Visiting Journalists 2011
Mark Fainaru-Wada, investigative reporter, ESPN, San Francisco, CA
David Handschuh, staff photographer, New York Daily News, New York, NY
Annie Murphy, independent journalist
Jeff Roberts, staff photographer, Birmingham News, Birmingham, AL
John Schidlovsky, director, International Reporting Project, Washington DC
Erich Schwartzel, project editor, Pipeline, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Pittsburgh PA
Jan Schaffer, director, J-Lab, Washington, DC
Lance Williams, investigative reporter, California Watch, San Francisco, CA
Biographies
Mark Fainaru-Wada is an investigative reporter for ESPN. Prior to that, he worked in the same capacity on the San Francisco Chronicle‘s enterprise team.
For The Chronicle, Fainaru-Wada and colleague Lance Williams began working on the BALCO steroids case in September 2003. Their investigative work earned them a string of national honors, including the George Polk, Edgar A. Poe, Dick Schaap Excellence in Journalism and Associated Press Sports Editors awards.
In March 2006, Fainaru-Wada and Williams published “Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports” (Gotham Books). The book became an immediate New York Times bestseller and prompted Major League Baseball to launch an investigation into steroid use in its sport.
In May 2006, Fainaru-Wada and Williams were issued subpoenas to testify before a grand jury investigating the source(s) of some of the information they published in The Chronicle and their book. The reporters vowed not to reveal their sources and were appealing their sentence of up to 18 months in prison when the government dropped the subpoenas in February.
Fainaru-Wada’s ESPN projects have included investigations into Major League Baseball officials skimming money from Dominican ballplayers; the relationship between the demise of physical education in the public schools and the nation’s child obesity crisis; the impact of the economy’s collapse on grass-roots sports in small-town Wisconsin; and the premature deaths of two college athletes.
Fainaru-Wada previously worked for the San Francisco Examiner, for which he wrote enterprise stories and covered Stanford football and men’s basketball. He also was a national sportswriter for Scripps Howard News Service, covering the Masters, Wimbledon and the Final Four. He has worked at the National all-sports daily, the Los Angeles Daily News and the Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel.
Fainaru-Wada is a graduate of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.
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David Handschuh has been a staff photographer at The New York Daily News since 1986. He has been nominated several times for a Pulitzer Prize, and has received awards for his photography from the Pictures of the Year Competition, The New York Press Photographers Association, The New York Press Club, the Society of Silurians, the Deadline Club and many police, fire and EMS organizations. He is a former president of the 10,000-member National Press Photographers Association.
A 1999 recipient of a DART Fellowship to study the effects of trauma on visual journalists, Professor Handschuh is the co-author of “The National Media Guide For Emergency And Disaster Incidents,” a primer (now in its second printing) on establishing better relationships between the media and public safety providers. He serves on the board of directors of News Coverage Unlimited, an international organization that provides support for journalists who have been exposed to traumatic experiences in their work.
Handschuh was a Poynter Institute Media Ethics Fellow for 2000-2001 and the sole visual journalist in that international group. He lectures frequently on digital photography, photojournalism and media/government relations.
Handschuh has taught undergraduate and graduate photojournalism at New York University since 1995.
Annie Murphy is an independent journalist working in radio, print, and multimedia. She is a regular contributor to NPR, Marketplace, and the World Vision Report, and her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. Murphy has reported on topics that include natural disasters, urban conflict, immigration, indigenous medicine, and the art of love letters. In 2008, she was named a Middlebury Fellow in Environmental Journalism, and spent 2005-2006 as a Fulbright Scholar to Bolivia, where she started freelancing. Murphy has a B.A. in Anthropology from Smith College and frequently calls on anthropology to inform her reporting. She is currently based in South America.
Jeff Roberts is a native of Birmingham, Ala. He has been a staff photographer at the Birmingham News for the past 17-years. During this time his work has won multiple awards from the Associated Press, Alabama Press Association and other organizations. Most recently he was awarded Photo of the Year at the Associated Press Photo Managers Conference in Denver, Colorado for the work he did during the April 27, 2011 tornados that devastated Alabama and the community of Concord, a suburb of Birmingham.
