord,” which also received an Edward R. Murrow citation this year. 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 IRE Awards, which honor the best in investigative journalism, will be presented at the 2015 IRE Conference in Philadelphia on Saturday, June 6.

WINNERS

OPC Second Vice President Abigail Pesta, a freelance journalist, won a National Headliner Award for her reporting in Cosmopolitan magazine. Her award for “magazine feature writing by an individual on a variety of subjects” recognizes work in three of her stories: “Who Are You Calling a Bully,” “I’m Still Alive” and “From Grad School to Prison.” The first is an investigation of a tragedy in Florida: A girl leapt from a tower to her death, and two middle-school girls were arrested and charged as felons for alleged bullying. The second is about a young woman who survived a campus shooting and became a campus police officer at the same school where she nearly died. The third is about a young woman who was sent to Rikers Island, accused of assaulting an officer at an Occupy protest, when she says the officer assaulted her.

OPC member Sheila Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films, won CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s 2015 Journalistic Achievement Award. As an executive producer or producer, she has received 28 primetime Emmy Awards and 32 News and Documentary Emmys. Nevins was part of a team that won the 2013 Edward R. Murrow Award for the documentary “Tales from the Organ Trade.” She has supervised the production of more than 1000 documentary films and won the first George Foster Peabody award for “She’s Nobody’s Baby,” produced with Ms. Magazine.

The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan has announced results from its inaugural FCCJ Freedom of the Press Awards. The club released results on May 3 to coincide with World Press Freedom Day. Awards honored work in categories including the Japan Investigative Journalism Awards, Friend of the Free Press, Publication of the Year, Fallen Hero and Lifetime Achievement. To see winners, watch videos from the ..and read more details about the awards, check the club’s website at fccj.or.jp.

The New York Times staff that won this year’s Hal Boyle Award from the OPC also won the Pulitzer in the International Reporting category for “vivid human stories” in its coverage of Ebola in Africa. Ned Parker of Reuters was a finalist along with a team from his agency for reports on Iraq and the rise of Islamic State. Feature Photography honors went to Daniel Berehulak, a freelance photographer for The New York Times, for his photographs of the Ebola epidemic. 2014 John Faber Award winner Bulent Kilic, of Agence France-Presse, was a finalist for the award for his photographs of Kurds fleeing Islamic State attacks in Iraq. Tyler Hicks, the 2013 Robert Capa Gold Medal Award winner, was a finalist for the Breaking News Photography Award, along with New York Times colleagues Sergey Ponomarev and Wissam Nassar, for coverage of conflict in Gaza. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch won the award for capturing images of outrage in Ferguson, Missouri.

Three OPC Award winners won accolades in the Spot News category in the 2015 World Press Photo Contest. Bulent Kilic landed First Prize Singles for a photo of a young girl who was wounded during clashes in Istanbul, Turkey. He also won Third Prize in the same category for an image of a fiery mushroom cloud during a US-led airstrike against Islamic State. Second Prize went to Tyler Hicks for a photo of the bloody aftermath of an Israeli missile strike on a beach in Gaza City. 2014 Olivier Rebbot Award winner Jérôme Sessini won first and second place in the Spot News Stories category for his photos of wreckage of a Malaysia Airlines shot down over Ukraine and his coverage of violent clashes in that country.

PARIS: OPC member John Morris, photo editor, has announced the May 15 opening of an exhibition of his 1944 photographs at the Musée Mémorial de la Bataille de Normandie in Bayeux, France. The exhibition will include the letters he wrote home from the First Army Press Camp, a chateau in Vouilly. Robert Pledge, also a photo editor, who is an OPC member and an awards judge, will be on hand with his colleague to speak and sign books. The recently created Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center in Budapest will host a similar exhibition in June, along with the traveling exhibition of Robert Capa in Color, which opened at the International Center of Photography in New York last year. Morris is working on a book called My Century, aimed to be published in two years around his centennial birthday.

Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and OPC Member David Hume Kennerly will join Politico Magazine as a contributing editor to cover the 2016 presidential elections. Kennerly, who has been a OPC member since 1992, will also follow the campaign trail for Politico over the course of the next two years to mark his 50th year of documenting political campaigns. The May/June issue of the magazine will highlight his work with a 30-page retrospective of his career, which began during the 1966 midterm elections.

BRUSSELS: OPC member Jonathan Kapstein was elected as president of the Press Club Brussels Europe on March 31. Kapstein previously served as bureau chief for Businessweek in Rio de Janeiro, Toronto, Milan, Johannesburg, and Brussels. While in Belgium, he covered European affairs and the nordic region for the magazine. After several years working as Europe director of government affairs for two major corporations, he returned to journalism as an independent. Kapstein won an OPC award for Best Reporting from Latin America and shared two other OPC citations for his work.

NEW YORK: After nine years at Bloomberg News, Michael Serrill, former OPC president, has gone freelance. He plans to travel and continue writing and editing on international affairs and global finance, and possibly to write a book on Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, a foreign correspondent who was one of the original members of the OPC. Before joining Bloomberg in 2006, Serrill was a writer and editor for 15 years at Time magazine and six years at Businessweek. He plans to take the summer off before launching new projects.

Al Jazeera America found itself under the spotlight after a wrongful termination lawsuit, the departure of top executives, and replacement of the foundering news station’s interim chief executive, Ehab Al Shihabi. OPC member Marcy McGinnis, senior vice president of outreach, resigned, telling The New York Times that she “didn’t like the culture of fear” at the station and that “people are afraid to
lose their jobs if they cross Ehab.” The lawsuit from former employee Matthew Luke alleges anti-Semitism and sexism from another high-level executive. Al Shihabi had claimed the network would keep him on, but Al Jazeera English founder Al Anstey is taking Al Shihabi’s position.

OPC member David Alpern, longtime writer and editor for Newsweek, has taken a new job with an OPC connection. After closing down the For Your Ears Only radio and Internet program that he began in 1982 as Newsweek on Air, Alpern has launched a podcast at the urging of former OPC President David Andelman, the editor-in-chief of the World Policy Journal at the non-profit World Policy Institute. Alpern interviews authors and experts on World Policy On Air, which launched in February. Guests have included Nina Khrushcheva, the grand-daughter of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and now a Russian expert at the New School University in New York. Episodes are available on iTunes.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

John C. Lucht, a longtime OPC member, died April 13 at the age of 81. He was an author and
executive recruiter known for bringing senior executives into major corporations in the U.S. and abroad. After starting his career in general management and marketing, he joined Heidrick and Struggles in 1970 as a recruiter until launching his eponymous consultancy in 1977. Rites of Passage, a book about job searches, negotiating compensation and career advice for executives, quickly became a bestseller on the topic when it was first published in 1988. The book was frequently updated in new editions, most recently last year.

Juan Leon, a former Associated Press correspondent and press freedom activist, died after a battle with pancreatic cancer on April 16 at age 72. The native Bolivian was exiled durng the country’s dictatorship in t he 1970s, and he was one of many journalists arrested and tortured during a coup led by General Luis Garcia Meza in 1980. Leon began his journalism career at age 18 for the La Paz daily Presencia, where he worked as news editor. Leon then joined the AP as a stringer 1978 and was hired full time in 1980 after the government expelled AP correspondent Harold Olmos. Leon is survived by his wife, Daysi Vacaflor, and his two children Esteban and Romina.

Sandra Mackey, a journalist and author based in the Middle East, died on April 19 at age 77. Her journalism career began in secret, reporting undercover for U.S. newspapers from Saudi Arabia under the pseudonym Michael Collins while her husband worked in a Riyadh hospital. For four years, she concealed her identity and smuggled stories out of the country to circumvent the ban on foreign journalists. Her work appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor. Mackey is also the author of two books: The Saudis: Inside the Desert Kingdom, and Passion and Politics: The Turbulent World of the Arabs. She is survived by her son, Colin Mackey.