FRONTLINE Announces 2026-2027 Columbia Journalism Fellow

Vidal represents FRONTLINE’s 12th round of journalism fellows from Columbia University. His year-long fellowship, generously supported by The Tow Foundation, aims to expose emerging investigative journalists to FRONTLINE’s award-winning approach to documentary storytelling, immersing fellows into all phases of the series’ reporting and production process.

Joining FRONTLINE as a Tow Journalism fellow, Vidal is an investigative journalist from Lima, Peru. He holds a Master of Science from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where he was a reporting fellow at the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism. While at Stabile, Vidal conducted an investigation into the labor conditions of seasonal migrant workers, recruitment pipelines and employers’ screening processes.

Previously, Vidal was a civic reporting fellow at City Bureau, where he covered housing and job opportunities for young adults on Chicago's Southwest Side. He was also a community reporter at La Voz del Paseo Boricua, a bilingual hyperlocal news outlet, as part of the Medill Local News Accelerator, where he collaborated with other newsrooms to strengthen Chicago’s local news ecosystem. Vidal served as a field producer for a documentary film about asylum seekers navigating cultural adaptation in Illinois. He has also reported on the effects of immigration policies on migrant communities and on access to health care.  

Over the course of his fellowship, Vidal will have the opportunity to work alongside FRONTLINE’s filmmaking teams and aid in the development of the series’ acclaimed documentaries. This work will include contributing to the research and development of stories, reporting out leads, wrangling and analyzing data, helping set up interviews and shoots, as well as various tasks as documentaries undergo editing, vetting and post-production. He will also have opportunities to contribute to FRONTLINE projects on other platforms — including pursuing and crafting digital stories for FRONTLINE’s website and working with the series’ Local Journalism Initiative partners — local news outlets producing investigative journalism projects.

“For more than a decade, our FRONTLINE/Columbia fellows have played a critical role in our newsroom, fortifying both our documentary reporting and investigative storytelling. We’re excited to welcome Alonso to the team and look forward to collaborating with him over the next year,” says Raney Aronson-Rath, editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE.

“We are grateful to The Tow Foundation and Columbia Journalism School for supporting this fellowship, which continues to provide invaluable, real-world experience to the next generation of investigative reporters,” added Aronson-Rath, who is an alumna of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism herself.

“Columbia Journalism School has long enjoyed a vital relationship with Frontline and we are thrilled to see Alonso Vidal join as this year's fellow. Frontline is a cornerstone institution in American journalism and we look forward to seeing the high-impact work that will come from this collaboration,” says Jelani Cobb, dean of Columbia Journalism School. 

About FRONTLINE
FRONTLINE, U.S. television’s longest running investigative documentary series, explores the issues of our times through powerful storytelling. FRONTLINE has won an Academy Award® as well as every major journalism and broadcasting award, including 113 Emmy Awards and 35 Peabody Awards. Visit pbs.org/frontline and follow us on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to learn more. FRONTLINE is produced at GBH in Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS. Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, with major support from Ford Foundation, and The Fialkow Family Foundation, as part of the Plum Bush Foundation. Additional support for FRONTLINE is provided by the Abrams Foundation, Park Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, and the FRONTLINE Trust, with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and Corey David Sauer, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen, and Laura DeBonis and Scott Nathan.

About The Tow Foundation 
The Tow Foundation was established in 1988 by Leonard and Claire Tow as a way to give back to the communities that shaped them. Its five primary impact areas are arts and culture, civic engagement, justice, higher education, and medicine and public health. Grounded in its decades of work in Connecticut and New York, the Foundation supports visionary leaders and effective organizations that promote access to opportunity and increase well-being.

About Columbia Journalism School
For more than a century, Columbia Journalism School has been preparing journalists in programs that stress academic rigor, ethics, journalistic inquiry and professional practice. Founded with a gift from Joseph Pulitzer, the school opened its doors in 1912 and offers a Master of Science, Master of Arts, a joint Master of Science degree in Computer Science and Journalism and Doctor of Philosophy in Communications. It houses the Columbia Journalism Review, the Brown Institute for Media Innovation and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. The school also administers many of the leading journalism awards, including the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, the Maria Moors Cabot Prizes, the John Chancellor Award, the John B. Oakes Award, the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project, Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award and the Meyer “Mike” Berger Award.