Overseas Press Club

Overseas Press Club Foundation
Encouraging the next generation of foreign correspondents

40 West 45 Street, New York NY 10036 USA| 201.493.9087 | foundation@opcofamerica.org

OPC Foundation | OPC Home | Programs | Winners | Career tips | Board | Apply Today | Donate | Luncheon | Links | Contact Us

 

The OPC Foundation keeps in touch with its scholarship winners and encourages their careers. The following is any update on where our past winners are today.

Beibei Bao, 2012 Roy Rowan winner, is back at Columbia having spent the summer as an OPC Foundation intern in the Reuters bureau in Shanghai. Among economic news and other subjects, she covered the the Chinese Olympic delegation. She worked with an editor in Australia and wrote some longer profiles, including breaking an age-faking scandal of a female boxer. Here is a website listing her Reuters bylines  http://angelabaobeibeiclips.tumblr.com/ 

Lauren E. Bohn
is spending her 2012 H.L. Stevenson Internship in the AP bureau in Jerusalem.  She joined AP in the fall after completing her Fulbright year in Cairo.

Eva Dou, University of Missouri, 2012 S&P Award for Economic & Business Reporting, is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in its Taipei bureau.

Jia Feng, 2012 Theo Wilson Scholarship winner, has an OPC Foundation internship in Reuters’ Beijing bureau where she is covering energy news.

Catherine Ryan Gregory, 2012  Irene Corbally Kuhn Scholarship winner, is at the University of Oregon completing her master’s degree.

James Jeffrey, 2012 David R. Schweisberg Scholarship, is finishing his master’s degree at  the University of Texas at Austin.

Sophia Jones, 2012 Reuters Scholarship winner, is back at George Washington University having completed a successful internship in the Reuters bureau in Ramallah.

Elisa Mala spent her 2012 Flora Lewis Internship in the AP bureau in Bangkok. See her bylined work here. Also, Here is her essay that appeared in the New York Times Magazine Lives column.

Nizar Manek, 2012 winner of the Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in memory of I.F. Stone, is now Marjorie Deane fellow at the Financial Times in London. After graduating from Columbia, he interned in New York at Barron’s and worked as a business intelligence consultant for the Basra, Iraq research cell at Olive Group, a global private security firm headquartered in the Middle East.

Lauren Rosenfeld, 2012 Walter & Betsy Cronkite Scholarship winner, is completing her master’s degree at Berkeley.

Max Seddon has a 2012 Stan Swinton Internship in the AP bureau in Moscow. Before that, he interned at Reuters in New York. Here is an online version of his winning essay. Here is a piece he did for AP in Moscow.

Georgia Wells, winner of the 2012 Emanuel R. Freedman Scholarship, is a member of the Wall Street Journal digital hub that publishes news on WSJ.com.  Before that, she was an intern on the FX Trader team where she covered emerging markets.

Rachel Will spent the summer at Reuters bureau in Kuala Lumpur for the 2012 Jerry Flint Internship for International Business Reporting. After that, she has fellowship with Princeton in Asia to write for the Phnom Penh Post in Cambodia for one year.Here is an article she wrote for World Policy that was based in part on her winning essay.

Lauren Zumbach, the 2012 Alexander Kendrick Internship winner, is back at Princeton having spent the summer as an OPC Foundation intern in the Mumbai bureau of Forbes Asia. Lauren was the first OPC Foundation intern with Forbes.

Natalie Bailey, the first Jerry Flint winner in 2011, returned to Bangkok where she worked in the IRIN bureau. She continues to cover humanitarian issues in Southeast Asia for IRIN as well as reviewing luxury hotels and spas for Forbes Travel Guide in Hong Kong and Macau.

Alexander Besant, 2011 winner of the Alexander Kendrick, had an OPC Foundation internship in the AP bureau in Cairo. Here is a sample of the work he was doing in Greece. He is now living in Berlin and working with GlobalPost.

Megan Camm, 2011 Emanuel R. Freedman Scholarship winner, spent time writing and reporting in Africa. Here's an article she did for World Policy Journal on conflict in the Congo and a related sidebar.

Kim Chakanetsa, 2011 Stan Swinton winner, was at the AP bureau in Johannesburg as an OPC Foundation intern. While there, she filed numerous stories that varied from a piece on a three year old who was badly burnt during a freak barbeque accident and had to receive cloned skin to a piece on a police 'death-squad'.  As well as filng print stories, she also produced pieces for APTV and spent time with the photo department. Before that, she worked on the international desk as the Margaret Moth Fellow at CNN. She is now in London freelancing.

