Jem Bartholomew, ‘20 M.A., has been awarded the 2023 Horwitz Fellowship. With this award, Columbia Journalism School will fund and support his reporting, investigation and travel as it relates to his work on labor in the U.K.
Bartholomew is a freelance reporter who writes for publications including The Guardian, 1843 Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Columbia Journalism Review and others. He has been a reporting fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and in 2019 was awarded Best Newcomer at the State Street Institutional Press Awards. His work on the U.K.'s homelessness crisis and worker exploitation in the gig economy was included in “Broke: Fixing Britain's Poverty Crisis” (Biteback), published in March 2023.
Bartholomew will continue his research on labor with support from the Horwitz Fellowship, with a focus on the decline of labor journalism in the UK. After the high profile clashes between Margaret Thatcher and unions in the 1980s, labor correspondents began disappearing from British newsrooms.
With Britain experiencing a cost of living crisis and the most working days disrupted by strike action since Thatcher's era, the number of labor correspondents could be counted on one hand. Bartholomew’s reporting will tackle the question of where those reporters have gone — and what is left behind without their vital work. What does a society lose when there are no watchdogs left to cover labor exploitation?
The Horwitz Fellowship is named for and honors the late Tony Horwitz (1958-2019), a 1983 graduate of the Master of Science Program and winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for his work at The Wall Street Journal. Horwitz authored more than a half dozen books, including the New York Times Best Sellers "Confederates in the Attic," "Blue Latitudes," "Baghdad Without a Map" and "A Voyage Long and Strange."
Now in its third year, this fellowship is open to Journalism School graduates from the last ten years and supports reporting projects “that bridge divides and promote equality and understanding.” Read on for more information about the Tony Horwitz Fellowship.