Announcing the 2026 CJS Alumni Award Winners
This spring, Columbia Journalism School honors four alumni for their outstanding contributions to journalism.
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.
The Alumni Award recognizes an exemplary body of work or a singular outstanding accomplishment in any journalism medium, a notable contribution to journalism education, or related fields for alumni at any career stage.
Beata Balogová, ’07 M.S., Chief Commentator, SME
Joe Rodriguez, ’81 M.S., Retired Editorial Writer and Columnist, San Jose Mercury News
Rex Smith ’80, Retired Editor, The Albany Times Union
The First Decade Award recognizes J-TEN alumni who have made significant contributions within the first ten years of graduation from the Journalism School.
Abdi Latif Dahir, ’16 M.A. Politics, Middle East Correspondent, The New York Times
Beata Balogová, ’07 M.S.
Chief Commentator, SME
Beata Balogová is an award-winning journalist, author, and a prominent voice for press freedom in Central Europe. From 2014 to 2025, she served as editor-in-chief of SME, Slovakia’s leading independent daily newspaper and news website, and currently works as its chief commentator. Before joining SME, she was editor-in-chief of the English-language weekly The Slovak Spectator from 2003 to 2014.
She earned her master’s degree from the Columbia Journalism School in 2007 and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 1994.
An ethnic Hungarian living in Slovakia, Balogová writes extensively on politics, social change, populism, and human rights. She is a frequent speaker at international journalism forums and conferences, where she addresses press freedom challenges in Slovakia and across Central Europe.
She is the author of Cornelias (Kornélie), an autobiographical novel published in 2022 and translated into Polish, Serbian, and Czech, as well as The Book Full of People (Kniha plná ľudí), a work of non-fiction.
Balogová received the 2020 European Press Prize for Opinion and has earned three national journalism awards in Slovakia. Cornelias won the Golden Pen Award from Ikar Publishing House for the best novel of the year. She currently serves on the board of the European Press Prize and was deputy chairwoman of the executive board of the International Press Institute from 2016 to 2022.
Joe Rodriguez, ’81 M.S.
Retired Editorial Writer and Columnist, San Jose Mercury News
After 35 years as a newspaper reporter, editorial writer, and columnist, Joe Rodriguez retired to his native southern California, where he continues as a volunteer for journalism projects.
Born and raised in East Los Angeles, he attended Garfield High School, where the reporter in him first emerged during the student walkouts demanding equal education. He went on to study writing at East Los Angeles Community College, California State University at Los Angeles and then journalism at Columbia Journalism School, graduating in 1981.
He started his career as a summer intern at the Modesto Bee in agricultural, central California, then moved south to the Press-Enterprise in Riverside, a booming suburb of Los Angeles. In 1983, Rodriguez ventured back east, to The Courant in Hartford, Connecticut, then the fourth-poorest city in the nation. He became an editorial writer there a few years later. His final stop was at the San Jose Mercury News in Silicon Valley, where he became the metro columnist in 1998 after returning from a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard.
Rodriguez developed his signature approach along the way by striving to center every story and column on regular people, often the voiceless or powerless, and by blending in the expertise of experts he found in community organizations, academia, and government.
In 1993 Rodriguez started the Mosaic Journalism Program, a free summer workshop for underserved high school students whose campuses offered little or no journalism. Three decades later, the Mosaic operates year-round and has nearly 600 alumni, many of whom became professional journalists. Rodriguez continues on as Mosaic chairman.
Rex Smith, ’80 M.S.
Retired Editor, The Albany Times Union
Rex Smith, a leading New York state journalist for four decades, writes, and publishes The Upstate American, a weekly analysis of news and society, and is the host of the long-running public radio program The Media Project, which is nationally syndicated by Northeast Public Radio, where he is also a regular commentator.
Smith spent 25 years with Hearst, including 18 years as editor of the Times Union, the newspaper of New York’s Capital Region, which he led to state and national recognition for reporting, writing, photography, and design, both in print and on digital platforms. Earlier in his career, he was an award-winning reporter, national correspondent, and bureau chief for Newsday, the editor of community newspapers in Troy, N.Y., and in Rensselaer, Ind., a TV news reporter and producer in the New York metropolitan area and a senior advisor on Capitol Hill to a member of Congress.
He is past president of the New York News Publishers Association and the New York State Associated Press Association and is executive vice president of the New York Fair Trial/Free Press Conference. Smith was awarded a master’s degree with highest honors by Columbia Journalism School, where he also served as the Alumni Board chair from 2019 to 2025, and holds an undergraduate degree cum laude from Trinity University in San Antonio.
A lifelong musician, Smith now performs with Albany Pro Musica, one of the Northeast’s premiere choral ensembles, which he currently serves as board president. He and his wife, the author Marion Roach Smith, live in Rensselaer County, N.Y.; their daughter, Grace Yu Ying Smith, is an official of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C.
First Decade Award
The award recognizes alumni who have made significant contributions within the first ten years of graduation.
Abdi Latif Dahir, ’16 M.A. Politics
Middle East Correspondent, The New York Times
Abdi Latif Dahir is currently a Middle East Correspondent with The New York Times based in Beirut, Lebanon. Prior to that, he spent five years as the paper's East Africa Correspondent, reporting from over a dozen countries across eastern, central, and parts of northeastern Africa. His work and investigations have spanned topics including armed conflict, elections, climate change, and human rights, as well as cultural and social developments, with a particular focus on how young people are shaping the region's future.
Before joining the Times, he was a reporter at Quartz in both New York and Nairobi, covering technology, innovation and China's growing presence in Africa. In 2018, Dahir was selected as a Dag Hammarskjöld Fund for Journalists fellow, during which he reported from the United Nations and covered the U.S. midterm elections. Dahir began his journalism career reporting for wire services such as United Press International and writing for local and regional publications across Kenya and East Africa. He earned a master's of arts degree with a concentration in politics from Columbia Journalism School.
Celebrate With Us
Join the winners and decades of alumni during the 2026 Alumni Awards Luncheon at The Italian Academy. Learn more about this and other Alumni Weekend events here — and save the date for April 17-18, 2026.