Jialu Chen, 2011 Reuters Scholarship winner and OPC Foundation intern, is currently with Mother Jones in San Francisco. She spent her Foundation internship at the Reuters burea in Taipei, after her internship with the Boston Globe. Here is her first story for The Globe.

Carol Kuruvilla, 2011 Rowan winner, spent a month the summer of 2012 in Copenhagen on a Humanity in Action fellowship.The journalism program focused on such minority issues as asylum rights and immigration, among others.

Diksha Madhok, 2011 Theo Wilson winner, is with Reuters in Dehli.

Ajay Makan, 2011 S&P winner, after an internship with The Economist in London, was first a reporter in the New York bureau of the Financial Times and is now the Oil and Gas correspondent in London.

Laura Rena Murray, 2011 Irene Corbally Kuhn Scholarship, is headed to the West Coast where she will continue her photography and freelance investigative reporting. But first she won a Fellowship at Auschwitz for the study of Professional Ethics. Here is the article she wrote about it. Here is a story that she wrote for the New York Times, which was named a finalist in the student division of the 2012 Investigative Reporters and Editors Awards.

Mark Oltmanns, 2011 Flora Lewis winner, spent a summer as an OPC Foundation intern in the AP bureau in Bangkok. Here is a video piece he did that aired on NewsHour about Case 002 of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. Here is a piece he did for GlobalPost on Thailand's elite bomb squad. Here is a piece he did on Afghan-Americans participating in military exercises with Marines at Camp Pendleton that aired on the PSB Newshour in February 2012.

Alex Pena, the first Walter & Betsy Cronkite winner in 2011, headed for East Africa shortly graduation. Here is hist first story for ABC News. He also won a Roy W. Howard National Reporting Competition via the Scripps Foundation and was one of nine student journalists participating in a study tour of Japan following in the footsteps of legendary Asia correspondent Roy W. Howard.  Here is a story he did for ABC News in Juarez, Mexico. Read of his plans to travel to East Africa to launch his career.
 
Hannah Rappleye, 2011 Harper’s Magazine Scholarship winner, was a street reporter for the New York Post. Here is what her winning essay was about. A piece she did with fellow CUNY students was named a finalist in the student division of the 2012 Investigative Reporters and Editors Awards. A multi-year reporting effort on a prison in Georgia ran in The Nation.

Colleen Stewart, 2011 H.L. Stevenson Scholarship, interned at the Portland Press Herald in Maine. Here is a peice she did for them. Here is a multimedia piece she did on women in agriculture, her favorite topic.

Sisi Tang is the 2011 Schweisberg winner. After her OPC Foundation internship in a Reuters in Hong Kong ended, she stayed on as a reporter.

Jennifer Brookland, 2010 Alexander Kendrick winner, graduated from the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University. She is now a global development reporter at Devex in Washington DC..

Leah Finnegan, 2010 Stan Swinton winner, is with The New York Times. She spent a summer as an OPC Foundation intern in the Associated Press bureau in Cairo. Here she writes about her that experience for the Huffington Post, her previous employer.

Francesca Freeman, 2010 Theo Wilson winner, is a metals beat reporter in the London bureau of Dow Jones Newswires. The beat deals with the whole of the EMEA region, including Ghana, the subject of her winning essay. An expanded version of that essay covering Ghana's sanitation crisis appeared in World Policy Journal.

Jenny Gross, 2010 Schweisberg winner, is now working at Dow Jone in London, a few desks away from Frankie. She also had an internship with the Associated Press in Johannesburg.  Here's a documentary she recently completed on gang violence in South Africa.

Artis Henderson, 2010 Irene Corbally Kuhn winner, had an OPC Foundation internship in the Associated Press bureau in Dakar.  She will continue to represent AP during her year-long stay in Senegal on an International Rotary fellowship. Read her story that appeared in the New York Times. Here is her first story for the AP.

Karina Ioffee, 2010 HL Stevenson winner, is in California working at patch.com, a hyper local online news startup.

Owen Kibenge, 2010 I.F. Stone winner, had a Reuters internship in New York. He's freelancing in Washington DC.

Denise Law, 2010 S&P winner, Denise Law, S&P winner in 2010, joined the Financial Times in Hong Kong as a reporter for a new online venture called FT Tilt, for a specialized audience of financial professionals interested in the emerging "Tilt" markets.  She is now with FT's China Confidential.

