People Column

By Susan Kille

OPC SCHOLARS

Anders Melin, who received a Reuters internship in 2013 from the OPC Foundation, in October was named executive compensation reporter for Bloomberg News. A native of Sweden, Melin spent his internship in the Reuters bureau in Brussels.

John Ismay, who won the 2013 Jerry Flint Fellowship for International Business Reporting, was listed first among those contributing to an Oct. 14 investigative report by C.J. Chivers in The New York Times about previously untold discoveries of chemical weapons in Iraq during the U.S. occupation of the country. Ismay, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who served in Iraq as an explosive ordnance disposal officer, wrote in the At War blog about his personal experience with chemical weapons in Iraq. Ismay and Chivers responded online to readers’ questions about the munitions.

WINNERS

James Foley, who was murdered by ISIS forces in Syria last summer, was named this year’s recipient of the Nackey S. Loeb First Amendment Award, an annual honor given to New Hampshire residents who fight to protect the First Amendment. The award is named for the former president and publisher of the Union Leader, New Hampshire’s only statewide newspaper.

Evelyn Leopold, an OPC board member and a veteran reporter at the United Nations, chaired the Dag Hammarskjöld Fund for Journalists Annual luncheon. The Oct. 28 lunch honored four young journalists who are finishing one-year fellowships at the U.N. sponsored by the fund: Olefumi Akande from TVC News of Nigeria; Abdel Aziz Hali from La Presse of Tunisia; Ana Maria Macaraig from Rappler in the Philippines; and Tuan Anh Pham from the online outlet Dan Tri of Vietnam. Former Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay and singer-songwriter Angelique Kidjo, a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, were guests of honor.

Kenyan journalist Joseph Mathenge in October received African Journalist of the Year honors, the top prize at this year’s CNN MultiChoice African Journalist 2014 Awards Ceremony. His work, which appears in The Standard in Nairobi, was chosen from entries from across the African continent.

Two Associated Press journalists working overseas, Dalton Bennett and Muhammed Muheisen, won the annual Oliver S. Gramling Journalism Awards, the highest AP staff honor. Bennett, a video journalist based in the United Arab Emirates, was described as “one of AP’s go-to video journalists, specializing in compelling visual storytelling from Europe to the Middle East and beyond. Muheisen, chief photographer in Pakistan, was twice part of AP teams that won the Pulitzer Prize for covering the wars in Iraq and Syria.

Since 1990, the International Women’s Media Foundation has honored some of the world’s bravest — and most embattled — female reporters and editors with Courage in Journalism Awards. Awards were presented in October to Arwa Damon, a CNN war correspondent; Solange Lusiku Nsimirem, editor-in-chief of Le Souverain in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and Brankica Stanković, a reporter for RTV in Serbia. The IWMF has received a $1 million grant from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation to establish an annual award for photojournalism in honor of AP photographer Anja Niedringhaus, who was killed in Afghanistan in April.

UPDATES

MILWAUKEE:
The Milwaukee Press Club inducted OPC member Dickey Chapelle into its Hall of Fame on Oct. 24. Chapelle, a photojournalist who covered the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, died in 1965 while photographing a U.S. mission in Vietnam. A Marine walking in front of Chapelle tripped a booby trap and
an explosion blew shrapnel into her neck, killing her within minutes. She was one of the first American correspondents killed in Vietnam, and the first American woman journalist to be killed in combat. She served on OPC’s Freedom of Information Committee and testified before Congress to promote greater
access for journalists and to loosen official restraints against them. She won the OPC’s George Polk Award in 1962 for her coverage of Vietnam. OPC President Marcus Mabry sent a letter to the Milwaukee Press Club saluting Chapelle’s induction. “Dickey was one of us,” he wrote, “an involved OPC board member and an outspoken advocate for reporters trying to tell readers and listeners at home what was going on in Hungary, Cuba, Vietnam, and all those other places she traveled to, wrote about and photographed.”

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif: Jonathan Dahl left The Wall Street Journal, where he was editor-in-chief of WSJ.Money magazine and executive director of page one, to become managing editor of Ozy, a digital news startup named after Shelley’s poem Ozymandias. Ozy Media is a year-old online magazine backed by Laurene Powell Jobs and other Silicon Valley luminaries plus German publisher Axel Springer. Dahl, who resigned as OPC secretary as part of his shift to California, joined theJournal in 1985, and worked in the Dallas and Chicago bureaus in addition to starting a travel column and helping create the Weekend Journal. He had also been editor-in-chief and executive editor of SmartMoney. The Financial Times reported that Dahl would oversee about 12 staff members and 20 freelancers.

OTTAWA, Ontario: Chrystia Freeland, a former OPC board member who is now a member of the Canadian Parliament, was inside the Centre Block of Parliament on Oct. 22 when she heard shooting as a gunman ran through the building after killing a soldier outside. She told MSNBC she took off her high heels and ran. She said she was given a bulletproof vest to wear and she hid in the canteen used by staff.

SCARSDALE, N.Y.: Seymour and Audrey Topping celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary on Nov. 8 with a party for family, friends and colleagues at their home.

