Announcing the 2025 Alumni Award Winners

Each year, Columbia Journalism School honors up to four alumni for their exceptional journalism careers, single achievements, and contributions to education or related fields. This year, the following CJS community members have been named Alumni Award Winners. Read on to learn more about this year’s awardees. 

Frances Dinkelspiel, '86 M.S.

Author and Co-Founder, Cityside

Frances Dinkelspiel is an award-winning journalist and author who co-founded Cityside, the nonprofit news organization behind three San Francisco Bay Area news sites: Berkeleyside, The Oaklandside, and Richmondside. A former staff writer for the Syracuse Newspapers and the San Jose Mercury News, her freelance articles have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Daily Beast, People, and elsewhere.

Dinkelspiel authored two books: Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California, a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, and Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California, a New York Times bestseller that the Wall Street Journal and Food and Wine magazine named one of the best wine books of the year.

Dinkelspiel graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history from Stanford University and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. She lives in Berkeley with her husband, Gary. They have two adult daughters.

Robert Lipsyte, '59 M.S.

Author, Reporter, and Sports and City Columnist at The New York Times

Robert Lipsyte, a long-time sports reporter and columnist for the New York Times, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary in 1992. He won Columbia University’s Meyer Berger Award for Distinguished Reporting twice, thirty years apart, in 1966 and 1996. He was the Ombudsman for ESPN in 2013-2014.

The author of 13 Young Adult novels, Lipsyte's most recent novel is Rhino’s Run. In 2001, he won the Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association for lifetime contribution to Young Adult Literature. His best-selling teenage novels include The Contender and One Fat Summer, made into a film, Measure of a Man, starring Donald Sutherland. Other books include the recent memoir, An Accidental Sportswriter, SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, and Dick Gregory’s autobiography, Nigger. His television career includes CBS’ Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt; the NBC Nightly News; the weekly PBS show, “Life (Part 2),” and the nightly public affairs show, “The Eleventh Hour,” for which he won an Emmy Award as host.

Lipsyte earned a bachelor of arts degree in English from Columbia College and a master of science degree in Journalism from Columbia Journalism School. He lives in Shelter Island, NY, with his wife, the writer Lois B. Morris.

Ann M. Simmons, '88 M.S.

Moscow Bureau Chief at Wall Street Journal

Ann M. Simmons is an award-winning journalist with superior knowledge of international affairs and expertise in Russia and the former Soviet empire. Her more than three decades of journalism experience extends across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and North America.

As Moscow bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, Simmons has covered the political, social, and economic complexities of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and life under his autocratic regime as he aims to reshape Europe’s security architecture. For most of her five years on the ground in Russia, she led a team of correspondents reporting on the military and defense sector, the volatility of the country’s economy saddled with international sanctions, the repression of Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, political upheaval in Central Asia, and conflict in the South Caucasus. She reported extensively from Ukraine, including Crimea, prior to the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022.

Simmons was first a reporter in Moscow for TIME magazine in the early 1990s, where she covered the aborted coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the breakup of the USSR, the rise of Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin, and the country’s efforts to transform from a socialist to a market-oriented economy.

Before joining the Journal, Simmons was a writer/editor covering global development at the Los Angeles Times, where she earlier served as bureau chief in Nairobi and Johannesburg and later as a video and multimedia journalist. She has been on the frontlines of many of the world’s most important news stories in recent decades, including the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the War in Iraq, the Syrian refugee crisis, and Hurricane Katrina. She was part of a team of LA Times reporters whose coverage of wildfires in Southern California won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News in 2004.

After receiving her master’s degree, Simmons got her start as an intern at the Miami Herald. She later became a staff writer, where her duties included writing a column about the development and economic revival of South Beach.

Simmons is a keen mentor and educator of future generations of aspiring journalists. She has instructed senior tutorials at the Department of Journalism at California State University, Northridge. She was selected as the Fall 2022 Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalist Fellow at Cornell University and as the James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professor of Journalism at the State University of New York at New Paltz in 2018.

Born and raised in London, Simmons holds a double honors Bachelor of Arts degree in Russian and Norwegian from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and a Master of Science degree from Columbia Journalism School.  She was a Nieman journalism fellow at Harvard, class of 2003.

First Decade Award 

The award recognizes alumni who have made significant contributions within the first ten years of graduation. 

Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul '17, M.S. Stabile

Executive Director, Defensores de la Democracia

Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul is a Mexican journalist. After graduating from Columbia Journalism School in 2017, she received a Magic Grant from The Brown Institute for Media Innovation in 2018, with which she created a one-of-a-kind archive that preserves the work authored by killed journalists in Mexico. The archive she created and leads received the Democratic Innovation Award from the Council of Europe in 2023 and the United Kingdom National Archives Safeguarding the Digital Legacy Award in 2024.

In order to take the reporting from victims of violence out of the archive and make it accessible to a broader audience, Ibarra Chaoul launched the nonfiction investigative podcast Voces Silenciadas, which delves deep into the lives and deaths of killed journalists in Mexico. Voces Silenciadas' first season was shortlisted by the New Journalism Foundation (FNPI) for a Gabo Award. In 2021, she became one of 10 recipients of a UNESCO grant to support investigative journalism in Mexico. She used it to lead a multimedia investigation, “La vida después del silencio,” about the institutional failures faced by family members of killed and disappeared journalists in Mexico through their search for justice. The series was a finalist for Mexico's National Journalism Award.

Ibarra Chaoul has worked as a reporter and researcher for Columbia Journalism School dean emeritus, Steve Coll, and at The Washington Post bureau in Mexico City. She has bylines in The Washington Post, Worcester Magazine, Rest of World, The Haitian Times, Gatopardo, Letras Libres, Este País, and Ríodoce, among other outlets. She is the author of three books: El Chapo Guzmán. El juicio del siglo, which chronicles the trial against Joaquín Guzmán Loera in New York while posing questions about victims' access to truth and justice; "Causa de Muerte: Cuestionar al poder," a reported-essay collection that explores the reasons why so many reporters are killed in Mexico; and "Resistencia ante la pandemia," which culls together a series of features—or crónicas, in the Latin American tradition—that show how one of the first COVID hospitals in Mexico operated during the coronavirus pandemic.

She has been a remote resident of the Doing Things with Stories program at ArtEZ University and OXFAM in the Netherlands. She was a 2023 Ochbereg Fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. She occasionally teaches journalism at Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology (ITAM).

Celebrate With Us

Join the winners and decades of alumni during the 2025 Alumni Awards Ceremony in Low Library. Learn more about this and other Alumni Weekend events here — and save the date for May 2–3, 2025.