James Matthews, 2010 Emanuel R. Freedman Scholarship winner. Oxford University Press just published his book on the Spanish Civil War, entitled:  Reluctant Warriors: Republican Popular Army and Nationalist Army Conscripts in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. James tells us the book challenges traditional political interpretations of the Spanish Civil War and sets it in a new and immediately human light.   The book is a comparative study of Nationalist Army and Republican Popular Army conscripts and analyses the conflict from the perspective of those who were involved against their will. While militants on both sides joined the conflict voluntarily, millions of Spanish men coped with the military uprising as an unwanted intrusion into their lives.  James, who also won an OPC internship in the Sao Paulo Reuters bureau, spent last year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and next year  will be a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow at University College, Dublin, working on post-First World War social conflict in Spain. 

Jeff Roberts, 2010 Reuters Scholarship winner, has joined paidContent.org as a staff writer covering patents, copyright and other legal issues affecting the development of online media. He previously covered law for Reuters. Jeff was an OPC Foundation internship in Paris. 

Caroline Stauffer, 2010 Flora Lewis winner, has an OPC Foundation internship in the Reuters bureau in Mexico City. Here is a story she did in September. She is a reporter for Reuters in Lima, Peru.

Chris Stein, 2010 Roy Rowan winner, is living in Accra, Ghana, where he’s a stringer for Agence France Presse and has written for the Christian Science Monitor. He moved there to cover the presidential elections and hopes to stay for quite a while afterwards. Before that, he worked at an alt-weekly called the Pacific Northwest Inlander in Spokane. After graduation, he went to Johannesburg for an internship in the Africa bureau of the Inter Press Service. Here's are links to stories he wrote on African entrepeneurs and a nurses' strike. He also worked in Alaska as the legislative correspondent for the AP in Juneau.

Simon Akam, a British Fulbright Scholar at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, was the Freedman winner in 2009. He is now a Reuters correspondent in Sierra Leone. He was the recipient of an OPC Foundation internship in the Reuters bureau in Istanbul. His stories have appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, and The New Republic, among others. Read his August 21, 2009, front page story in the New York Times. Check out his website. Some of his stories for Reuters concerned the "new" Islamic curiculum and Turkey coming to terms with its past. He also worked in Berlin for the German newspaper Die Welt.

Haley Sweetland Edwards
, 2009 winner of the Irene Corbally Kuhn Scholarship, cpvered the upriasing in Yemen for the LA Times, among others, until she was deported. She is now back in Tbilisi, Georgia, covering the Caucasus on a freelance basis for the LA Times, AOL News and whoever-else-is-interested. You can follow her travels at haleybureau.com. Check out her reporting for Foreign Policy. Here's a story in The Atlantic.

Jeff Horwitz, 2009 Fred Wiegold winner, is now a staff writer at the American Banker.

Michael Miller, the 2009 Stan Swinton winner, is now a staff reporter at the Miami New Times. Here is one of his first feature articles. After graduating from the joint master's degree program in journalism and Latin American studies at NYU, he returned to Mexico City where he had worked as an OPC Foundation intern in the Mexico City bureau of the Associated Press.

Stephen Nessen, the 2009 Roy Rowan winner, is nowDigital Producer/ Reporter at WNYC Radio, New York Public Radio. Here's a story he produced int he summer of 2009 when he was an assistant producer.

Priti Patnaik, 2009 winners of the S&P Award, won third prize in the 2010 Foreign Press Association scholarship contest. She is now living in Switzerland. She has had a string of internships in New York City at Breaking Views, The American Lawyer, Debtwire and most recently at The Bond Buyer. Patnaik has reported on banking, insurance, politics for the Economic Times and Business Standard in New Delhi. Currently based out of Lausanne, she is open to writing about finance, law and development issues. She is also keen on reporting and assisting on investigative projects in the region.

Maria Repnikova, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and the 2009 Kendrick winner, interned in the Reuters bureau in Beijing. The following are links to her favorite stories: http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=112008http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=112210
She is now back at Oxford pursuing a PhD in media politics in China and Russia and freelancing on Russian and Chinese stories.

Michelle Theriault Boot, the 2009 Theo Wilson winner who graduated with a master's degree in the journalism program at the University of Oregon, was an OPC Foundation intern in the Associated Press bureau in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is now living in Anchorage, freelancing at AP and teaching journalism at the University of Alaska as well as some mag and radio work. She’s also on the board of the Alaska Press Club and say there are opportunities there that don’t exist in the Lower 48.