The cake served at the party was a close replica of their original tiered wedding cake. Last month, Top and Audrey did an archival interview about their long careers in journalism which is on the OPC website. Top is a longtime member of the OPC and serves on the club’s board. 

NEW YORK: In her first interview since she was severely wounded in April in an attack in Afghanistan, Kathy Gannon, an OPC member and a veteran Associated Press correspondent, vowed to return to Afghanistan. She said she had re-lived the decisions that led to the death of her friend Anja Niedringhaus, an AP photographer, but would do nothing different. “We weren’t careless or cavalier about the security arrangements …,” Gannon said in an interview at AP headquarters. Gannon said her physical recovery has been grueling and is still a work in progress.

Deidre Depke, was elected by the OPC board in October to replace Jonathan Dahl, who resigned, as club secretary. Depke has been a reporter and editor in New York for 25 years, working as senior news editor at BusinessWeek, as the foreign editor and an assistant managing editor for Newsweek
and as the editor of Newsweek.com and The Daily Beast. In addition, she worked as the general manager for TheWeek.com, concentrating on business development and technology creation. She currently manages a small consultancy that works with new media startups, including Tina Brown’s Live Media company.

Calvin Sims, OPC’s first vice president and president of New York City’s International House, and Charles Sennott, co-founder of GlobalPost and a board member of the OPC Foundation, worked together for months to plan Generation Jobless, a two-day conference focused on finding solutions to youth unemployment that was co-sponsored by their organizations and held Oct. 24 and 25 at International House. Sennott is executive editor of GroundTruth, a nonprofit initiative training young foreign correspondents that has reported from 11 countries about youth unemployment. “The consequences of not addressing youth unemployment are dire and have the potential to leave young people around the world without a future,” Sims said.

Azmat Khan, an OPC board member, will be become an investigative reporter for BuzzFeed. In December she will join an investigative unit of 10 reporters led by Mark Schoofs, a former senior editor at ProPublica who was part of a team at The Wall Street Journal that won a Pulitzer for coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks. Khan currently leads the digital team at Al Jazeera America’s flagship show “America Tonight” and had been a digital reporter and producer for the PBS series “Frontline.” Her work earned an Online News Association award in 2012, the Gannett Foundation Award for Innovative
Investigative Journalism in 2013 and an Emmy nomination in 2014.

Charles Graeber, an award-winning freelance journalist, has joined the OPC board. He won the OPC’s 2011 Ed Cunningham Award for “After the Tsunami, Nothing to Do but Start Again” written for Bloomberg Businessweek and is the author of The Good Nurse, a 2013 best-selling book about America’s most prolific serial killer, Charles Cullen, whose 16-year long nursing career left as many as 300 dead. He has contributed to publications that includeWired, GQ, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Vogue, National Geographic, Men’s Journal and The New York Times.

Time magazine promoted Brian Walsh from senior editor to foreign editor in October and filled two top posts at international bureaus. Walsh served as Tokyo Bureau chief from 2006 to 2007 and joined Time in 2001. Nikhil Kumar, who had been a senior editor, was named South Asia Bureau chief, based in New Delhi. Aryn Baker leaves her post as Middle East Bureau chief, based in Beirut, to become Africa Bureau chief, based in Cape Town.

Get the Picture, a documentary based on the book of the same name by OPC member John Morris, was shown at the Time-Life building on Oct. 17 for an audience of Time-Life alumni and OPC members.

The documentary, directed by Cathy Pearson, follows the remarkable and long career that Morris has had in photography. He was photo editor of Life magazine during World War II and a founder of Magnum Photo Agency who worked with many of the greatest names in photojournalism. The film features stories from prominent photojournalists such as James Nachtwey and Peter Turnley, who attended the event. OPC member Norman Pearlstine generously sponsored the screening and a luncheon. This private screening was the first time that the film was shown in New York City.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

Ben Bradlee, the legendary executive editor of The Washington Post, died Oct. 21 at his home in Washington.

Bradlee, who was 93, led the Post’s newsroom for 26 years and transformed it into one of the world’s leading newspapers.

Under his tenure, the Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Watergate scandal, which forced President Richard Nixon to leave office under threat of impeachment in 1974. Two years earlier, the Post joined The New York Times in defying pressure from the government not to publish stories based on the Pentagon Papers, a secret government account of the Vietnam War.

David Hoffman, an OPC member who served as assistant managing editor for foreign news at the Post, was among the thousands who gathered Oct. 29 at the Washington National Cathedral to say farewell to Bradlee. Hoffman tweeted: “Magnificent farewell to a remarkable man today. Ben Bradlee loved the lines ‘I am the captain of my soul.’ And so he was. Goodbye, captain.”

The OPC was saddened to learn that Sonya K. Fry, who retired last spring as our executive director, suffered the loss of her sister, Linda A. Paranko, who died Oct. 30 after battling multiple sclerosis for more than 20 years. Paranko, who lived in East Lyme, Conn., had worked as a dental assistant and was an avid bowler and dancer before MS took its toll.