Berkeley Journalism Quarterly Newsletter

 

Fall 2024

Dear Berkeley Journalism Community,

In mid-September, I stepped in as acting dean at UC Berkeley Journalism when Dean Geeta Anand took leave for the semester. While I have worked at the J-School for eight years as a professor, it’s an honor to serve in this new capacity, alongside our extraordinary faculty, staff and alumni.

In these weeks before one of the most important elections in US history, and during a time of crisis in the world, I am feeling the incredible weight of our responsibility as journalists and educators. These are times of violence and vitriol, misinformation and disinformation, and increasingly under-resourced newsrooms. As you know so well, in times like these, journalists are more important than ever.

At North Gate Hall, a new generation of journalists — undeterred by these challenges — has been stepping up to uncover truth, question power and report stories that matter. This fall, 56 students were admitted in the Class of 2026 and from day-one, they were reporting on the ground in our Bay Area communities. Forty-five percent of them are the first in their families to go to college.

A week after our first-year students started classes, our second cohort of California Local News Fellows launched into newsrooms across the state. We now have 78 fired-up fellows working statewide, from Shasta County to the Inland Empire, at ethnic presses, public radio stations and major metro publications.

What’s more, we’re seeing these new journalists make an impact. Investigative Reporting Program Director David Barstow  helped students develop major investigations: Kate Raphael’s (’24) story about a failure to honor DNR agreements ran on the front page of The New York Times and Katey Rusch (’20) and Casey Smith’s (’20) two-part investigation about secret plans to conceal police misconduct made the front page of The San Francisco Chronicle.

You — our alums, donors and friends — are a huge part of these successes. Your donations big and small last year enabled us to fund 29 newsroom summer internships, ensuring that no student was compelled to work for free, as is often the case with internships. Read below about our efforts to raise $35,000 this fall to help the next generation of journalists thrive.

In addition to making gifts, you’re volunteering. Here’s a special shoutout to our volunteer alumni committee that just launched “North Gate Update” to provide news specifically for and about our alums.

Thanks again to all of you for all you do for Berkeley Journalism. Please continue reading to learn more about our indefatigable J-School community.

Warmly,

Elena Conis
Acting Dean and Professor

What follows are some of the highlights from our prolific journalism community over the past few months. We share these snapshots knowing it is impossible for us to feature all of the accomplishments in this limited space. Please follow our social media channels to learn more about our community’s important work and accolades in real time. We ask for your grace if we have inadvertently left anyone out.

 

Upcoming Events

• October 17, 6:00 pm, North Gate Hall, LMC: Book Talk with Edward Wong (’98) – At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China
• October 18, 5:30 pm, North Gate Courtyard: Alumni Reception during UC Berkeley’s Homecoming Weekend
• October 24, 2:00 pm PST/ 5:00 pm EST, online: Mark Danner will be on a special New York Review of Books panel with New York Review contributors Fintan O’Toole and Pamela Karlan, the fourth installment in a series of online events in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. “What If He Wins? A Conversation About Trump and the Law”
• October 25, 5:30 pm to Sunday, October 27, 4 pm, Anchor House: Three-Day AI/Journalism Hackathon at UC Berkeley: Harnessing AI to Enhance Trust and Deepen Engagement in Local Communities
• October 29, 6:00 pm, BAMPFA: Meeting the Moment: Embracing the Change at the National Geographic Society with National Geographic CEO Jill Tiefenhaler
• October 30, 5:00 pm, reception, 6:00 screening, North Gate Hall: Voces: Latino Vote 2024 screening, followed by a panel with filmmakers
• November 13, 6:00 pm, North Gate Hall: Media Postmortem: Revered editors Marty Baron and Dean Baquet break down coverage of the elections and discuss what’s to come
• November 19, 5:30 pm, North Gate Hall, LMC: Advance screening of “Pacific,” the first episode of the Netflix docuseries “Our Oceans,” narrated by Barack Obama