Jessica Wanke Deahl, the 2009 H.L. Stevenson winner, is now an assistant producer for digital news at National Public Radio. Here's an article she wrote for the American Journalism Review on an Afghan entrepreneur who opened a business in Kabul catering to journalists: http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4707

Emily Witt, 2009 Flora Lewis winner, is the Wall Street reporter for the New York Observer. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Men’s Journal and a variety of other places. Here's an article she did for ProPublica.

Mayank Bubna, 2008 H.L. Stevenson winner, is in New Delhi working as a freelance journalist reporting on defense and security issues. He recently completed a documentary entitled Wayaahu Cusuub about a Somali music band living in Kenya that's been making waves in East Africa. The band members are all refugees with no formal music training or education of any sort. They speak of the trials and tribulations of having to speak up through their music on issues not typically discussed in Somali communities, often facing backlash for it.

Mariano Castillo, IF Stone winner in 2008, is now a newsdeck editor for CNN in Atlanta. He graduated with a Master's degree in international affairs from Columbia University. Mariano won an OPC Foundation internship in Mexico City where he worked in the Reuters bureau.

Jerry Guo, Reuters 2008 awardee, wrote an article for the Washington Post entitled "My Excellent North Korean Adventure" and was profiled by NPR. He also interned for the Wall Street Journal during the summer of 2008. Jerry also won first place in the Atlantic writing contest for nonfiction. That piece ran in the New York Times' Sunday Styles section.  He will traveled to Nepal on a Yale grant to profile the king, who is about to be dethroned. He was went to Zimbabwe in January 2009. Articles on the African trip appeared in Newsweek.com and the Christian Science Monitor. He graduated from Yale in 2009. He is now a correspondent for Newsweek.

Devon Haynie, the 2008 Flora Lewis awardee, spent several months reporting for the AP in Johannesburg, South Africa, on an OPC Foundation internship. She is now a freelance writer and reporter at the Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne, IN. In 2010, she won the “Best Magazine Article of the Year” award from the Indiana Society of Professional Journalists for an article she wrote about a veteran who robbed her parents in 1993. 

Sheila B. Lalwani, 2008 Irene Corbally Kuhn winner, is now a Fulbright fellow and journalist in Berlin. She is working on journalism projects relating to immigration and policy.  Previously she had attendedthe Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Previously, she completed two internships in New Delhi, one with the Human Rights Law Network and one with the US Department of State. She was awarded a Nancy Klavans Fellowship from Harvard University's Women & Public Policy Program to research media and human rights in India.

Sarah Mishkin, Freedman winner in 2008, is now the Taipei Correspondent at the Financial Times. She was previously based in Hong Kong. After graduating from Yale in December 2008, she reported for Business Today Egypt and later interned at NPR in Hartford.

Paul Sonne, the 2008 Stan Swinton winner, is covering media, retail and consumer goods for the European edition of the Wall Street Journal in London. He received a master's in philosophy in Russian history as a Marshall scholar at the University of Oxford, and worked as an OPC Foundation intern in the Associated Press bureau in Moscow. Read his front page story in the Wall Street Journal on June 24, 2009.

Max Strasser, 2008 Kendrick winner, lives in Cairo and is the news editor at Egypt Independent, the English-language sister paper of Al-Masry Al-Youm, Egypt's leading newspaper. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, TheAtlantic.com, The Nation and elsewhere.

Alexandra Suich, 2008 Theo Wilson winner, has been working at The Economist since she graduated from Yale in 2008.

Yu Sun, the first S&P winner in 2008, is with FT Confidential, a Financial Times publication. He works in the New York office.

Rollo Romig, 2008 Roy Rowan winner, after graduating from the master's program at New York University, went to Phnom Penh in the fall of 2008 as an OPC Foundation intern at the Cambodia Daily. He was the assistant director of the NYU Journalism in Ghana program in 2007. He is currently the blogs editor at The New Yorker.

Max Strasser, 2008 Kendrick winner, worked in the summer of 2008 in TIME Magazine's bureau in Jerusalem. In 2009, he graduated from Oberlin and began a job in September as an editor at Al Masy Al Youm English Edition, which is based in Cairo, Egypt.   He writes, “I think that this is going to be a great first job. I remember when I was in New York for the scholarship luncheon and ceremony that a number of people were talking about the good opportunities at English-language newspapers in foreign capitals. It was at that point that I first got the idea and now it's become a reality.   I feel very lucky. The OPC scholarship was a very influential event in the beginning of my journalism career.”

