Scott Elliott ’05 and his colleague Mark Fisher of the Dayton Daily News were awarded first place for education reporting in the National Headliner Awards competition for a series they wrote in 2004 called “Flunking the Test.” The three-day series also won the Daily News’ Enterprise Story of the Year Award for 2004. The series examined the growth of testing under No Child Left Behind and exposed standardized tests as poor tools for judging the academic knowledge and ability of young children.

Michelle Genece ’02, a freelance producer based in New York, has been awarded an R&D grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for a documentary examining Middle East news coverage from American and Arab perspectives. “In the Eye of the Beholder” will follow two news teams—one from an Arab news channel, the other from a U.S. news organization—as they cover the same event. The film will illuminate how different international audiences hear and see very different accounts of world events.

Scott Huler ’03, who last year published Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale,and How a 19th-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry, is at work on a new book. “I’m working on a project called ‘No Man’s Lands,’ which in some ways isn’t dissimilar from the book about the Beaufort Scale that I wrote on the Fellowship,” Huler writes. “Again it has at its center an old text, and I follow wherever that text leads to get to its power and meaning. Where I spent 20 years having people ask ‘The WHAT scale?’ with the last book, now I’m telling people I’m pursuing the Odyssey of Homer, and most of them have heard of that.”

The Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at U-M has offered Micheline Maynard ’00, a Detroit-based reporter with The New York Times, a visiting lecturer’s position for 2005–2006. She will be teaching a seminar on the airline industry and its role in American society.

Wes Pippert ’76, director of the University of Missouri School of Journalism’s Washington Program, conducted two workshops in Serbia last summer under the sponsorship of the U.S. State Department. The workshops were held in Belgrade and Palic for about 20 Serbian journalists. Pippert also was one of a dozen Missouri faculty members who spent two weeks in Russia as part of Missouri’s Global Scholars program.

Kemp Powers ’03, a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, has received a Bill Cosby Screenwriting Fellowship at the University of Southern California. “It’s a four-month-long, part-time program that enables us to continue working while we participate in the Fellowship,” Powers says. “The screenplay I submitted for the Fellowship was the one I wrote while taking Terry Lawson’s screenwriting class at Michigan. Just another great example of how the Knight-Wallace Fellowship continues to reap huge dividends.”

Bill Rose ’97, has been named managing editor of The Palm Beach Post. “Considering the load I’ve inherited, the obituary cannot be far behind,” he quips. “It’s a great county in which to run a newspaper,” Rose says. “It’s the place where the 2000 election first broke down, where nine of the September 11 terrorists lived and trained, and where the first domestic anthrax attack took place. At times it seems all the weirdness that once seemed to slide down the peninsula toward Miami-Dade has now slid back up to Palm Beach County. And that makes for great copy. All of this keeps us running pretty much all the time.”

Yvonne Simons ’03 has accepted a job as the assistant news director for KVVU-TV, a Fox affiliate, in Las Vegas. Simons, who previously was the midday anchor for Ohio News Network, will run the day-to-day operations of the newsroom and coach reporters and anchors.

Jason Tanz ’05, a senior editor with Fortune Small Business, has signed a book deal while still in Ann Arbor on the Fellowship. The book is tentatively titled Lose Yourself: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America. “Whether we recognize it or not, hip-hop has changed the way we think about race in this country—for better and for worse—and my book will explain what, why, and how it happened,” says Tanz. The book was sold to Bloomsbury at auction in February.

Andrew Whitehead ’04, editor with the BBC’s “The World Today,” has headed to India for 18 months. He took over as the head of the BBC’s charitable wing, the BBC World Service Trust, which focuses on using the media to promote development. In India, Whitehead reports, the Trust makes two weekly TV programs in Hindi—one a detective program and the other a youth program—with strong HIV awareness and prevention messages built in. The programs are broadcast on Indian state-run TV. “The detective program,” Whitehead says, “has an audience in the nine figures—yes, more than a hundred million viewers.”

Miguel Wiñazki ’03, editor-in-chief of Clarin’s “Viva” Magazine, has published his ninth book, La Noticia Deseada, translated as “Wanted News.” Wiñazki started the project while he was a Fellow in Ann Arbor. He says, “It’s about the power of public opinion, and how public opinion constructs its own version of the facts. The media must fight against this trend.”

SPRING 2005 MAIN PAGE