News Round-up

Longtime audio lecturer Ben Manilla dies

Ben Manilla, a Peabody Award-winning producer, beloved broadcast journalism educator and mainstay of our audio program for 15 years, died on September 30, following a long illness. Manilla spearheaded and operated a variety of companies specializing in audio production, distribution and consulting, and created programming for virtually every radio format and music genre heard on thousands of commercial and public stations across the US and internationally. In June, Manilla saw his decades of work honored when the Library of Congress included digitized recordings of The House of Blues Radio Hour plus nearly 2,000 original audio interviews into their archives. Read our story and a tribute from Professor and former Dean Ed Wasserman here. Read the San Francisco Chronicle obituary here.

Search for new dean is launched

When Berkeley Journalism Dean Geeta Anand announced in July that she would not seek a second term, UC Berkeley Vice Chancellor and Provost Ben Hermalin announced the launch of a search for the school’s permanent dean. A search committee that includes students, faculty, staff and alumni has been formed and outreach has begun to recruit candidates. A new dean is anticipated to take office on July 1, 2025. Stay tuned for a new website focused on our dean search. In the meantime, visit the UC Berkeley site for dean and executive searches here.

Berkeley Climate Journalism Lab kicks off

A new Berkeley Climate Journalism Lab kicked off this fall with the mission of “Reinventing climate journalism by tapping the collective brainpower of the world’s leading public research university.” The lab is led by Professor Jason Spingarn-Koff, the Knight Chair in Climate Journalism, Lecturer Mark Schapiro and Editor Twilight Greenaway. Visit the new webpage here. The lab’s Climate Equity Reporting Project has launched a newsletter called State of Change. Subscribe here.

Student News

Berkeley Journalism’s stellar audio program run by Director Shereen Marisol Meraji has helped students develop and publish a spate of audio stories over the past few months. Hussain Khan’s (’25) first audio feature for KALW is about an Oakland choir that performs gospel music outside of churches. Khan is also a 2024 AIR (Association of Independents in Radio) New Voices Fellow. Aisha Natalia Wallace-Palomares (’25) reports on a new generation of Mexican singers embracing corridos, for KQED’s “California Report.”

Panashe Matemba-Mutasa (‘25) published a front page story in the East Bay Express on the Bay Area’s oldest all-Black Harley-Davidson motorcycle club, celebrating 65 years of biking and brotherhood.

Marion Apio (’25) spent the summer in Uganda for an internship with Solutions Now Africa in Kampala. Apio — who was also a UC Berkeley Human Rights Center Fellow — worked on a documentary about a climate literacy program for rural farming communities in Central Uganda.

Matt Mitchell‘s (’25) beautifully written and brave personal essay about the suicide of his father—written for Professor Lisa Armstrong and Professor Elena Conis‘ narrative writing courses—has been published in The Spectacle magazine.

As a summer intern with our Investigative Reporting Program’s “Aging in America” project, Hannah Johansson (’25) published an important consumer story on CNN about what aging parents of disabled children can do to better secure their child’s financial future long after the parents are gone. Amin Muhammad (’25) shot the photos for the package.

Tarini Mehta and Laura Isaza’s (’24) “Tech is coming for your brain data”—about how a Chilean politician turbocharged the ‘neurorights’ movement— ran in The Boston Globe. They did a large share of the reporting as part of Prof. Elena Conis’ Reporting on Science Denialism class.

 

Faculty News

Shereen Marisol Meraji has a new podcast: “How I Get It Done,” featuring 20 in-depth conversations with inspirational women exploring the tradeoffs and demands of their professional and personal journeys. It’s a great listen and was done in collaboration with NY Mag’s The Cut, Vox Media and Audible Originals.  The lead producer for nearly all of the episodes is alum Charlotte Silver (’19).

We are so grateful to have such an amazing cast of high caliber instructors joining us this academic year. We have an editor from The New York Times, three amazing instructors from The Washington Post, two Wall Street Journal reporters, the Editor at Large and a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, and a panoply of many other seasoned journalists joining us. Read the story about our new fall lecturers here.

