J-School student wins OPC Foundation Award

Mark Anderson, a student in the UC Berkeley Graduate School of

Journalism, won an Overseas Press Club Foundation Fellowship. The $3,000 grant he was

awarded will fund an internship in the Nairobi bureau of Reuters later this year. He received

the award at the Foundation’s 2014 Annual Scholarship Luncheon held at the Yale Club in

New York City. Acclaimed foreign correspondent Kimberley Dozier, now an intelligence writer

for The Associated Press, was the keynote speaker.

Anderson was among 14 aspiring foreign correspondents selected by a panel of leading

journalists from a pool of 175 applicants from 65 different colleges and universities. In his

winning essay, the graduate of the School of Oriental & African Affairs at the University of

London wrote about the links between Turkey and Somalia and how Turkish development and

investment, among other influences, is changing the war-torn African nation.

Anderson was the recipient of the Emmanuel Freedman Scholarship. He received from the

award from Tobias Bermant of the Freedman family. The award is named for the legendary

former foreign editor of the The New York Times who is credited with building the Times’ global presence.

The award winners were also honored with a reception at Reuters the night before the

luncheon, hosted by Reuters’ president and editor-in-chief Stephen Adler, and they met with

foreign editors of The Associated Press at AP headquarters in New York City. They also met

privately with Dozier and with the executive editor of GlobalPost in a special breakfast held the

morning of the awards presentation.

Second-year J-School graduate student Mateo Hoke and J-School alum Xiaoqing Pi were awarded OPC fellowships last year.

The OPC Foundation is the nation’s largest and most visible scholarship program encouraging

aspiring journalists to pursue careers as foreign correspondents. Media organizations at the

luncheon included AP, Bloomberg, CBS News, Financial Times, GlobalPost, Reuters, and The

For more information on the OPC Foundation and its scholarship program, see http://

www.overseaspressclubfoundation.org/.