Nieman Reports
Spring 2006 Issue
Nieman Notes
Compiled by Lois Fiore
1943 1947
1952 1961
1968 1972
1977 1980
1984 1987
1989 1991
1992 1994
1999 2000
2003 2004
2006
-- 1943 --
James Daniel died on December 26, 2005. He was 89 years old. According to his daughter Nina, he died peacefully in his sleep after suffering a heart attack at his home in Weston, Connecticut.
Daniel was born in Lexington, North Carolina. After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he became a reporter at The (Raleigh) News & Observer, where he worked throughout the 1930's. In the 1940's he moved to the Washington Daily News, where he served as both reporter and city editor. Daniel later worked as contributing editor for Time magazine and a roving editor for Reader's Digest in the 1950's.
When Daniel retired he and his wife, Ramona Teijeiro Daniel, moved into an historic home in Weston, Connecticut, which they "painstakingly and lovingly returned to museum-quality grandeur," according to the local paper. In Weston, Daniel became a well-known town historian and, in the late 1960's, was elected first selectman. In June of last year, Weston honored Daniel with a reception and plaque in gratitude of "his leadership and foresight in the preservation and protection of Weston's history," said the paper. The ceremony took place in Weston's Meeting Room, which Daniel, dubbed curator, had decorated with authentic colonial period pieces.
"Jim will be missed by the entire town of Weston. Over the years, he contributed in so many ways to make Weston the wonderful town it is today," first selectman Woody Bliss said. Bliss then called the Meeting Room "a lasting monument to Jim's intellect and dedication."
Daniel is survived by two daughters, four grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. His wife, Ramona, died in 2000.
Contributions in Daniel's name may be made to the Weston EMS, the Weston Historical Society, or Sacred Heart Church in Georgetown, Connecticut.
-- 1947 --
Fletcher P. Martin, the first African American to receive a Nieman Fellowship, died from complications of diabetes on November 27, 2005. He was 89 years old.
A native of McMinnville, Tennessee, Martin graduated from Louisville Municipal College in 1938 and quickly became city editor of the Louisville Leader, a weekly with 20 employees and 22,000-circulation that covered the African-American community. In 1942, he joined the Louisville Defender as a feature writer and continued to cover African-Americans issues.
He spent 22 months in the South Pacific during World War II, earning the titles of first accredited war correspondent from Louisville and first black war correspondent with Douglas MacArthur's forces. After covering the war, he returned to the Louisville Defender as the paper's city editor and advocated for desegregation.
According to his son, after Martin's Nieman year, and despite his many professional experiences, he was denied a job at The Courier-Journal when an editor feared his staff would quit rather than work with a black reporter. When offered a job with The Washington Post, he declined when he learned of their segregated restrooms and instead returned to the Louisville Defender. He moved to Chicago in 1952 to cover courts and civil rights as the Chicago Sun-Times's first black reporter. In 1962, Martin became a press attaché for the U.S. Embassy's former U.S. Information Agency in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Later positions with the agency led him to Kenya and Ghana.
Martin retired to Majorca, part of Spain's Balearic Islands, for 25 years, then moved to Indianapolis for the last seven years of his life.
Merv Aubespin, a former president of the National Association of Black Journalists, recalled Martin's leadership in a Courier-Journal obituary: "He was one of the first African Americans to work for a major daily newspaper. He was one of our pioneers who opened the door in the majority media for African Americans." Said the Sun-Times: "Fletcher Martin introduced Chicago to the Rev. Martin Luther King." When Martin left Louisville for Chicago, Mayor Charles Farnsley presented him with the key to the city of Louisville.
According to one of his daughters, the Harvard insignia was displayed at his wake in Indianapolis. Being a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, she said, was Martin's proudest affiliation.
Martin is survived by a son and three daughters.
-- 1952 --
Lawrence Nakatsuka, a former Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporter, died January 1st. He was 85. Nakatsuka was the first Japanese-American Nieman Fellow.
Nakatsuka was born "Kaoru Nakatsuka" in Hanalei, Kauai, Hawaii. After graduating from the Saint Louis School, where he was called "Lawrence," Nakatsuka became the first Japanese American to join the staff of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and covered Japanese community events and labor issues for the paper. In 1941, he was dispatched to the Japanese consulate to cover the attack on Pearl Harbor, an assignment deemed dangerous for a Japanese American. In 1946, in the job of assistant city editor, he conducted an interview with Minnie Yamauchi, who had recently graduated from Columbia University with a master's degree in labor relations. Two years later they were married.