Andrés Cediel (’04) is a co-producer of the just-released Voces: Latino Vote 2024, a film that is a co-production with PBS SoCal. The hour-long film is a collaboration among CPB, PBS, PBS SoCal, ITVS and Latino Public Broadcasting. Cediel also worked with the California Local News Fellowship and their newsrooms on a series of accompanying video shorts and stories. Nearly a dozen Berkeley Journalism alums contributed to the doc and shorts. Nisha Balaram (’20) was the associate producer. Other contributors include Daffodil Altan (’04), Brandon Yadegari (’20), Vanessa Flores (’23), MJ Johnson (’23), Jessica de la Torre (’23), Bria Suggs (’24), Nadia Lathan (’24), Mitzi Perez-Caro (‘24), Matthew Miranda (’22), Jen Wiley (’23) and Samuel Tanner (‘24). Current student Aisha Wallace-Palomares (’25) also contributed as an associate producer. The Executive Producer of ITVS is Carrie Lozano (’05).

Ken Light’s retrospective American Stories: 1969-1995 at the Bronx Documentary Center was reviewed in Dart: Design Arts Daily. The review describes Light as “one of the leading social documentary photographers in the world today.” The exhibit runs Oct. 10– Nov. 17. At the end of September, the school hosted America in Focus: Ken Light and Wesaam Al-Badry (’20) on photographing the political moment. The two photojournalists discussed Light’s work in “Course of the Empire” and photos they took together at the 2024 Republican convention in Milwaukee and the Democratic convention in Chicago. A corresponding exhibit is on display in the halls of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism through January.

Elena Conis, acting dean and professor, was recently interviewed by Jon LaPook of CBS News Sunday Morning for a fascinating segment aired nationally about measles cases increasing amidst skepticism of routine immunizations. In a walk and talk interview through campus and in North Gate Hall, Conis, a medical historian, explains the reaction to mandatory smallpox vaccinations at the University of California at Berkeley in 1902 following a Supreme Court ruling that the government had the authority to require them.

Ed Wasserman‘s op-ed in The San Francisco Chronicle highlights how the media failed to show President Biden’s decline.

Queena Kim (’00) recently produced and reported a fascinating story on Korean pop culture inspiring a Korean-language learning boom at US universities, including UC Berkeley, for PRI’s “The World”.

Lisa Armstrong was named to the NABJ Board of Directors as Academic Representative for the 2024–2026 term.

Nick Romeo reviews David Lay Williams’ “The Greatest of All Plagues,” about seven major thinkers who saw inequality as a grave political threat and proposed specific remedies for it, in the Washington Post.

Mark Danner wrote and executive produced a series of eight episodes called “Corridors of Power,” on ShowTime and the BBC (in the UK) which premiered in August. The series takes on the questions of US power, genocide and human rights. It is directed by Dror Moreh and his narration is read by Meryl Streep. Watch it on Apple TV. Danner also published a story on Trump and the election in The New York Review of Books entitled “Getting Out the Fear Vote.” Danner will be on a special New York Review of Books panel October 24 with New York Review contributors Fintan O’Toole and Pamela Karlan, the fourth installment in a series of online events in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. “What If He Wins? A Conversation About Trump and the Law” starts at 5pm EST.

Emeritus Professor Jon Else’s documentary “Land of Gold: The Making of ‘Girls of the Golden West'” will be broadcast nationwide on PBS’ “Great Performances” series November 1. The film is directed by Else and produced by alum Camille Servan-Schreiber (’00). Mark your calendars.

Bernice Yeung, managing editor and director of the Investigative Reporting Program, was invited to bring two students to the IMEdD International Journalism Forum in Greece. Marion Apio (’25) and Jariel Arvin (’25) were selected through a competitive process. Panels and discussions focused on topics such as AI, global press freedom and media sustainability. UC Berkeley Journalism was one of 12 universities around the globe invited to participate.

