McGraw Center names first business journalism fellows

The first recipients of the McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism at the CUNY J-School were named on Monday.

The new Fellowships, launched this spring by the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Center for Business Journalism, were created to support long-form investigative and enterprise stories on critical issues related to the U.S. economy and business.

Nearly 70 journalists from more than a half dozen countries applied for the awards. Three fellows were picked for the summer; in the fall, the center have another call for proposals and name three more.

Each fellow will receive a stipend of up to $15,000; in addition, the McGraw Center provides Fellows with editorial guidance and assistance in placing their stories with established print, radio or digital outlets.

The first McGraw fellows for 2014 are:

• Tom Mashberg: An award-winning former investigative editor for the Boston Herald, Mashberg will delve into the business and economic ties between heroin use and the spread of powerful prescription painkillers. The project is a follow-up to a yearlong series produced by The Record (Bergen County, NJ) that was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. Mashberg played a key role in reporting that series, which looked at the deadly addiction crisis caused by the widespread abuse of street heroin and opiate-based prescription pain medications in New Jersey. During the Fellowship, he will again work with The Record to build on those earlier stories.
• Nate Halverson: A San Francisco-based freelance writer who is working with the The Center for Investigative Reporting, Halverson will focus on the massive buying spree China has begun in the U.S. and around the globe as it looks to play an expanding and influential role in world agriculture. The need is urgent for a country where 1.4 billion people are increasingly demanding more meat but where farmland is already pushed to near capacity. The project will look at what China’s plans could mean for food and water scarcity–an issue that many say will rival access to oil as the largest source of geopolitical unrest in the coming decades.
• Jay Greene: A business reporter for the Seattle Times, Greene will use his Fellowship to examine the legal and cultural difficulties faced by online giant Amazon as it expands internationally. The Internet retailer’s aggressive, hyper-competitive style has fueled its rapid rise in U.S., but it has run head-long into objections overseas from lawmakers, unions and others who want to protect their businesses, their workers–and perhaps most important, their cultures. While Amazon remains popular with consumers, those international challenges have slowed its powerful growth engine.