OPC Foundation President John Daniszewski’s welcome speech

Laura Zelenko, senior executive editor and global standards editor for Bloomberg News, introduced the first winner of the newly launched Rob Urban Fellowship for Reporting in Central and Eastern Europe, for which she is the founder.

Urban was a financial journalist who helped establish coverage of Eastern Europe for Bloomberg News in the early 1990s in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He died suddenly on Sept. 20, 2023, at the age of 66. Zelenko and Urban had two children together, Sasha and Katya, who both attended the reception. She said the family was honored to see the fellowship go to the first recipient, Sofia Sorochinskaia, a Russian native, to help her realize her goal of reporting on Russia as an international correspondent.

“We all miss Rob so much, and are so grateful to everyone, many of whom are here, who helped make this fellowship a reality,” she said. She expressed special thanks to Matthew Winkler, a co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, who hired both Urban and Zelenko while they were working as freelancers in Prague. Winkler supplied an excerpt from an interview with Urban from a book about Bloomberg News that has not yet been published, which Sasha Urban read aloud.

In the interview, Rob Urban recounted how he and Zelenko going on “vacation” in Prague from their jobs at the Charlotte Observer, freelancing for Bloomberg, and soon landing their first big stories in banking and bond markets. Their early reporting led to a series of stories, titled “Prime Bank Fraud” that won the OPC’s Malcom Forbes Award for 1994.

Sorochinskaia, speaking about her award in a video, recounted her experience working as a producer for TV Rain in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, as the government shut down the network along with nearly every other independent news outlet. She said during the ensuing information blackout, Russians depended on foreign news sources.

“That’s when I realized the true power of international journalism,” she said. “It’s not just for people abroad. It’s a lifeline for those seeking the truth in countries like mine.”

Later, while studying at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in the U.S., she returned to Moscow as reporting intern for The Moscow Times, where she covered key political events, “speaking with locals often while hiding from the police knowing that I was the one bringing real stories from inside Russia to the world was mad magical and I want to keep doing it.”

Rambo Talabong, winner of the Nathan S. Bienstock Memorial Scholarship, talked about facing his first libel complaint at the age of 20 while working for the award-winning outlet Rappler in the Philippines. The complaint came from an official who Talabong alleged continued to receive a full salary from the government after he had stopped serving in any official role.

Though the complaint was eventually dismissed, he remembers poring over stacks of legal papers.

“Amid the celebration, my colleagues called me brave. But deep in my chest I felt a grip – fear. I was petrified, realizing that doing what I loved meant facing more of these cold white stacks of paper,” Talabong said. “But then, my editors at Rappler told me this: it’s a badge of honor. Keep doing what you're doing.”

Since then, he has reported on police wrongdoing in the Philippine drug war, natural disasters, hostage crises, national elections and conflict in the South China Sea. Talabong holds a degree in communication from Ateneo de Manila University and studied data journalism at Columbia University.

Isabela Fleischmann, the winner of the S&P Global Award for Economic and Business Reporting, is a Brazilian journalist fluent in Portuguese, Spanish and English. While working for a Brazilian newspaper from South Africa in late 2021, she was among the first to report on the emergence of a new Covid-19 variant now known as Omicron. Fleischmann said she faced intense pressure to report the story quickly and scoop competitors but also understood the crucial need to verify facts.

“That experience taught me a valuable lesson to me. Journalism is not just about speed, it’s about being credible and trustworthy. Sharing accurate information impacts public health policy and communities, and it’s a responsibility I'm proud to uphold.”

Currently at New York University, she has contributed to Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and other outlets, and is eager to continue work in Latin America. She has a journalism degree from the State University of Londrina, Brazil.

Charles Clewis, winner of this year’s David R. Schweisberg Memorial Scholarship, wrote about dire conditions in a Syrian refugee community near the Jordanian border. In 2022, while serving as an American military officer in Syria, he conducted hours of personal interviews with rebel fighters, heard firsthand accounts of atrocities in Syrian prisons under Bashar al-Assad, life under Islamic State rule, and struggles of those displaced by war.

Clewis said his work and travels across Africa and Syria have “instilled in me a desire to continue writing and photographing stories that illustrate the harsh realities of humanitarian crisis and armed conflict.”

After finishing his studies at the University of Oxford, he plans to return to the Middle East, “to tell stories in and on-the-ground and intimate manner, just as they should be told.”

Andrea Berg from Mercedes-Benz with Isaac Holmberg

Inaara Gangji, a journalist from Tanzania who won the Edith Lederer Scholarship, said she decided to become a journalist to examine “the many pressing issues that affect my home country,” as well as that of other nations. While studying journalism at Northwestern University and as a graduate student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, she has been honing her skills as a data-driven reporter.

She said while working as a contributor for Forbes Africa, she found that business and demographic data about Africans like herself, particularly women, either did not exist or were often disregarded.

“These data allow one to see patterns and tell stories that otherwise may be hidden,” Gangji said. “The proliferation of AI and technology, and its role in media is what led me back to graduate school in the first place.”

Carl David Goette-Luciak, the Roy Rowan Scholarship winner, spoke about his decision to pursue journalism on the night when, while working as a human rights researcher in Nicaragua, police shot and killed his colleague Angel Gaona, a TV news reporter, during a live broadcast while reporting on anti-government protests.

“I had long respected Angel’s investigative journalism, which documented corruption and held people who abused power accountable,” he said. He began covering Nicaragua’s nationwide conflict for The Washington Post and the Guardian.

“I learned that I'm the kind of reporter who can run toward the gunfire, into the fray. The kind of journalist who can turn a tense standoff with paramilitary – with a gun to my head – into an interview, genuinely seeking to understand the motives that drive conflict and individual people.”

Goette-Luciak earned an undergraduate degree and a master’s in public policy from the University of Virginia and is fluent in Spanish with proficiency in German.

As a visual journalist and documentary filmmaker from northern India, Kulsoom Rizavi, winner of the Flora Lewis/Jacqueline Albert-Simon Scholarship, has reported on Muslims publicly practicing their faith under Narendra Modi’s right-wing nationalist government, press repression in Kashmir, and communities in Iceland, Oregon and Mexico conducting funerals for dying and dead glaciers. Rizavi, who is proficient in English, Hindi, Urdu and French, is currently a senior at Duke University.

“My storytelling has taken me to places I never expected to visit and given me a chance to speak to people I otherwise never would have encountered,” she said. “What connects my work is a desire to practice community-centered journalism that doesn't just take away stories, but actually imparts value to communities – and to document the human experience in a way that doesn't let past injustices be forgotten and repeated.”

Of the 18 awardees this year, three will start fellowships over the next few months at Reuters bureaus in Mexico, Germany and Dubai, and one for Bloomberg – also in Dubai. Approximately five more fellowships will be announced this spring.

Last year, the OPC Foundation launched a new initiative, Rukeyser Reporting Grants, to help fund freelance international reporting projects of former winners. Grants are offered twice a year and can range up to $5,000 a project. Diana Kruzman, the first Reporting Grants Awardee in 2024, attended the reception and is preparing to embark on a reporting trip this summer to the Aral Sea area to compare how surrounding countries are tackling desertification and the receding sea.

Together with the annual Scholar Awards and semi-annual Reporting Grants the OPC Foundation is committed to supporting the future of international journalism and ensuring the best talent is at hand for the task. 

Written by Chad Bouchard