Following his Nieman year, Nakatsuka was appointed press secretary to Governor Samuel Wilder King, and later Governor William Quinn, during Hawaii's statehood admission. In his last column, a 2004 viewpoint column in the Star-Bulletin, he recalled of this time, "There were tens of thousands of Hawaii residents, like myself, who were second-class citizens. Those were the years before statehood, before we became first-class citizens." Quinn appointed him deputy director of the former Department of Social Services, and in 1955 he toured Burma, India, Pakistan and the Philippines for the U.S. Information Agency.
Nakatsuka moved to Washington in 1963 to serve as legislative assistant to Senator Hiram Fong and advanced to become Fong's executive assistant during the years of the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and Immigration Reform Act. He returned to Hawaii as vice president for legislative affairs for the Chamber of Commerce of Hawaii, where he remained until his retirement in 1983.
Nakatsuka received the Asian American Journalists Association's (AAJA) Lifetime Achievement Award in August 2000. He is cited by the AAJA as the first Japanese American in Hawaii to work for an English-language newspaper.
Nakatsuka is survived by three children, a brother, and two sisters.
-- 1961 --
Lewis Nkosi writes: "A book about me, with essays by international scholars and photographs, is just out from Rodopi Publishers (Amsterdam and New York) titled 'Still Beating the Drum: Critical Perspectives on Lewis Nkosi,' edited by Professors Lindy Stiebel and Liz Gunner. I finished my novel 'Mandela's Ego,' which is due to be published in May or June in Cape Town. In March there will be special panels at the ALA [African Languages Association, a U.S.-based Association of African Scholars] annual conference to be held in Accra to celebrate my 70th birthday and literary career."
"Still Beating the Drum" is an attempt to organize and evaluate the work of Nkosi, one of South Africa's most respected writers and critics. Part one consists of papers from scholars around the world currently studying Nkosi's work and writings; part two reprints Nkosi's key articles and some unpublished recent interviews, and part three is a timeline and bibliography of Nkosi's life and work.
-- 1968 --
Edmund B. Lambeth, director of the Center for Religion, the Professions and the Public at the University of Missouri, writes that The Pew Charitable Trust's board of directors renewed its support with a $1.5 million grant and that the program's academic home will now be the University of Missouri's School of Journalism.
Lambeth also noted that he planned to use the citizen journalism section of the Winter 2005 issue as reading material for his students:
"I'd like to use it as required reading in a session of a course on Journalism, Religion and Public Life. We will explore some of the implications of citizen journalism for religion reporting, writing and editing. "As the founder of the Civic Journalism Interest Group within the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, I believe your new issue is especially timely."
Lambeth, 73, who became director of the center in February 2004, will step down from the position in July 2006. A search is underway for a new director.
-- 1972 --
John Carroll has been appointed the first Knight Visiting Lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The position is designed for "distinguished journalists who will study, analyze and lead the discussion on the future of journalism in America and around the world," according to the December 2005 announcement of the appointment. The recipient of the lectureship is to spend a year at a major university of their choosing for reflection, research and teaching. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is funding the position with a $200,000 grant.
In the announcement, Carroll was quoted as saying:
My topic is an urgent one: nothing less than the fate of journalism. The economic underpinnings of our craft are eroding. At the same time, the Web is offering rich opportunities for journalism in new forms. And, in the current scramble for market share, the work of the principled journalist is being lost in a din of marketing and propaganda.
As a matter of public policy, a self-governing nation simply cannot do without real journalism. As a practical matter, we must find ways to make it pay. These are some of the concerns I intend to explore -- urgently and, I hope, realistically -- in this new role at Harvard. I couldn't be more grateful for the opportunity.
Prior to this appointment, Carroll had been editor of the Los Angeles Times. He will be based in the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics & Public Policy.
-- 1977 --
Hennie van Deventer writes that his wife, Tokkie, "is 60 on 15 March. As a special tribute to a special woman, I had a
Web site created. Even if I do not expect that you will understand one written word, I do hope that you will recognize some of the faces! ... My latest project is a so-called 'photo album' of our beloved Sabiepark in the South African bush. That will be my book number 11."