Yu Sun, the first S&P winner in 2008, is now in Shanghai and is an economics reporter for China Confidential, a newsletter published by the Financial Times.

Ben Weller, 2008 Schweisberg winner, is back in South Korea teaching writing at Silla University. He continue to freelance and is now represented by Wonderful Machine (www.wonderfulmachine.com). Ben also won an OPC Foundation internship in the Reuters bureau in Seoul, South Korea. When that ended, he stayed on in Korea and taught English at Gyeongsang National University. He also did some freelance photo work, including covering Singapore's foreign minister's trip to Seoul  for the Straits Times. A Duke graduate, Ben graduated from Indiana University with a master's degree in journalism in 2008. He also taught photography at Manchester College. Click here to see his portfolio. he continues to freelance for Reuters and others.

The 2007 Kendrick winner, Antonio Castaneda, is working as a producer for The Charlie Rose Show at PBS.

Aaron Clark, the 2007 Roy Rowan winner, is an energy markets reporter at Bloomberg News.

Sareena Dalla, 2007 Theo Wilson winner, returned to the Harvard Kennedy School of Government after taking the fall 2007 semester off to serve as CNN’s 2008 New Hampshire Campaign Producer leading up to the state’s January 8 primary. Click here to learn of her experiences.

Elizabeth Dickinson, the 2007 IF Stone winner, has joined World Affairs Journal as a blogger and contributing editor. She lives in Abu Dhabi, having previously worked as assistant managing editor at Foreign Policy magazine and Nigeria correspondent for The Economist. She has held previous internships with the Wall Street Journal Europe in Brussels and the New York Times' West African bureau in Dakar. In addition, her writing has appeared in IRIN News, AllAfrica.com, the International Herald TribuneNewsweek International, and the Mail and Guardian.

Jeremy Gantz, 2007 H.L. Stevenson, became the full-time Web editor of In These Times in March 2009, a magazine published in Chicago that reports on workers’ rights and labor issues, both domestic and international. He graduated from the master's program at Northwestern after a two-month OPC Foundation internship at the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh.  Among the highlights of that experience were traveling across the Tonle Sap lake to interview snake hunters in a remote floating village and interviewing Sam Rainsy in the National Assembly. Here is an article he wrote about the state of freelancing in 2013.

Ben Hubbard, 2007 Stan Swinton, is now back as a reporter in the AP bureau in Jerusalem, the same site where he served as an intern in the OPC Foundation internship program. As an intern, the Arabic speaker was able to travel quite a bit and filed stories from Nazareth, Bar Sheva, Ramallah and Nablus, among others. Ben graduated from the master's program at Berkeley in 2008.

Andy Greenberg, 2007 Reuters winner, is a senior reporter at Forbes.com.

Ed Ou, the 2007 Dan Eldon winner, is with Getty Images based in the Middle East. He represented the New York Times in Cairo during the revolt. He has also worked for Reuters and AP. He also did a documentary about nuclear radiation victims in Kazakhstan. See his work on his Website. Here is an article he wrote for the Times on an HIV clinic in his native Vancouver.

Katie Paul, 2007 Kuhn winner, is a freelance journalist living in Amman.  She was previously a reporter at Newsweek.  Two years ago she went to Syria on a  year-long Fulbright fellowship to study the impact of web connectivity among young people. She stayed in the area, frist in Beirut and now Jordan, watching that hypothesis unfold.  She has  done work for Human Rights Watch, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, the Los Angeles Times, and Newsweek/The Daily Beast, among others. Katie began her career as an OPC Foundation intern in the Reuters bureau in Buenos Aires. When that ended, she stayed on as a stringer and contributed to the bureau’s national election coverage. Here is her website.

Emily Rotberg Cronin, who won the Freedman scholarship in 2007, has just returned to New York after years of working in London. She is now a Contributing Editor to ELLE UK and freelances for other publications, including the Telegraph Magazine and Style.com. See her website for more info.

Erica Schlaikjer, 2007 Schweisberg winner, is the EMBARQ Information & Innovation Coordinator at World Resources Institute in Washington DC. She is also a curator and creater at Benevolent Media and managing editor of CityFix.com. She previously interned at Crain's Chicago Business. She returned from Taipei, where she wrote articles for the Taiwan Business TOPICS magazine, published by the American Chamber of Commerce.  Her blog: www.ResponsibleChina.com, is about environmental sustainability

Ayesha Nasir, formerly Ayesha Akran, the 2006 Stan Swinton winner, spent 30 days in September and October in the Associated Press bureau in Bangkok, serving as the first OPC Foundation Internship winner. She was on the ground when the coup occurred. She is now a filmmaker. See a film she did on Pakistani prostitutes in 2010.

