Five second-year students awarded Mark Felt scholarships to pursue investigative reporting

From left to right: Parker Yesko, Jimmy Tobias, Nadine Sebai, Brett Murphy and Alyssa Jeong Perry.

Five second-year UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism students are the newest recipients of the Mark Felt scholarships awarded every year through the School’s Investigative Reporting Program (IRP).

Each $10,000 award will go toward tuition, research and reporting expenses as the students pursue investigative stories while working with IRP faculty, including Professor Lowell Bergman and Tim McGirk. This year’s recipients — Brett Murphy, Alyssa Jeong Perry, Nadine Sebai, Jimmy Tobias and Parker Yesko (all ’16) –are looking into such topics as international shipping cartels, U.S. immigration policies, and the trade in smuggled meat from African wild game.

Murphy says he applied for the scholarship “because I saw all the great work coming out of the [IRP] shop, especially from past Felt scholars. So I knew I’d be in good hands over there.”

Murphy plans to use a portion of the funds to travel to reporting locations. “My goals are always to make local stories universal, so anyone can relate,” he says. He hopes his work about exploited labor in international shipping will fold into his career goals of uncovering investigative stories.

For Sebai, the scholarship gives her a chance to work for a full year on an investigation into the death of a California high school football player, a “rare opportunity” she wouldn’t get in many working newsrooms.

The funding will help Yesko delve deeper into longform investigative work connected to San Francisco politics and their impact on homeless residents, as Super Bowl 50 comes to the Bay Area next year. “The money will enable me to really focus on going deep into a topic,” she says.

The Felt scholarships, an annual gift from from UC Berkeley alumnus and former journalist Bob Bishop (’77), are named for Mark Felt, who is better known as the whistleblower “Deep Throat” in the 1970s Watergate scandal. Bishop was inspired by the work of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. He named the scholarship in honor of Felt when it was revealed decades later that the senior FBI official was a crucial source in the paper’s groundbreaking investigation.

By Sasha Lekach (’16)