CJS graduates win reporting fellowships with Pulitzer Center

Columbia Journalism School is proud to announce that 10 graduates from the Class of 2023 have been named Reporting Fellows in partnership with the Pulitzer Center to pursue in-depth projects on underreported issues of global importance.

This is the fourth year of the partnership, which provides funding and mentorship from an advisor associated with the Pulitzer Center. Fellows and advisors are paired based on their reporting interests and expertise. This year, fellows will report on topics as varied as migration, environmental justice, and the aftermath of war and natural disaster.

Five of the CJS fellows working in the international arena are funded by the Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism, which is committed to preparing journalists to work, think and report globally. It is led by inaugural Center Director Azmat Khan, Patti Cadby Birch Assistant Professor of Journalism. The Li Fellows will pursue stories in Mongolia, Japan, Turkey, Egypt and the Pacific island of New Caledonia. Other reporting grants are funded by generous alumni of the school, including through the Dean’s Fund for Post Graduate Reporting Opportunities.

"The fellows this year reflect a broad and deep interest in subjects of significant global concern,” said Elena Cabral, assistant dean of Academic Affairs and International Programs. “I am excited to see these talented and well-equipped reporters shed light on the people and places at the heart of their projects."

This investment in graduating students complements existing postgraduate fellowships offered through Columbia Journalism School. These efforts recognize that students and newsrooms continue to need support as they cover ongoing news stories in the U.S. and elsewhere.

“The 2023 Post-Grad Fellows have chosen such a wide range of subjects—each one is fascinating and each one focuses on an underreported, yet important, issue,”  said Kem Sawyer, Reporting Fellows Program Director at the Pulitzer Center.

Camillo Barone is an intern at NewsGuard, based in New York. Barone has covered politics and human rights for several national and international publications in Rome, Italy, such as TPI, Vatican Radio, Class CNBC and Il Tempo. His fellowship with the Pulitzer Center will help him examine the condition of the Italian LGBTQ couples’ children deprived of documents and rights.

Nevin Kallepalli is a religion reporter based in New York City. His Pulitzer Center project will cover the destruction of Palestinian cemeteries by Israeli land developers throughout historic Palestine and the deteriorating conditions of graveyards in the occupied West Bank.

Monica Montero is a multimedia journalist who has covered social issues for Spanish media. The Pulitzer Center fellowship will allow her to travel to Calais in northern France to report on whether the United Kingdom’s controversial Rwanda Asylum Plan might serve as a deterrence to the increasing number of migrants who attempt to cross the English Channel.

Rebekah White is a journalist and editor from Auckland, New Zealand who writes about science and the natural world. She was previously the editor of New Zealand Geographic magazine. Her Pulitzer Center project will investigate ocean geo-engineering projects: proposals to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by storing it in the sea.

Nelson Rauda Zablah has been a reporter for the Salvadoran newspaper El Faro since 2015. He covers politics, historical memory, immigration, and cryptocurrencies. His Pulitzer Center project will chronicle how the Salvadoran women's soccer team won its first international trophy with a roster of mainly US citizens, daughters of immigrants who are redefining national identities and challenging inequality in the conservative Central American country.

Li Global Fellows

Alexander Borodikhin is a reporter and editor at Mediazona, the leading independent Russian news outlet, now in exile, that focuses on criminal justice and political repression. With Li Center funding, he will head to Mongolia to investigate how Russian and Buryat diasporas are re-evaluating and questioning their identities in times of war.

Pete McKenzie is a freelance journalist who frequently writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian, mainly about the Pacific. In 2023, he was named New Zealand’s Reporter of the Year, the country’s highest journalistic honor. With Li Center funding, he will report on the ongoing struggle against, and the political effects of, Western colonization in the Pacific.

Miho Ouyou is a journalist who has covered a wide range of topics, including education, politics, human rights, and environmental issues. For her Li Center project, Miho will be reporting on the impact of discharging treated radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan into the sea.

Christina Roman is a freelance journalist focused on longform narrative and enterprise reporting. She is currently working on an investigative story with The Hatch Institute and will be joining The Reuters Institute as a 2023 Journalist Fellow in the fall. The Li Center funding will allow her to report on the impact of a large-scale development project on local communities in Egypt.

Anne Whiting has researched, worked within, and reported on sustainable and ethical business and supply chain developments within the global fashion industry for nearly a decade. Her Pulitzer Center project will investigate the social, environmental, political, and emotional impacts of the growing problem of textile waste brought about by the international secondhand clothing trade. She aims also to highlight feasible solutions to this textile waste actively pursued by both foundations and conglomerates in Africa and India. Her reporting coincides with a series of recent and pending groundbreaking governmental policies in the EU and US which, for the first time, address the various humanitarian and environmental offenses of Fast Fashion.