Yeung and alum Andrew Becker (’05) produced a riveting audio doc — “A Baby Adopted, A Family Divided” — about a wealthy politician who adopted a Native child — and who circumvented the goals of the Indian Child Welfare Act in the process. Becker and Yeung got ahold of secret recordings, confidential adoption case documents and federal investigative files to understand how it was possible. The story aired on Reveal, a co-production of The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, in collaboration with our Investigative Reporting Program. Becker was a member of the original cohort of IRP Post-Graduate Fellows in 2007/2008. Steven Rascón (’22) was the production manager.

 

Adam Hochschild recently gave a talk on The First Post-Pandemic Political Era: After WWI on the 100th anniversary of the Immigration Act of 1924. And he and his wife Arlie co-taught a short course called “Two Hochschilds for the Price of One” at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Freight and Salvage in Berkeley.

Alumni News

Laura Fitzgerald (’24) and Max Harrison-Caldwell (’24) published an investigation in the Los Angeles Times about big donations and big oil in Sacramento. They developed the story while at Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program, with the support of Professor David Barstow and Local News Editor Christine Schiavo.

Kate Raphael (’24) published an investigation about the confusion that often surrounds DNR agreements on the front page of The New York Times. Professor David Barstow and the Investigative Reporting Program supported the story as part of the “Aging in America” series.

Katey Rusch (‘20) and Casey Smith (‘20), published a four-year investigation in the San Francisco Chronicle about a secret system of legal settlements that has concealed corruption, criminality and misconduct by law enforcement officers throughout California for decades. Rusch published a second story showing that in some cases, a clean-record agreement not only made it possible for troubled officers to hide misconduct but it also enabled them to qualify for a disability pension. Read Aysha Pettigrew’s Q&A with Rusch here.

Cayla Mihalovich‘s (’24) beautiful, resonant story about a man who takes care of his mother, who has Alzheimer’s, and connects with her through music aired on The California Report Magazine. The story was developed in Professor Shereen Marisol Meraji’s advanced audio course last fall. Celeste Hamilton Dennis’ (‘24) thesis story about El Daña — one of the nation’s oldest drag kings still performing in the US — aired on NPR’s “Codeswitch”, with photos from Florence Middleton (‘24). Laura Isaza (’24) aired her audio thesis about eater disorders in sport climbing on NPR’s “All Things Considered”. In July, students Fernando Andrade, Audy McAfee, Hussain Khan, Celeste Hamilton Dennis, Jenna Hards, Holly Burns, Bella Arnold and Melanie Velasquez aired their last episode of the semester on KALW Radio’s “Bay Made.”

 

Congratulations to the graduates nominated for News & Documentary Emmys: Violet Du Feng (’04), Lauren Rosenfeld Capps (’12), Rachel de Leon (’14), Jeffrey Plunkett (’05), Emily Taguchi (’06), Sarah Cahlan (‘19), Jason Fine (’90), Jason Spingarn-Koff (’01), Bret Sigler (’03) and Tommy Nguyen (‘05). Recent grads who worked on Rachel de Leon’s (’14) incredible doc “Victim/Suspect”: Elena Neale-Sacks (’22), Betty Márquez Rosales (’20) and Skyler Glover (’21) were researchers on the documentary; Myah Overstreet (’23) and Buddy Terry (’23) were production assistants on local shoots.

And the winners were: Jeffrey Plunkett (’05), showrunner and an executive producer of “Trafficked with Mariana van Zeller,” (National Geographic) won for Outstanding Science And Technology Coverage for “Cyber Pirates” and Outstanding Business, Consumer Or Economic Coverage for “Black Market Babies.” Plunkett was also executive producer of “Science Fair the Series” (National Geographic) that won for Outstanding Science And Technology Documentary. The film looks at nine high schoolers from around the globe navigate rivalries, setbacks and hormones on their journey to compete at the International Science and Engineering Fair. Luisa Conlon (’17) was a cinematographer on the film. Rachel de Leon’s (’14) “Victim/Suspect” (Netflix) won for Outstanding Research: Documentary. The film is the result of a four-year investigation and features a first-of-its-kind case study of investigations in which police charged self-reporting sexual assault and rape victims with a crime. Jason Fine (’90), SVP of Rolling Stone Films was an executive producer of “Little Richard: I Am Everything,” which won for Outstanding Arts and Culture Documentary. Produced in association with Rolling Stone Films, director Lisa Cortés’ Sundance opening night documentary tells the story of the Black queer origins of rock n’ roll, exploding the whitewashed canon of American pop music to reveal the innovator – the originator – Richard Penniman.

