Nieman Foundation Announces 12 Fellows

Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism announced earlier this month the 12 recipients of its prestigious international fellowships, which offer foreign journalists the chance to pursue a year of open study at the University. Each of the incoming fellows heralds from a different country, this year ranging from Canada to Cameroon.

The fellowship program, currently ending its sixty-seventh term, offers a total of 24 fellows up to 10 months to step out of the newsroom and pursue their intellectual interests via Harvard’s course catalogue. Of these, half are foreign nationals and half are U.S. citizens. The Foundation’s domestic fellows were announce in May.

The application process requires, among other things, a proposal for study of a specific issue the prospective fellow wishes to explore, among other things. Focus topics for this year’s fellows range from environmental policy to Internet news, according to the Nieman Foundation’s June 10 announcement.

The fellowship includes a $55,000 stipend and enables the fellows’ families to take advantage of Harvard’s academic and cultural resources as well.

While all fellows will use these resources to delve into their specific interests in depth, most cite general learning and exploration as their greatest ambitions for the next year.

“I’m looking forward to the chance to think about these issues, develop a deeper knowledge base, allow the ideas to percolate,” Beena Sarwar, one of the new fellows, wrote in an e-mail. Sarwar is an editor of The News International, based in Karachi, Pakistan.

Several fellows say they especially look forward to interacting with their new peers over the course of the next year.

“The idea of spending a year of reading, reflection, and vigorous discussion with like-minded colleagues at America’s premier educational institution is a rare and remarkable opportunity,” new fellow Bill Schiller—currently foreign editor at The Toronto Star—wrote in an e-mail.

The Nieman Foundation also expects Fellows to take on the role of teacher by participating in undergraduate discussions and by mentoring aspiring journalists on campus. Many, like Sarwar, already have advice to impart. She urged young journalists to embrace honest observations and analysis—even over a pretense of perfect objectivity.

“Forget objectivity, it doesn’t exist,” she wrote. “And if you have to be biased, let it be on the side of the disadvantaged, provide them a platform or a voice.”

Schiller said he thinks aspiring journalists can best learn by example.

“Everyday, America is blessed with some of the best newspapers in the world,” he wrote. “Undergrads should make that reading part of their daily lives.”

The new fellows, other than Sarwar and Schiller, are Claudia Antunes, deputy Rio de Janeiro bureau chief of Folha de S. Paulo; Zippi N. Brand, a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker in Tel-Aviv, Israel; Kim Cloete, a specialist journalist for the South African Broadcasting Corporation; Taghreed El-Khodary, a freelance print and television journalist in Gaza City, Palestine; Yaping Jiang, executive vice president of the People’s Daily Online in Beijing, China; Mary Ann Jolley, a producer/reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Sydney; Guillermo E. Franco Morales, content manager of new media and editor of eltiempo.com in Bogota, Colombia; Takashi Oshima, a reporter, for The Asahi Shimbun in Tokyo, Japan; Altin Raxhimi, a producer-editor for Top Channel T.V., and correspondent for Transitions Online, in Tirana, Albania; and Alice Tatah, a producer/presenter for Cameroon Radio and Television in Yaounde.

—Staff writer Yingzhen Zhang can be reached at zhang9@fas.harvard.edu.