-- 1980 --
Jim Boyd, deputy editorial page editor at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Minnesota, received the 2005 Arthur Ross Award for Distinguished Reporting and Analysis on Foreign Affairs, given by The American Academy of Diplomacy, "for critical, perceptive and nonpartisan commentary on the policies of governments and international organizations, reflecting exhaustive research, a willingness to tell truth to power, and a consistent appreciation for the importance of cooperation among nations."
Here is a brief excerpt from Boyd's acceptance speech:
... The last three years have been difficult. The pushback for our aggressive views has been intense. Radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt organized a campaign to get people to drop subscriptions; we lost about 200, and it scared my superiors. Bloggers like Power Line harassed us continuously. A senator who shall go unnamed -- hint: he's no fan of Kofi Annan -- had breakfast with our publisher and warned him that we were beginning to be associated with the loony left and that I had an angry agenda. Well, you folks are not the loony left. So thank you for honoring me; it will help.
I want to assure you that I am not an angry bomb thrower. Most of my writings on foreign affairs involve topics such as: Can the E.U. make the single currency succeed; must NATO go 'out of area or out of business?' Should NATO be enlarged? Should we ratify the CWC treaty, the ICC treaty? Whither Russia? And so on. ...
... I think two factors caused our more aggressive editorializing over the last three or four years. The first is our deeply felt belief in multilateralism. John Cowles Sr., the publisher who started Cowles family ownership of the Star Tribune, was a friend of President Dwight Eisenhower and a passionate believer in the United Nations -- as a prophylactic, I'm sure, against a repeat of the carnage of World War II. Cowles pretty much single-handedly pulled Minnesota out of the isolationism of the Charles Lindbergh crowd. So to see all of the multilateral institutions pretty well trashed was offensive.
Second, I am a Vietnam veteran. I went there as an Army case officer, undercover actually as a Foreign Service Reserve officer attached to Mac/Coords. I worked for a young FSO named Mort Dworken. Last I heard he was political officer at the Court of St. James.
But the kids I went through basic training with at Fort Lewis were mostly farm kids from around the Northwest. Most went straight from basic to advanced infantry training to Vietnam. About half did not come home. I cannot tell you how deeply I feel a commitment to them and through them to today's young men and women to help ensure that whenever they are put in a combat zone it is because we literally have no other option.
That's what has motivated my writings. Not partisanship certainly; not a generalized angry outlook, but specific issues about which we -- I -- feel quite deeply. ...
-- 1984 --
Jane Daugherty reports a job change:
I'm happy to report that I have accepted a full-time appointment as associate professor of journalism at Florida International University (FIU).
The School of Journalism and Mass Communication is located on the North Miami Beach Campus on Biscayne Bay. Eight of the school's graduates have won Pulitzers so far, and FIU graduates more bilingual journalists every year than any U.S. university except the University of Texas.
The decision to leave a great gig at the Palm Beach Post was difficult; for the past year I've been covering public health and emergency responses to things like hurricanes and terrorism. [See her article on page 6.] While there I was fortunate to work on Modern-Day Slavery, a project that won a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the Harry Chapin Media Award, and the James K. Batten Public Service Award. But when this offer from FIU came unexpectedly, it was just too good to turn down.
I've taught a couple of courses at FIU as an adjunct and really admire the new journalism department head, Allan Richards, and the new dean, Lillian Lodge Kopenhaver, who is an expert in constitutional law and First Amendment issues. The school is engaged in an exciting expansion into some specialized coverage areas I care a lot about, including social welfare, public health and aging, so it is a good time to make a move I've thought about for several years.
The other plus is the North Miami Beach campus is only 60 miles from West Palm Beach, so I'm going to continue living in my 1930 Key West-style cottage near the Intracoastal in a small town just south of West Palm, Lake Worth, which has a lot of diversity and old Florida feel.
Other news: My daughter Meghan, 18, is a freshman at George Washington University in D.C. and just made the honor roll. My son Ryan, 25, (Nieman kid when he was four) graduated with a major in Spanish from Denison University and, after a stint as a translator for EFE News Service in Miami, has moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where he is using his bilingual skills pursuing a couple of business opportunities. He's planning to return to Spain this summer to teach English.
-- 1987 --
Doug Cumming writes:
The Nieman class of '87 has probably been one of the most flocking in the fellowship's history. We've had summer reunions every two years, from North Carolina beaches to British Columbia, roughly based on the model of our one week sharing a villa in Jamaica during the January break of '87.