The new podcast “Altered States” from executive producer Malia Wollan (’08) and associate producer Cassady Rosenblum (’18) is a production of PRX and the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. One of the first episodes was produced by alum Shaina Shealy (’16), who follows Israeli and Palestinian peace activists who gathered to drink ayahuasca to try to heal their collective trauma.

Noelia González (‘16) was the lead producer, and wrote and hosted all episodes of Podcast Universo curioso de la NASA, the agency’s first Spanish-language podcast, now in its second season.

Felicia Alvarez (’23) investigates a “news” site called the Permian Proud that Chevron started in Texas to cover the Permian Basin, one of the world’s most oil-rich areas — a story that came out of Professor David Barstow’s Blockbuster class with support from IRP local news editor Christine Schiavo. The story was co-published in the Santa Fe New Mexican, the Louisiana Illuminator and Texas Climate News.

Khwaga Ghani’s (’24) audio capstone thesis project “As the Taliban tightens grip, secret schools for girls become more dangerous to run” broadcast nationally on PRX’s “The World.”

Read the first edition of Journalism Adjacent, a new feature published on our news site about alumni who are using their journalism degrees in important and interesting ways. Our first Q&A is with Peter Bittner (’17), whose company is training journalists and others how to use AI.

Four prolific Berkeley Journalism alumni were honored with Sigma Delta Chi Awards for the most outstanding work published or broadcast in 2023. Their coverage explored everything from the paucity of mental health care to court challenges regarding social media content moderators in Africa to the stunning number of skydiving accidents at one Northern California company. Congratulations April Dembosky (’08), Erica Hellerstein (’14), Stephen Hobbs (’14) and Bill Whitaker (’78/’16).

The National Association of Black Journalists recently celebrated Berkeley Journalism Professor Lisa Armstrong and alums Corey Antonio Rose (’23) and Jason Samuels (’95) at the organization’s 2024 convention in Chicago. Rose (’23) was awarded the Michael J. Feeney Emerging Journalist of the Year Award and Professor Armstrong’s story was part of a Guardian US series called “The Great Fertility Divide,” which won for best single topic series in a magazine. Samuels, a professor of journalism at NYU and a news and documentary executive producer, won for best network public affairs segment on television for “America in Black“. Alums Durrell Dawson (’06) and Justin Pye (’14) were also on the “America in Black” production team. Samuels created a new summer program for college journalists that launched this summer – the NYU Black Male Journalism Workshop.

Misha Kapany Schwarz and Maarya Zafar’s (’24) thesis film “When the Smoke Clears” has been accepted at the 16th Annual Santa Fe Int’l Film Festival (Oct 16-20) and has received a grant from the Berkeley Film Foundation. The audience absolutely loved this film about two first responders’ journey to Mexico to undergo psychedelic treatments guided by traditional healers in attempts to heal their deep-seated PTSD and depression at its commencement showcase screening at BAMPFA in May. Jessica De La Torre’s (‘24) thesis film “La Chef”, a short-documentary based in Mexico City on a female chef’s gripping struggle against toxic masculinity and her transformative journey to redefine women’s roles in the industry, is also screening at the festival. Other Class of 2024 students who also received grants for their thesis projects include Maggie Fuller and Jule Sophie Hermann for “(M)otherhood”; Danica Simonet and Albert Gregory for “Unconditional” and Hana Beach and Beki San Martin for “This is Not a Climate Film”.