Elizabeth Barchas Prelogar , who won the Flora Lewis Scholarship in 2006, has an article in the February 2007 Harvard Law Review on international journalism and the threat journalists face when they report on international events and are then called into foreign courts because their stories were available on the internet. She is now clerking for Supreme Count Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

Galima Bukharbaeva, the 2006 If Stone winner and Uzbek exile, is currently in Germany, working as editor-in-chief of the online informational service on Uzbekistan, www.uznews.net. She is alsochairwoman of the Real Unity of Journalists of Uzbekistan. In May 2009, she was trying to rally world support for her colleague Sali Abdurakhmanov. Click here for more information.

Harriet Clark Steiman, 2006 Kendrick winner, a former associate editor at Inc. magazine and formely communications manager at the Clinton Global Initiative, is now pursuing her MBA at MIT.

Anupreeta Das, the 2006 Reuters winner, is the  Wealth Reporter at The Wall Street Journal. She covers Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway and wealthy investors and entrepreneurs. Preeta previously served as Senior M&A Reporter at The Journal where she covered Facebook’s IPO as well as  turmoil in the investment banking business.

Cory Eldridge, the 2006 H.L. Stevenson winner, is now in Jordan working as the features editor at  JO magazine, an English language monthly magazine that he interned for when he studied in Jordan during college. Here's an article he wrote in 2009 about his internship with the Reuters' Dubai bureau. He later wrote, “I used my OPC Foundation scholarship to pay for the trip. Because of the scholarship, I met the Reuters editors who offered me the opportunity. Thank you so much. I still don't believe I won the award, as a West Coast, state-school undergrad, and I still feel honored knowing that such a stellar organization included me in a group of brilliant, young journalists.” Check out his blog and website.

Gregory D. Johnsen, the 2006 Schweisberg scholarship winner, is now in Cairo on a Fulbright-Hays Fellowships for doctural students abroad. He is a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton. A former Fulbright fellow in Yemen and an Arabic speaker, Johnsen wrote his winning essay on presidential politics in Yemen's fledging democracy. Click here for a 2010 update and his current views on Yemen. An article on Yemen appeared on the op-ed page in the New York Times on November 20, 2010.

The 2006 Theo Wilson winner Rachel Jones, formerly with The Associated Press in Caracas, Venezuela, is now freelancing there.

Zvika Krieger, who won the Freedman award in 2006, is is a correspondent for The Atlantic, as well as senior vice president of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace. He is a former editor at The New Republic and a formerNewsweek Middle East correspondent. Here is a piece in did for The Atlantic in 2011.

Michelle Dammon Loyalka, Kuhn winner in 2006, has finished her book, Eating Bitterness: Stories from the Frontlines of China's Great Urban Migration.She moved to China in 2006 after graduating from Missouri and winning the J-school's McIntyre Fellowship, which funds one graduating student each year to work on a book-length project. The winning idea was essentially just a longer version of her OPC essay. The book is a collection of profiles of people who've moved from the countryside into the city in hopes of snatching up their portion of the newly-imported American Dream, and a look at all the difficulties they face and the varied directions this journey takes them. She and her husband live in China with their two children.

Rawya Rageh, the 2006 Dan Eldon winner, now covers the Iraq Parliament for Al Jazeera English. Previously she was based in Cairo where she designed and oversaw coverage of all Egypt's news. She was in the center of AJE's coverage of the Egyptian uprising in 2011. Her reporting was named one of the top 50 stories produced by graduates of Columbia Journalism School during its first 100 years of operation. Rawya's comments at the scholarship luncheon were memorable for her plea that "Africa matters." She also covered the Saddam Hussein trial for AP in Baghdad.  In a September 14, 2006, article on the web, she described locking eyes with him. On a television assignment in the Sudan,where she traveled to the South, to the border with Chad and to Darfur, she had a half hour exclusive interview with the president.

Jacob Adelman, 2005 HL Stevenson winner, joined the Tokyo bureau at Bloomberg News, covering Asia's energy markets, Japanese energy industries and energy-related policies. Hep reviously covered real estate and land-use related topics at The Associated Press' Los Angeles bureau.

Maria Ahmed, 2005 Stan Swinton winner, worked as a staff writer at Global Agenda Magazine in London, part of the Euromoney Institutional Investor group, and is hoping to move to Institutional Investor to cover emerging markets.

