People Column

By Susan Kille

OPC SCHOLARS

Alexander Besant, who won the OPC Foundation’s Alexander Kendrick Memorial Scholarship in 2011, began work in July as a curator of Facebook’s mobile application Paper, which is intended to serve as a phone-based equivalent of a newspaper or magazine. Besant, a contributor to the OPC’s Global Parachute, has written for GlobalPost, The Associated Press, Hearst Newspapers and The Globe and Mail.

Anna Nicolaou, a 2014 OPC winner, started work in August as a digital editor and reporter for Financial Times in New York. She won the 2014 Standard & Poor’s Award for Economic and Business Reporting and had an OPC Foundation fellowship in the Reuters Bureau in Brussels.

Jad Sleiman, the 2013 David R. Schweisberg Memorial Scholarship winner, is now a staff reporter based in Germany for Stars and Stripes. Sleiman, a former Marine, covers Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa.

WINNERS

Two Americans are among the four 2014 winners of the Maria Moors Cabot Prizes for outstanding reporting on Latin America and the Caribbean, the oldest international awards in journalism. Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, which administers the prizes, chose Frank Bajak, chief of Andean news for the AP; Tracy Wilkinson, Mexico Bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times; Paco Calderon, cartoonist for El Heraldo de Mexico; and Giannina Segnini, who was until recently the editor of the investigating team of La Nacion in Costa Rica. A special citation is being given to Tamoa Calzadilla and Laura Weffer for work they did with the investigative unit at Ultimas Noticias of Venezuela. The awards will be presented Oct. 15 at Columbia University. Members of the Cabot Prize board include OPC member Abi Wright, executive director of Professional Prizes at the Columbia Journalism School.

Asma Shirazi, a journalist in Pakistan, has become the second woman to win the Peter Mackler Award for Courageous and Ethical Journalism. Shirazi, who has been described as Pakistan’s first female war correspondent, was host of a popular television talk show that was banned by former military ruler Pervez Musharraf. The award, which is administered by Global Media Forum in partnership with Reporters Without Borders and Agence France-Presse, will be presented Oct. 23 at the National Press Club. It honors journalists who fight courageously and ethically to report the news in countries where freedom of the press is either not guaranteed or not recognized. The award is named for Peter Mackler, a veteran journalist who was chief editor for North America at AFP when he died in 2008. OPC members Marcus Brauchli and Rebecca Blumenstein serve on the award’s board.

UPDATES

ISTANBUL:

Four days after Alissa J. Rubin, Paris Bureau chief for The New York Times, was seriously injured in an Aug. 12 helicopter crash in Kurdistan, she was back on the front page with a story she dictated here from her hospital bed. She said she knew she was alive when she heard herself groan. The helicopter was carrying aid to Yazidi refugees in the Sinjar Mountains. The crash killed the pilot and injured other passengers, but none as seriously as Rubin who suffered broken bones and a fractured skull. Adam Ferguson, a freelance photographer working for the Times who was accompanying Rubin, pulled her from the wreckage. She won an OPC award in 2009 for best magazine writing from abroad.

PARIS:

John Morris, a longtime OPC member, was described in an Aug. 14 posting on the Lens blog of The New York Times as “perhaps the best-known living photo editor.” Lens wrote about the publication of Quelque Part en France: L’été 1944 de John G. Morris (Somewhere in France: John G. Morris and the Summer of 1944), a book that was featured in the June issue of the Bulletin. Photos from the book were displayed this summer at the International Center of Photography in New York. Morris, 97, was the London photo editor for Life throughout World War II, where he edited the photographic coverage of the war in Europe including Robert Capa’s photos from the D-Day invasion. He later became picture editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, executive editor of Magnum Photos, an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post and picture editor of The New York Times. Morris is the subject of “Get the Picture,” an award-winning documentary that was released on DVD in August.

PARIS:

Stefania Rousselle, an OPC member, reports that she and multimedia editor Mimi Chakarova are working to have their feature-length documentary “Men: A Love Story” ready in time for the Sundance Film Festival that begins in January. Rousselle described it as “an unprecedented dark comedy about men’s thoughts on women, sex and love” presented in a “collection of stories told in an honest, uncensored, uncompromised, unapologetic and definitely not politically correct narrative.” She is an award-winning freelance video journalist based in Paris.

BEIJING:

Tsinghua University Press will publish a Chinese translation of On the Front Lines of the Cold War: An American Correspondent’s Journal From the Chinese Civil War to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam by Seymour Topping, an OPC board member. The book, originally published in 2010 by Louisiana State University Press, documents Topping’s travels and reporting for the International News Service, the AP and The New York Times during a tumultuous period.

LOS ANGELES:

OPC member Kathy Eldon reports that she and her daughter, Amy Eldon Turteltaub, had the opportunity in August to meet Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teen-age activist who was shot in the head in 2012 by the Taliban for advocating for girls education. Eldon described Malala as a “true hero” and “creative activist extraordinaire, who is using the power of story telling to impact the world.”

CAPE TOWN:

It’s a Black/White Thing by OPC member Donna Bryant has been shortlisted for the City Press Tafelberg Nonfiction Award, given for books that add to the understanding of society, history and politics in South Africa. The book was reviewed in the June
Bulletin.