Five alumni and one of our star multimedia lecturers are among the finalists for the 2024 Gerald Loeb Awards for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. Warm congratulations to Sarah Cahlan (’19) and multimedia Lecturer John Harden of The Washington Post, Caitlin Esch (’10) of “Marketplace,” Robin Urevich (’09) of Capital and Main, Jeremy C.F. Lin (’16) of Bloomberg and Nazmul Ahasan (’23) for Public Health Watch. The winners were announced on October 10 in New York City, and included “American Icon” by The Washington Post. Congratulations Sarah Cahlan and John Harden!

Débora Souza Silva’s (’14) “For Our Children”— acquired earlier this year by Ava DuVernay’s Array Releasing— is available on Netflix and has been shortlisted for The Marshall Project’s first-ever Sing Sing Film Festival Award. The film, directed, produced and co-written by Souza Silva, chronicles the powerful convergence of two mothers, Reverend Wanda Johnson and Angela Williams, whose lives were forever altered by police brutality against their Black sons. The film was co-produced by Loi Ameera Almeron (’16) and edited and co-written by Sara Maamouri (’00). Myah Overstreet (‘23) was the associate producer.

Last summer, Carrie Ching (’05) moved with her family back to her home state of Hawaii — landing in Haiku, Maui. Just 12 days later, the island was swept by deadly wildfires and the town of Lahaina burned to the ground. She was pulled into reporting on the tragedy for the national media. Ching writes about that experience, and her revelations about the deeper story behind the fire, in The Atlantic. The essay is an adaptation from her forthcoming book, a reported memoir about the legacies of colonialism in Hawaii, and the relationship between colonialism and climate change.

“The Strike,” a new feature documentary incubated in the school’s Investigative Reporting Program, by JoeBill Muñoz (’19) and Lucas Guilkey (’19), is having a special screening at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, Wednesday, October 23 at 6:30pm. The film will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and more than half a dozen solitary survivors and hunger strikers. The panel will be moderated by Professor Lisa Armstrong. (The J-School hosted its screening in August.) Congratulations also to the three J-School students Guilkey mentored: Robin Estrin (’21), Ravleen Kaur (’20) and Katie Bernstein (’21), who helped with early research and development of the film.

Read Marlena Telvick’s June interview with the filmmakers here.

Grace Galletti (’23) and Zhiwei Feng’s (’23) thesis film “The Weight They Carry” was selected to screen at the Not One More Vet conference in Chicago on October 5. The documentary explores the nation-wide mental health crisis that veterinarians are experiencing and that is still heavily stigmatized.

Laura Fitzgerald (’24) and Max Harrison-Caldwell (’24) published an investigation in the Los Angeles Times about big donations and big oil in Sacramento. They developed the story while at Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program, with the support of Professor David Barstow and Local News Editor Christine Schiavo.

Empower the Next Generation of Journalists

Our crowdfunding campaign this semester will support internships as well as reporting costs and other wraparound support services that help make the student experience at Berkeley Journalism a valuable and supportive one. Thank you for giving as generously as you can to help raise $35,000. As of today, we have raised $10,000. Give here.

Event Highlights

Watch these recent events and more on our Berkeley Journalism YouTube Channel here: Lecturer Adam Hochschild in conversation with Mara Kardas-Nelson (’20) about her book “We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky,” an acclaimed and critical history of microfinance; Professor Ken Light in conversation with Wesaam Al-Badry (’20) about Light’s work in “Course of the Empire” and photos they took together at the 2024 Republican convention in Milwaukee and the Democratic convention in Chicago.

 

About this communique: The Dean’s Letter is a quarterly email newsletter sent to alumni, donors, students, faculty, media partners and others in Berkeley Journalism’s broad community.  If you’d like to follow ongoing developments in real-time, find us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Have alumni news or accomplishments to share? Please send it, along with a high-res headshot to journalism@berkeley.edu. Are you hiring? Please reach out to career.services@berkeley.edu. Want to learn more about donating to the school? Contact stevekatz@berkeley.edu.