A story by Kristen Gillespie, the 2005 Irene Corbally Kuhn scholarship winner, used the rest of the scholarship to go to Turkmenistan and filed this report for NPR.

Marina Walker Guevara, the 2005 Emanuel Freedman winner, is ICIJ’s deputy director. A native of Argentina, she has reported from a half-dozen countries and her investigations have won and shared more than 12 national and international awards. Over a ten-year career, she has written about environmental degradation in Latin America by multinational corporations; shadowy U.S. government HIV/AIDS prevention programs in Africa, and the cigarette mafia in the Tri-Border Area of South America, among other topics. In March 2006 she was awarded the European Commission Lorenzo Natali Prize (Latin America and the Caribbean region) for her reporting about environmental damage caused in Peru by a U.S.-based mining company; that investigation also won her the 2006 Reuters-IUCN Media Award for Excellence in Environmental Reporting. That was also the subject of her essay and she credits the scholarship for giving her the funding to pursue the subject.

Christina Hildreth, the Theo Wilson Scholarship winner in 2005, is now serving in Mumbai, India, with the International Justice Mission, a human rights organization that focuses on securing justice for the poor in 10 countries around the world.  She is the field office's communications coordinator. She writes, designs, and reports on the work the IJM does to save women from sex trafficking. For more information, see www.IJM.org. Click here to read one of her stories.   

Shlomi Simhi, 2005 IF Stone winner, is now editor of Israel's Bar Law Journal. He previously did an internship for the L.A. Times in Israel.  For three months, he covered Tel-Aviv, Gaza and Jerusalem. He writes, “I feel that it's the ultimate fulfillment of the scholarship I was awarded by the OPC Foundation.”

Emily Steele, the Schweisberg winner in 2005, is now US Media and Marketing Correspondent at the Financial Times, covering content and distribution companies, digital media innovators, and the wider marketing industry. She joins from The Wall Street Journal, where she most recently served as a Social Media Editor. She joined the WSJ in 2006 and, until January, she reported about the digital media and marketing industries and contributed several stories to the paper’s investigation about online privacy.

Garance Burke, 2004 Freedman winner, has transferred to The Associated Press' San Francisco bureau. She is a member of the AP's investigative team in the West, focusing on high-impact accountability projects with a specialty in data analysis. She was most recently a correspondent in California's San Joaquin Valley.

Joe Hanel, the 2004 HL Stevenson winner, is the Washington correspondent for the Durango Herald.

Krista Mahr, the first Flora Lewis winner in 2004, is at Time magazine in Hong Kong. Before that, she edited two English language magazines in Iceland: the Iceland Review, a cultural quarterly, and Atlantica, the inflight magazine for Icelandair.

Doug Merlino, Kendrick winner in 2004, is the author of The Hustle: One Team and Ten lives in Black and White that has won several awards. He also was editor of the OPC Bulletin and is completing two books.

Tess Taylor, the 2004 IF Stone winner, spent 2010 on a year long poetry fellowship, living at the Amy Clampitt's house in the Berkshires, and working on a new book of poems. 

Matt Whitaker, 2004 Stan Swinton winner, is a reporter for Dow Jones Newswires.

The 2004 Dan Eldon winner Martin Patience is the BBC correspondent in Beijing. He writes in April 2009: "It's a great job, fascinating story, and absolutely beautiful country. I really wouldn't want to be anywhere else."

Nick Zamiskis, who won the Schweisberg scholarship in 2004, is at Yale Law School after several years covering China for the Wall Street Journal.

The 2004 Theo Wilson winner, Sarah Garland, traveled to El Salvador where Inter Press Service published her article on gangs, the same subject of her winning essay.

Fariba Nawa, 2004 Kuhn winner, is the author of Opium Nation which details her reporting on her native Afganistan. She also wrote an article on the Afghan women and the drug trade that ran on the cover of the London Sunday Times Magazine. Click here for an update.

Andrew Strickler, 2004 Reuters winner,  is a Legal Industry Reporter at Law360. He covers firm strategy, deals and hires, scandals, and all stories related to legal business. He previously served as a National Criminal Justice Reporter for The Daily and as a Crime Reporter at Newsday.