The latest was a bit thin and brief, on account of some health problems. Still, the group gathered for a scrumptious long weekend at the end of July in Lexington, Virginia where my wife, Libby, and I were the hosts. [Doug is in his third year as a PhD teaching journalism at Washington & Lee University, and Libby is also on the W&L faculty, in physics.] Al May, now an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, came with his wife, Carol Darr; Linda Wilson flew in from Washington State with her husband, Rick Carns, and Susan Dentzer, currently covering the health beat for "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," came with her husband, Chuck Alston, now a senior vice president with the P.R. firm MS&L in Washington, D.C. It was good food, Blue Ridge music, a float down the James, and golf -- a little like old times.
--1989 --
Liu Binyan died on December 5th of colon cancer in a hospital in New Jersey. He was 80. He spent the past 17 years in exile
in the United States. Even after he was diagnosed with cancer and given only a short time to live, the Chinese government refused to give him permission to return to China, despite his own efforts and the support of his friends. He had wanted to die in the country he loved.
Liu Binyan's presence in the class of 1989 had a powerful effect on his classmates. What follows are remembrances from two of his classmates, Constance Casey and Rick Tulsky. And the End Note is an essay written by two of Liu Binyan's colleagues, Juntao Wang '96 and Xiaoping Chen '98.
• Constance Casey: We were honored to have Liu Binyan in our Nieman group. We knew about his distinguished career as a reporter, but I think it was hard for us -- for me, anyway -- to completely take in how eventful and difficult his life had been. On thing we did know, and could clearly see, was that he adored his wife, Zhu Hong, and that they were an inspiring, mutually supportive couple.
I remember from our time together not only his dignity but also his bemused smile. He and I were sitting together in a seminar about surveillance and invasion of privacy. (That was 1988, and our speaker was sounding the alarm even then.) I asked him at the break what the Chinese word for 'privacy' was.
He smiled and said, 'There is no word in Chinese for privacy.'
I think from his perspective, living in China through the most trying of times, he may have seen us, the American Niemans, as innocents. But he was never patronizing or dismissive or superior. When he became exiled from his home country after Tiananmen Square, I expected the Chinese government would eventually relent and allow him to be reunited with his children, especially when he became gravely ill. How innocent of me to think that.
• Rick Tulsky: The amazing thing about our Nieman experience was spending a year with journalistic heroes -- Joe Thloloe, who had experienced police breaking into his house to arrest him in South Africa for practicing journalism; Julio Godoy, whose newspaper had been blown up over crusading journalism in Guatemala; Moeletsi Mbeki, whose entire family had been dedicated to achieving justice in South Africa, and Bill Kovach, whose dedication to aggressive and courageous journalism cost him his editorship in Atlanta. But their experiences were overshadowed, as amazing as that seems, by the courage and dedication to the truth demonstrated by Liu Binyan, a man of quiet determination to journalism as a means to expose injustice and inform the public. Amazingly, Binyan remained dedicated to the truth despite decades of personal hardship as a result of his convictions.
It would be impossible to overstate the impact of spending a year in that environment. And for that reason, I will be forever indebted to Liu Binyan.
• Constance Casey has retired after five years as a gardener with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. "It has been fun," she says. "I'm keeping a hand in urban gardening by volunteering one day a week. But it is time to return to the world of words. I've started writing a column on gardening for Slate, the online magazine."
-- 1991 --
Rui Araujo writes to say that he has a new job:
I became the ombudsman of the Portuguese daily newspaper Publico as of January 1, 2006. I had lots of doubts, but Bill Kovach [former Nieman Curator] and two other journalist friends (Miguel Sousa Tavares and José Manuel Barata-Feyo) convinced me to take the job. It is another challenge in my career. The job seems to me to be a kind of Nieman year -- thinking journalism instead of reporting.
Next May, a book will be published (Oficina do Livro, Lisbon) with some of the best reports ever done in Portugal since the advent of democracy (April 25, 1974). I am one of the chosen reporters. My specific contribution is a story I did for monthly newsmagazine Grande Reportagem, almost three years ago. I tell my lonely and silent 'adventures,' as the second in command of the fishing boat Intrujão, south of Cape Verde. It is a story of men and sharks.
I am also finishing my third thriller. It is a story based on real facts: There are two homicide brigade cops dealing with a crime connected -- this time -- with cocaine.
