NEW YORK, March 4, 2009 – The South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) and SAJA Group Inc. are proud to announce the winners of the 2009 SAJA Reporting Fellowships.
SAJA will award four grants this year for reporting pieces in Afghanistan, Nepal, Pakistan and India. The winners are the team of Graeme Wood and Anup Kaphle and three individual journalists: Sandip Roy, Teru Kuwayama and Lisa Tsering. Nearly 25 proposals were submitted this year.
"The number of high-caliber entries made the judging process extremely difficult," said Sandeep Junnarkar, the chair of the SAJA Reporting Fellowships. "The judges found that the winners' projects stood out for their timeliness and compelling storylines. SAJA is eagerly looking forward to seeing the finished works."
The completed works are expected to be available to news organizations around the world at no cost later this year.
ABOUT THE WINNERS:
Graeme Wood and Anup Kaphle both work for The Atlantic in Washington D.C.; Wood as a staff writer and Kaphle as a fellow. Wood also is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, Slate and Salon magazines. Kaphle has also worked as fellow at News21 in New York and as an intern at Forbes magazine. The SAJA Reporting Fellowship will provide up to $4,700 for the team to report on the Nepalese Gurkhas currently fighting in southern Afghanistan.
Sandip Roy of San Francisco is an associate editor of New America Media, the nation’s first and largest consortium of ethnic media. SAJA will provide $4,000 for a magazine and multimedia story on the impact of aging in India.
Lisa Tsering of San Leandro, Calif., is a reporter for India West and a freelance Bollywood movie reviewer for Hollywood Reporter. She plans to look at the challenges of adopting children from India. She will receive $3,000.
Teru Kuwayama of New York is a freelance photojournalist whose work has appeared in Outside and Private magazines. Esquire named him one of the best and brightest of his generation in 2005 for his coverage of the occupation of Iraq. The fellowship will provide him with $3,500 to create a photo essay on the tribal wars in Pakistan.
ABOUT THE JUDGES:
The judges for the first round were: Jigar Mehta, a SAJA board member and video journalist for the New York Times; Pradnya Joshi, deputy night editor for the New York Times and Arun Venugopal, a reporter with WNYC Radio, New York City's NPR affiliate and editor of the SAJA blog, SAJAforum.
The judges for the final round were: Subrata Chakravarty, former Assistant Managing Editor of Forbes magazine and now principal of SNC Media, a media consulting firm; Deepti Hajela, AP Newswoman and former SAJA president; Vikas Bajaj New York Times Business Writer and former SAJA vice president and Lonnie Isabel, associate professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and former deputy managing editor of Newsday.
ABOUT THE SAJA REPORTING FELLOWSHIPS
The SAJA Reporting Fellowships, which were launched in 2005 to ensure follow-up reportage about the 2004 tsunami and its victims, were initially funded by SAJA members, corporate donors and friends of SAJA. This year, SRF received a major financial boost thanks to the support of the Mahadeva Family Foundation, which will make an annual contribution of $20,000.
"The support of Kumar Mahadeva and Simi Ahuja, who have been part of the SAJA community for more than a decade, is critical to SAJA's core mission of improving the coverage of South Asia through the SAJA Reporting Fellowships and similar programs," said Junnarkar. "This is going to have a major impact on the kind of stories that the Fellows do and how Americans learn about what's going on in South Asia today."
A total of up to $20,000 may be given out annually, divided among projects or a single project at SAJA's discretion. Each fellowship award is typically between $3,000 and $7,000.
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