Four journalists win grants from McGraw Center for Business Journalism

Four veteran journalists have won grants of up to $15,000 as recipients of the second round of the McGraw Fellowships for Business Journalism.

The winning projects will explore the rise of genetic medical tests, efforts to improve safety at Bangladesh’s troubled textile factories, the link between digital labor and the de-skilling of the American workplace, and the impact of new high-tech meat substitutes on the environment and the traditional meat industry.

The McGraw Fellowships, an initiative of the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Center for Business Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism,  were created in 2014 to support ambitious coverage of critical issues related to the U.S. economy and business.  The Fellowships – awarded twice a year — enable accomplished journalists to do the deep reporting needed to produce a distinguished investigative or enterprise business story. The first McGraw Fellows were named in July 2014.

Roughly 80 journalists from more than a dozen countries applied for the second round of Fellowships in December. The winners were chosen following interviews and a thorough review of detailed proposals, work samples and references.

Each McGraw Fellow receives a stipend of $5,000 a month for up to three months. In addition to financial backing, the McGraw Center provides Fellows with editorial guidance and assistance in placing their stories with media outlets.

The new McGraw Fellows are:

• Beth Daley: A reporter at the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, Daley covered environment, science and education for the Boston Globe for more than two decades before joining NECIR. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2008 for stories examining the impact of climate change on New England and a 2011 Knight Fellow at Stanford University. During the Fellowship, Daley will examine the increasing use of genetic diagnostic tests, their costs and the medical industry’s role in promoting them.

• Rowan Jacobsen: An award-winning freelance journalist based in Vermont, Jacobsen will explore the potential of Silicon Valley’s new high-tech meat analogs to disrupt the traditional meat industry and mitigate its significant contribution to climate change.  Jacobsen was a 2012 Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow, writing about endangered cultures on the borderlands between India, Myanmar, and China. He is the author of six books, including Fruitless Fall, The Living Shore, and Shadows on the Gulf.

• Amy Yee: A freelance reporter and former correspondent for the Financial Times in New York and New Delhi, Yee was a 2013 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business at Columbia University. She will use the Fellowship to report on the challenges of improving safety in Bangladesh’s thousands of garment factories, two years after the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza, the world’s deadliest textile industry disaster.

• Mark Harris: A Seattle-based freelance technology reporter and 2014 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, Harris will look at the link between digital labor and the de-skilling of the American workplace. He plans to focus on the online marketplaces and digital technologies that are radically altering the world of work, allowing jobs that once required hard-won skills and years of experience or education to be parceled out to the cloud.

Applications for McGraw Fellowships are considered twice a year, in the spring and the fall. The next deadline for proposals is May 15, 2015. For more information and the online application, go to www.mcgrawcenter.org.