-- 1992--
Seth Effron writes:
On February 1, 2006, I left my job as executive editor of State Government Radio in Raleigh, North Carolina. During 18 months with the start-up, I launched its Web site, a daily newsletter, and a daily broadcast that covered North Carolina state government and politics, local government, economic development, and education. I achieved all I think I could and have given the operation a reporting and journalistic foundation.
I did not stay unemployed for long. Starting on March 1, I became the deputy press secretary to North Carolina Governor Mike Easley. Easley, a Democrat, is serving his second four-year term. I'll be helping oversee all communications with the news media and work with the governor on policy development and his efforts to communicate policy initiatives.
-- 1994 --
Jerry Kammer, of Copley News Service, won a George Polk Award for political reporting for uncovering the scandal of U.S. Representative Randy Cunningham, a Southern California Republican who admitted accepting $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors. Kammer won the award with Dean Calbreath, of The San Diego Union-Tribune, and Marcus Stern, also of Copley News Service. The awards, given by Long Island University to memorialize a CBS correspondent killed while covering the Greek civil war in 1948, will be presented at a ceremony in New York in April.
-- 1999 --
Susan Reed has received an Alicia Patterson Foundation grant, one of eight journalists selected to spend time traveling, researching and writing articles on a particular project. Reed will investigate why significant numbers of women and minorities have failed to rise to the highest levels of the richer corporations.
-- 2000 --
• Mary Kay Magistad has been awarded part of a duPont-Columbia silver baton for "The Global Race for Stem Cell Therapies," a series about stem cell research in the United States, Britain, Israel and China. The series was broadcast on "The World," a nationally syndicated news program. The award went to the three reporters on the series, plus the editor and the executive producer. Magistad is the Beijing-based Northeast Asia correspondent for "The World," and reported the China-based segment of the series. The program is a coproduction of Public Radio International, BBC World Service, and WGBH Radio Boston. It is the only American radio program focusing exclusively on global issues, and it was chosen from over 620 radio and television news entries.
• David Molpus is now executive editor for WVIZ/PBS and 90.3 WCPN ideastream, a multiple-media public service organization in Ohio. In making the announcement, Kit Jensen, COO of ideastream, said "David's skills, abilities and experience provide editorial direction and leadership that is essential to the continued development of our journalism as we leverage technology to provide greater service." Molpus remarked that ideastream is "a vibrant organization with the ambitious goal of becoming an indispensable resource for northeastern Ohio. I am especially impressed with the vision for building community-based journalism and the desire to expand partnerships with other service-oriented organizations."
Molpus had worked at NPR for 28 years as senior correspondent, newscaster and producer. He cohosted NPR's "All Things Considered" Weekend Edition for two years and often was a substitute host on "Morning Edition" and "Weekend Edition Sunday." On leaving NPR, he was the regional "All Things Considered" host at Minnesota Public Radio and was news director for WMRA, the NPR station serving Charlottesville and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
Molpus was NPR's first national correspondent to cover the American South, the first defense correspondent, and the first workplace correspondent. He has won a number of awards, including a National Headliner Award for a report on the impact of gambling on Atlantic City, New Jersey, and a Clarion Award for reports on catfish workers in the Mississippi Delta.
• Thrity Umrigar has a new novel out, "The Space Between Us," published by HarperCollins:
There are two major female characters in 'The Space Between Us' -- Sera Dubash, the upper middle-class Bombayite, and Bhima, the servant who has worked in the Dubash household for many years. The character of Bhima is based on a real person. She worked in the house I grew up in Bombay, a shadow flitting around our middle-class house, her thin brown hands cleaning furniture she was not allowed to sit on, cooking food she was not allowed to share at the family dining table.
But despite these obvious divisions, there was another reality, one that I also noticed when I was a child: I saw servants trusting their meager savings to their mistresses as a way of protecting their money from the grasping hands of drunken husbands; I saw Bhima and the females in my household working peaceably together in the kitchen in a kind of domestic shorthand.
I have always been fascinated by this intersection of gender and class -- how the lives of women from the working class and the middle-class seemed at once so connected and so removed from each other.
It is a theme that has interested me -- haunted me, even -- for as long as I can remember. One of the reasons I have always loved Bombay is because it is a city riddled with contradictions and paradox. In an apartment in a small corner of the city, I grew up experiencing a microcosm of this larger paradox -- this strange tug-of-war between intimacy and unfamiliarity, between awareness and blindness.