Roberts credits much of his success to his friend, the late photojournalist Spider Martin, whose work during the turbulent Civil Rights period of the 1960s and his coverage of the Bloody Sunday march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., helped bring about the Voting Rights Act. As a young photojournalist, Roberts had the great fortune to be mentored by Martin and learned a great deal of the journalistic process from him.
Roberts continues to strive to make a difference in the lives of his subjects and seeks to make an impact on his neighborhood and the world with his work. He is constantly seeking to bring about change to those whose voices are often the least heard and those who can hardly stand in defense of themselves.
Jan Schaffer is executive director of J-Lab at American University and a leading thinker in about the future of journalism. J-Lab is a journalism catalyst. As the news and journalism space is re-imagined, J-Lab helps increase the rate and spectrum of change by funding new approaches to journalism, researching what works and sharing practical insights.
She launched J-Lab in 2002 to incubate pioneering initiatives in interactive and participatory journalism, innovations in journalism and citizen media ventures.
J-Lab has rewarded novel ideas through the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism (www.J-Lab.org). It has funded 70 news media start-ups through its New Voices (www.J-NewVoices.org) and McCormick New Media Women Entrepreneur programs (www.newmediawomen.org). It has pioneered more than 20 collaborative journalism ventures. It also produces Web tutorials on digital media and community publishing at www.J-Learning.org and the Knight Citizen News Network (www.kcnn.org).
Schaffer previously directed the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, a $14 million initiative that funded more than 120 pilot news projects that better engaged people in public issues. She is a former Pulitzer Prize winner for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where she worked for more than 20 years as a reporter and editor.
Currently, she serves as a speaker, trainer, author, consultant and web publisher on digital storytelling models and the future of journalism.
John Schidlovsky is the founding director of the International Reporting Project. He created the program in 1998 with the goal of encouraging more international coverage in the U.S. media. Previously he spent four years as the first director of The Freedom Forum’s Asian Center in Hong Kong from 1993 to 1997, monitoring media changes in the transition of Hong Kong to Chinese rule and working with journalists in virtually every country in the Asia-Pacific region. From 1990 to 1993 he was the curator of the Jefferson Fellowships program for journalists at the East-West Center in Honolulu.
Schidlovsky was a reporter for nearly 20 years, including 13 years with The Baltimore Sun. He was The Sun‘s Beijing bureau chief from 1987 to the end of 1989, and closely covered the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and aftermath. Earlier he served as The Sun’s New Delhi bureau chief and covered events in the Indian Subcontinent and throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Before joining The Sun in 1977, he was a freelance reporter in Cairo and Beirut, covering the region for NBC, ABC and Newsday.
Schidlovsky studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo and at Columbia University, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in English in 1970. He began his career in journalism as a reporter at the Springfield (MA) Union in 1971. He was awarded a Gannett Fellowship in Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii in 1983 and was named journalist-in-residence at the East-West Center in 1989. He has written about media issues for the Media Studies Journal, Nieman Reports, IPI Reports, American Journalism Review and other publications.
Erich Schwartzel is an energy reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and editor of Pipeline, a thematically based network around coverage of hydrofracking for natural gas. Schwartzel is a 2009 graduate of Boston University. While at BU, Schwartzel was a correspondent for the Boston Globe. Earlier, he interned with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and the Latrobe Bulletin.
Lance Williams is an investigative reporter for California Watch, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting. He previously worked for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he helped break many of the newspaper’s exclusive stories on the BALCO steroid scandal.
With Mark Fainaru-Wada, he wrote “Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports,” a national bestseller. In 2006, the reporting duo was held in contempt of court and threatened with 18 months in federal prison for refusing to testify about their confidential sources on BALCO. The subpoenas were later withdrawn.
Lance has been a reporter in California since 1973. He has won the George Polk Award, the Scripps Howard First Amendment Award and the Gerald Loeb Award, among other honors. He graduated from Brown University and UC Berkeley. Before joining the Chronicle, he worked at the San Francisco Examiner, the Oakland Tribune and the Hayward Daily Review.