2023 OPC Foundation Scholar Awards - March 1, 2023

Meet the 2023 Scholar Award Winners!

Watch the Awards Ceremony

Youcef Bounab, Harper's Magazine Scholarship in memory of I.F.Stone, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY

Andrew Califf, Stan Swinton Scholarship, New York University

Chris Chang, Seymour & Audrey Topping Scholarship, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism  
   
Nuha Dolby, Roy Rowan Fellowship, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Viola Flowers, N.S. Bienstock Scholarship, Stony Brook University

Zane Irwin, Flora Lewis/Jacqueline Albert-Simon Scholarship, Swarthmore College

Simon Levien, Emanuel R. Freedman Scholarship, Harvard University

Madeleine Long, Irene Corbally Kuhn Scholarship, University of Richmond

Kaela Malig, Sally Jacobsen Scholarship, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

Devin Seán Martin, Fritz Beebe Fellowship, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

Rachel Nostrant, Edith Lederer Scholarship, New York University

Lucy Papachristou, Jerry Flint Scholarship for International Business Reporting, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY

Sarah Raza, Rick Davis-Deb Amos Scholarship, Stanford University

Kailyn Rhone, Reuters Fellowship, New York University

Daniel Shailer, Walter & Betsy Cronkite Scholarship, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

Rayna Song, S&P Global Award for Economic & Business Reporting, Northwestern University

Francis Tang, David R. Schweisberg Scholarship, Syracuse University

Yucheng Tang, Richard Pyle Scholarship, New York University 

2022 OPC Foundation Scholar Awards - May 11, 2022

Meet the 2022 Winners

Reporters Notes on Ukraine (Uncut Version)

2021 OPC Foundation Scholar Awards - April 8, 2021

Meet the 2021 Winners

Read more about the 2020 Scholar Awards Luncheon

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Ben Taub, the 2015 Freedman Scholarship winner (above), won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Ben, who has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2017, was awarded the Pulitzer for “Guantanamo’s Darkest Secret,” his account of a man who was tortured at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility for over a decade. The Pulitzer Board praised Taub for “blending on-the-ground reporting and lyrical prose to offer a nuanced perspective on America's wider war on terror.” Ben aslo won the Best Investigative Reporting Award in any medium at the 2017 Overseas Press Club Awards Dinner. The story "War Crimes in Syria" appeared in The New Yorker and was funded in part by the Pulitzer Center.

Emily Steele, Schweisberg winner in 2005, is seen with her colleague Michael Schmidt and the Pulitzer Prize they won for public service. A media reporter for the New York Times, Emily was recognized for her reporting on sexual harrassment allegations against Fox News host Bill O'Reilly.

Ed Ou, Eldon winner in 2007, and his NBC News Left Field colleague Aurora Almendral, won the 2018 OPC Award for Best International Reporting in the broadcast media showing a concern for the human condition. The winning entry was entitled "The Kill List: The Brual Drug War in the Philippines." Ed is a video journalist for NBC News. He also won  a 2020 Peabody Award in the news category for a work he produced for NBC Digital entitled A Different Kind Of Force: Policing Mental Illness.

2009 IF Stone winner Jonathan Jones won two Emmys for the PBS Frontline/ProPublica in-depth documentary, "Firestone and the Warlord." The film, which looked at the Firestone tire company's actions during the Liberian Civil War, won an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism-Form and a second Emmy for Outstanding Research. Earlier this year, The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights named, "Firestone and the Warlord," the winner of an 2015 RFK Journalism Award in the new media category. The subject was the topic of Jonathan's winning essay six years earlier. Here is the OPC program on how to turn research into an award-winning documentary.

Congratulations to 2006 Schweisberg winner Gregory Johnsen who is seen here accepting the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Coverage of Congress from the National Press Foundation on behalf of his BuzzFeed News colleagues for their centerpiece titled "60 Words and A War Without End." Here’s the video on C-Span: http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4528727/gregory-johnsen

Congratulations to 2008 Stan Swinton winner Paul Sonne (center) for winning an Overseas Press Club Award. Based in London, Paul and his colleagues from the Wall Street Journal won the Malcolm Forbes Award for best international business reporting in newspapers. The winning series of articles, “Censorship, Inc,” described how Iran, Egypt, Libya and Syria used technology from Western and Chinese companies to spy on dissidents, conduct surveillance, and track mobile phone use.

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Congratulations to Ben Hubbard, 2007 Stan Swinton awardee, for winning the 2012 Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.  He shared the honor with C.J. Chivers for their work in Syria.  Although Ben won for his reporting for The Associated Press, both journalists are now with the New York Times.  Ben began his career at AP with an OPC Foundation internship in AP’s Jerusalem bureau  Ben and C.J. Chivers both went in and out of Syria multiple times in 2012, often traveling by foot and at night in order to avoid detection. They managed to gain the trust of rebel groups and report amidst bombs, bullets and the constant threat of capture. Their articles offer a glimpse into a region most readers are unfamiliar with, and were reported with the utmost accuracy possible in a war-torn country.  “Syria is probably as dangerous as or more dangerous than any other country that a winner has reported from,” said Richard Stolley (BSJ52, MSJ53), a former managing editor of TIME who is one of three judges for the award and a member of Medill’s Board of Advisers. “What was most remarkable was, under these awful conditions, how good their writing and reporting was.” Stolley is a former president of the OPC.  Ben described his coverage of Syria as helping fill an information void about what is going on in the country.  He noted, “I have always considered it my job as an Arabic-speaking journalist to try to act like a bridge between the often baffling events taking place in the Arab world and the American or English-language reader.”

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The work of 2006 OPC Foundation scholar Rawya Rageh reporting for Al Jazeera English on air and on Twitter was named one of the top 50 news stories produced by graduates of Columbia Journalism School as part of its Centennial Celebration. Rawya was in Cairo’s Tahrir Square for the dramatic protests that toppled Hosni Mubarak and marked the historic bloom of the Arab Spring. 

The Overseas Press Club Foundation is the 501 (C)(3) charitable organization affiliated with the Overseas Press Club, which was founded in New York City in 1939 by a group of foreign correspondents to improve the profession of international journalism. For last year 25 years, through tumultuous times in global journalism, the OPC Foundation has been steadfast in its commitment to support and promote the next generation of international correspondents, given them the encouragement and experience they need to launch their careers.  In that time, the Foundation has singled out 370 graduate and undergraduate students for its Scholar Awards which offers either scholarships or fellowships for young journalists to gain valuable experience in the foreign bureaus of the Associated Press, Reuters, Wall Street Journals, Forbes and the GroundTruth Project, among others.