'The Space Between Us' is an attempt to understand, through the illuminating searchlight of fiction, paradoxes that I could never make sense of in real life. I began the novel in the spring of 2003. But, in fact, I have been writing this book forever.
Umrigar has been a journalist for 17 years, and has written for The Washington Post, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, and other national newspapers. She also regularly writes for The Boston Globe's book pages. Umrigar teaches creative writing and journalism at Case Western Reserve University. She is also the author of the novel "Bombay Time" and the memoir "First Darling of the Morning: Selected Memories of an Indian Childhood."
-- 2003 --
Ann Simmons will be moving to New Orleans for the Los Angeles Times to cover the many issues involved in the rebuilding of that city after Hurricane Katrina. She'll begin the assignment in March and expects to be there for about a year. She has been the Times's roving state reporter since 2004 and has been with the paper since 1997.
She writes, "I spent several weeks in the region following hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the experience was most exhilarating. The rebuilding of New Orleans is an important and compelling story, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to pursue it. Having spent a lot of my career as a foreign correspondent -- most recently as the bureau chief for the L.A. Times in Nairobi and Johannesburg -- I am looking forward to getting back into the field and doing more on-the-ground people reporting and less desk reporting. I also see this as a great opportunity to explore yet another new culture and learn yet another new 'foreign' language."
-- 2004 --
Carol Bradley, class scribe, submitted the following notes:
• Thierry Cruvellier, after having, in his own words, "embarrassed himself during his whole Nieman year for abusively claiming he had come to Lippmann House to write," has "finally" completed his book on the genocide trials held before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The ICTR was set up in 1994 by the United Nations and located in Arusha, Tanzania, where Thierry was the only international journalist to cover it permanently from 1997 to 2002. Under its French title "Le Tribunal des Vaincus -- Un Nuremberg pour le Rwanda?" the book will be published in April by the publishing house Calmann Lévy. Through the stories of some of the main trials and behind-the-scenes intriguing judicial plots, the book gradually opens to a somewhat disturbing analysis on how justice is rendered in an international setting. It also attempts to define how the Rwanda Tribunal has been different from any other international criminal court. It is the first independent account on the workings of this international tribunal and offers a timely point of reference while the International Criminal Court, the first permanent world criminal court, is about to open its first cases.
• Don Schanche, after more than 20 cumulative years with Knight Ridder, left The Macon (Ga.) Telegraph in December to take a job as the day supervisor in AP's Atlanta Bureau. Don reports that "the job is stimulating and the colleagues are first-rate. The hours -- 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. -- are a shock to the system after years of working a morning newspaper schedule (beginning each workday somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 a.m.). But it's kind of fun to see the sunrise." AP's office is on the 24th floor of the Centennial Tower, "so the sunrise reveals a grand view every morning," according to Don.
• David Stern is currently working as the Caucasus trainer/editor for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR), a nonprofit organization that concentrates on reporting in conflict zones. IWPR started out in the former Yugoslavia and now runs projects in Afghanistan, Central Asia, Africa, Iraq and the Balkans war crimes tribunal in The Hague. The philosophy behind the organization is simple.
Its founders believe that objective, responsible local journalism, which adheres to international standards and reflects all sides of a dispute, can play a part in bringing these conflicts to an end or preventing other conflagrations from breaking out. As part of his job, David helps teach journalists in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia the basics of good journalism and helps edit their articles at IWPR's online publication. He can be reached at loydstern@hotmail.com or dlstern@caucasus.net.
-- 2006 --
Jon Palfreman, an independent documentary film producer, had one of his productions, "Light Speed," win the 2005 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award. "Light Speed" aired in WNET's Innovation series in 2004. The program, Palfreman says, "tells the story of how fiber optic technology -- the technology that makes the Internet possible -- was developed." The award ceremony will be held in May.
A veteran of both U.K. and U.S. television, Palfreman has made over 40 BBC and PBS one-hour documentaries including the Peabody Award-winning series "The Machine That Changed the World," the Emmy Award-winning NOVA "Siamese Twins," and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton-winner "Harvest of Fear." Palfreman has received many awards honoring the quality and accuracy of his journalism. He is the only television producer ever to receive the prestigious Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Writing and is three-time winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science science writing prize, three-time winner of the National Association of Science Writers "Science-in-Society" Journalism Award, and a winner of the Writers Guild Award for best script. Palfreman has written two books and is an adjunct professor at Tufts University.
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