TOKYO:

Brian Bremner, who had been assistant managing editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, is headed to Tokyo to become managing editor for enterprise for Bloomberg News in Asia. He spent 15 years in Asia, with stints in Tokyo and Hong Kong, and won the 1998 Overseas Press Club of America’s Morton Frank Award for coverage of the Asian financial crisis.

WASHINGTON:

Steve Centanni, a veteran foreign correspondent for Fox News, is retiring. He traveled throughout the Middle East and reported from the Gaza Strip, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and he also covered the 2011 murder trial of the Somali pirates who killed four Americans after hijacking their yacht. He and Olaf Wiig, a freelance cameraman from New Zealand, were kidnapped in Gaza and held for 13 days in August 2006. Ten days after the kidnapping, a video was released showing the two men in Arab robes reading from the Koran to indicate their conversion to Islam. Centanni said he and Wiig had been forced at gunpoint to make the video. For the last several years, Centanni has been based in Washington.

PEOPLE REMEMBERED

Fred Ferguson, an OPC member since 1984 who once edited the Bulletin, died Aug. 22. He was 82. Ferguson began his career as a stringer on Pacific Stars and Stripes during the Korean War covering the southern Japanese Islands. He spent 27 years at United Press International, where his father had also worked, and served as a reporter and editor at bureaus in Mississippi, New York and New Jersey. He later became regional executive for New Jersey, Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware. One of his fondest memories was escorting former President Harry S. Truman on his daily walks. At the OPC’s first Tchotchke Night in 2010, Ferguson shared a story about hiding a walkie talkie under a baby carriage to dictate scoops from outside a Russian mission on Long Island. After leaving UPI, Ferguson worked in public relations, first for 8 years at an agency now known as Ogilvy PR and then at PR Newswire for 15 years. A favorite phrase of his was: “Now I’m a flack instead of a hack!” Ferguson was a second-generation member of the Silurians. His father, also named Fred, was a boyhood friend of Roy Howard (of Scripps-Howard fame) and spent many years as president of the Newspaper Enterprise Association.

In a career that spanned Morse code to satellites and the Internet, Tony Beard, the longtime communications manager in the London Bureau of The New York Times, was often compared to Q, James Bond’s technology expert. He died Aug. 17 at age 80. He spent 46 years in the bureau – 1955 to 2001 – seeking faster, easier and less cumbersome ways to transmit stories and photos. John Burns, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and former London Bureau chief, said Beard “had seen the likes of me – young man in a hurry, impatient of cautions from those minding the home front, eager to escape the office and head out to the badlands – many times over the years. He had grown accustomed to his meticulously prepared technological wizardry disappearing out the door of his base in the London Bureau, only to return, if it ever did, abused and battered, and to the expectations that he could somehow wring replacements from his stores, and explain it all to the budget overseers in New York. And he did all of this with a meticulous courtesy, a tolerance for overblown stories of derring-do, and a good humor that marked him out as a truly civilized man.”

Chapman Pincher, a British journalist who unmasked Soviet spies and tormented prime ministers, was 100 years old when he died Aug. 5 at his home in Kintbury, England. He had an extraordinary 30-year career unearthing state secrets as the defense and science correspondent of The London Daily Express, then England’s best-selling newspaper. Pincher, who was known as “the lone wolf of Fleet Street,” worked as a one-man investigative unit producing scoop after scoop of postwar military secrets. He was proud of being likened to a kind of official urinal in which ministers and defense chiefs could stand patiently leaking. He retired from the Express in 1979 and went on to write more than 30 books. His best-known book was 1981’s Their Trade Is Treachery, where he made the case that Roger Hollis, a former director general of MI5, was a Soviet spy. Those charges were denied. Pincher published his last book in February, a memoir titled Dangerous to Know. His son said Pincher had made a final joke shortly before his death: “Tell them I’m out of scoops.”

Jim Frederick, a foreign correspondent, editor and author died July 31 in Oakland, Calif. He was 42 and his wife said the cause of death was cardiac arrest. Frederick wrote Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death, an account of the 2006 murders of an Iraqi family, and the rape of their 14-year-old daughter by four U.S. soldiers. Frederick worked for Men’s Journal and Working Woman magazines, but spent most of his career at Time Inc., where he was a reporter and editor for Money and Time magazines. At Time, his jobs included managing editor of Time.com, Tokyo Bureau chief and senior editor in London in charge of the news weekly’s international coverage. In 2008 while he was in Tokyo, he was the co-author of The Reluctant Communist, with Charles Robert Jenkins, a U.S. soldier who deserted his post in Korea in 1965, crossed the border and remained in North Korea for 40 years. After leaving Time Inc. in 2013, Frederick had traveled extensively with his wife, Time senior editor Charlotte Greensit, whom he met while stationed in London.

Kenneth B. Noble, a reporter who headed the West Africa bureau of The New York Times from 1989 to 1994, died July 17 in Gainesville, Fla. He was 60 and died of congestive heart failure. Noble also covered business in Washington and was the newspaper’s Los Angeles bureau chief during the O. J. Simpson trial. While reporting from two dozen countries along Africa’s west coast, Noble covered the civil wars in Liberia and Angola, the AIDS pandemic in Zaire and coup attempts in Nigeria. After leaving the Times in 1997, he taught journalism at the University of Southern California and at the University of California, Berkeley.