Marton Dunai, who won the Roy Rowan scholarship in 2003, moved to Budapest in September 2008, after six years in California. He's a traveling regional (Balkans, Central Europe) correspondent at the leading Hungarian daily and is working for some American initiatives on the side, as well as Transitions Online in Prague and the Center for Investigative Reporting in Sarajevo. He is also starting his own blog /news site to chronicle his travels in multimedia

Mariam Fam, 2003 Stan Swinton winner, an AP writer based in Cairo, reported for the wire service from Iraq.

Jason McClure, 2003 Freedman winner, is an East Africa-based correspondent for Bloomberg. He and his wife Tessa live in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Previously he covered the Justice Department for Legal Times in Washington D.C. and interned for Newsweek on the foreign desk and in the Boston bureau. He writes, "The OPC scholarship was a key factor in getting the Newsweek internship, as I handed my clips to their chief of correspondents during the OPC tour."

Kristy Siegfried, 2003 Stevenson winner, worked at The Star (in Johannesburg), South Africa’s best-selling daily newspaper.

Wei Gu, 2002 Reuters winner,  is now with The Wall Street Journal Asia’s digital team as Editor of China Wealth and Luxury. In her new role she oversees wealth and luxury coverage for the Chinese language site of WSJ.com as well as WSJ's global platforms. Wei joins from Reuters, where she was China Columnist for Breakingviews. She initiated Chinese commentary for Reuters in 2005 after three years in the U.S., covering tech companies and handling important China-related stories. She is based in Hong Kong. She writes, “As a former Reuters scholarship winner, I owe a great deal to the Overseas Press Club Foundation. Without you, my fulfilling journey at the company would not have been possible.”

Brad Hong, who won the Schewisberg scholarship in 2002, is working as a reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He was part of the P-I's business staff that won the 2006 Best Business Section award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

William Nessen, 2000 Dan Eldon Scholarship winner, is in Cape Town S.A. working on a film.

Carissa S Wyant, 2002 Dan Eldon winner, used her scholarship to further her education, and complete her studies at Yale. A 2002 graduate of Wellesley College with a double-major in Peace and Justice Studies and Comparative Religion, she holds a master's degree in Religious Studies from the Yale University Divinity School. Her dream is still to work as a Middle East correspondent. She writes, “Receiving the OPC Foundation scholarship in 2002 brought me one step closer to that dream by investing in my education, thus equipping me with the historical framework and analytical tools needed to be an effective and responsible journalist.”

Melissa Chan, 2001 Kendrick winner, who spent time with ABC News and World News Tonight with Peter Jennings wrote, “I thank the OPC Foundation for really moving beyond just the scholarship fund; I've had support far above what I ever expected when I won the scholarship.” She joined Al Jazeera English as a producer/reporter in the network’s Beijing bureau.

Damien Cave, the IF Stone winner from 1998, is the Mexico City Correspondent for The New York Times, covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. He most recently served as Miami Bureau Chief for the paper, after several years reporting from Baghdad. For a revealing look at marriage in a war zone, see Damien's story that ran in the Times On January 20, 2008: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/fashion/20baghdad.html?_r=1&ref=style&oref=slogin
He was among a team of Times reporters who were finalists for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. He also led a smaller group that won the 2008 Overseas Press Club award for best international coverage on the Web. 

Nicholas Confessore, who won the 1998 Harper's Magazine Award, is a political reporter at The New York Times. He is currently covering the 2012 presidential campaign, focusing on the rapidly evolving world of political fundraising and campaign finance.  Previously, he wrote about New York state politics and government for the Metropolitan Desk. He has also worked in the Brooklyn and City Hall bureaus of The Times. Before joining The Times in 2004, He was an editor at The Washington Monthly and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and Rolling Stone, among other publications. He began his career as a staff writer at The American Prospect.  He was part of a team of reporters whose coverage of the downfall of New York governor Eliot Spitzer won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting and the Sigma Delta Chi award for deadline reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Kristina Shevory, the 1998 Reuters winner, is a freelance writer. She has been writing about business since 1998 in Russia, Texas and Seattle for the Seattle Times, Dow Jones, BusinessWeek, Investor's Business Daily, New York Post and the New York Times.

Edward Wong, the David Schweisberg winner in 1998, is an Iraq correspondent for The New York Times, a position he has held since November 2003. He began working for The Times in October 1999 and has been a reporter on the Metro, Sports, Business and Foreign desks. Here in a front page on January 20, 2012, he describes having spent a week in northern Myanmar (Burma).

Chris Reardon, an OPC Foundation winner in 1992, is a  Senior Digital Editor/Writer for the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency in Geneva, Switzerland.

 
Copyright ©2007 Overseas Press Club Foundation