McGraw Center for Biz Journalism hands out five grants

Five veteran journalists have been named the latest recipients of the McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism.

Each of the winning projects will receive a grant of up to $15,000.

The new McGraw Fellows will explore subjects ranging from the emerging market for biodiversity credits and fraud schemes that target tribal corporations, to the impact of chemicals used in manufacturing semiconductors.

The McGraw Fellowships, an initiative of the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, were created in 2014 to support in-depth stories that “follow the money.”

The Fellowships enable experienced journalists to produce ambitious investigative or enterprise stories on critical issues related to the global economy, finance and business. Nearly 80 journalists have since won McGraw Fellowships.

The new McGraw Fellows are:

• Stan Alcorn and Tomás Uprimny: Alcorn is a freelance American journalist based in Colombia. Uprimny is an independent Colombian journalist. Together they will report on “biodiversity credits” and financing conservation in the Amazon.

  Alcorn was previously an investigative reporter and producer at Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, where his stories helped motivate changes in law and were taught in university classrooms. They have won numerous honors including a Peabody Award, an NABJ Salute to Excellence Award, a Best of the West Award, multiple Online Journalism Awards and Society for Professional Journalists awards. He was also a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists.

  Uprimny was most recently the lead producer of the podcast series DMG: El Sueño de la Hormiga, about the largest financial pyramid scheme in the history of Colombia. It was the most-listened-to podcast in Colombia for several weeks and won the award for best podcast from the Círculo de Periodistas de Bogotá. It also won the most prestigious journalism award in Colombia, the Simón Bolívar Prize — an award Uprimny has won five times, for written and radio journalism.

• Jonathan Mingle:  An independent journalist based in Vermont, Mingle will report on electric utilities’ lobbying and legal challenges to federal limits on power plant pollution.

  Mingle’s climate and energy focused journalism has appeared in a range of outlets, including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Yale Environment 360 and Undark Magazine. A former Middlebury Fellow in Environmental Journalism and recipient of the Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, Mingle is the author of Fire and Ice: Soot, Solidarity, and Survival on the Roof of the World, published by St. Martin’s Press in 2015, and Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America’s Energy Future, published this year by Island Press.

• Meghan Sullivan: A freelance investigative journalist based between Alaska and Washington D.C., Sullivan will report on fraud schemes that target tribal corporations.

  A recipient of the Scripps Howard Fellowship, Sullivan worked on video investigations as a reporter, producer, and on-air correspondent for the Scripps News National Investigative Unit. Prior to that, she was a National Reporter for Indian Country Today, where she led a year-long series in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Network focused on the long-term impacts of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act — a complex law which established the state’s unique economic system and land policy. The series won numerous awards from the Native American Journalists Association, the Edward R. Murrow Awards, Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards and the Alaska Press Club Awards, among others. Meghan started her career in journalism as a reporting fellow for the NBC News Business and Technology Unit and the NBC News Bay Area Investigative Unit.

• Molly Taft: A freelance investigative environment and climate journalist, Taft will explore the use of chemicals in the semiconductor manufacturing industry in the U.S.

  Taft is a contributing reporter and editor at Drilled, a global multimedia reporting project focused on climate accountability. Formerly a staff writer for Earther and a contributing editor for the New Republic, their work has appeared in publications including WIRED, The Nation, The Intercept, Rolling Stone, and Buzzfeed. Taft’s reporting for Earther won a SEAL Environmental Journalism Award, and they were part of a reporting project produced by the Center for Public Integrity on the health toll climate change is taking on the country that won an Association of Health Care Journalists Award.

More than 100 journalists working across a wide array of subjects applied for the latest round of the Fellowships. Each winning project receives funding up to $15,000. In addition to financial backing, the McGraw Center provides Fellows with editorial guidance and assistance in placing stories with media outlets.

The winners were selected through a competitive process. The McGraw Center would like to thank Arlyn Gajilan (Reuters), Diana Henriques (freelance book author), Andrew Lehren (NBC News), Alex Lescaze (Sidney Hillman Foundation), Ryan Nave (Reckon Media), Ricardo Sandoval-Palos (PBS) and Judy Watson (Newmark Graduate School of Journalism) for their assistance with evaluating the Fellowship proposals.