Each spring, Columbia Journalism School’s faculty recommends five graduates to be awarded Pulitzer fellowships.
Four of the graduates receive grants to travel, report and study abroad, while the fifth goes to a graduate who wishes to specialize in drama, music, literary, film or television criticism.
The 2017 fellowship recipients, named at CJS graduation in this week, are:
Jon Allsop
Allsop graduated from the Columbia Journalism School having covered everything from the musical Hamilton’s use in schools, to Chinese art, to Bronx real estate. He also freelanced nationally for Pacifica Radio, and partnered with the investigative team at The Hartford Courant as part of an international project on the lottery industry. In June, Jon will take up residence at BuzzFeed’s New York office as a Dow Jones interactive editing intern. In September, he'll start a year-long placement as a Delacorte fellow at The Columbia Journalism Review, where he hopes to cover the intersection between politics and the press in Trump’s America.
Originally from Plymouth, England, Jon graduated with first class honors in Government from the London School of Economics, where he served as editor-in-chief of the official student newspaper The Beaver. He worked as a field organizer on the campaign to keep Britain in the European Union before moving to New York last summer. Jon also spent a year on exchange at Sciences Po Paris's specialist Middle East and Mediterranean campus in Menton, France. He is deeply interested in the politics of division in the Gulf and in Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Cyprus, and thinks any of these countries would provide excellent fodder for his Pulitzer-funded project.
Oliver Arnoldi
Arnoldi is a writer and filmmaker from London. He previously worked on the arts desk at the Telegraph and was a reporter at the Tibet Post in Dharamsala, India. He has written about films for GQ magazine and the Huffington Post, and he has made a podcast about solitary confinement for Life of the Law. His fiction is published in The Stinging Fly, an Irish literary magazine. Last year, he received the Tribeca Film Institute/ESPN Future Filmmaker Prize. He works at VICE News on HBO.
With the fellowship, Oliver is interested in potentially writing about the virtual romance industry in Japan.
Nicole Einbinder
Nicole Einbinder is a recent graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She grew up in southern California and received her undergraduate degree in international studies and journalism, Phi Beta Kappa and with interdisciplinary honors, from the University of Washington in 2016. At the UW, she was a reporter and editor for her campus newspaper, the Daily, and held internships at the Orange County Register, The Seattle Times, and KING 5 Television.
Over the past year at Columbia, Nicole reported on LGBTQ Latino bar culture in Queens, wrote a long-form piece on violence against transgender women in Central America and the political asylum process and pursued her master’s project on inequalities in Bronx Housing Court and city efforts to provide a right to counsel for low-income tenants facing eviction. She traveled to India to cover religion thanks to a grant by the Scripps Howard foundation. Nicole’s dream is to be an investigative journalist reporting on religion, immigration, gender and human rights issues. This summer, she will be working as a news and politics fellow at Bustle.
Joseph Flaherty
Flaherty is a 2015 graduate of Middlebury College. Last year, he worked at a university in Turkey as a Fulbright grant recipient. He'll begin a six-month reporting fellowship at the Phoenix New Times in Arizona this summer. With the help of the Pulitzer traveling fellowship, he hopes to return to Turkey to write about the country’s turbulent politics.
Simin Chen (culture)
Chen hails from Singapore, and arrived at Columbia after eight years’ experience as an editor and cultural journalist. She received her undergraduate degree in 2003 and worked as a graphic designer for a few years, but was gradually drawn to writing. From 2008, she served as editor of JUICE, one of Singapore’s key cultural publications, before founding ZIGGY in 2012. For three years, ZIGGY gave voice to edgy and alternative artists, musicians, DJs, fashion designers, filmmakers, photographers and youthquakers, locally and beyond. Chen oversaw the editorial, digital and art direction of the magazine until it folded in 2015.
She came to Columbia to enrich her understanding and critical thinking, and pretty much to become a more acute cultural observer, critic and writer.
RELATED:
Kathleen Kingsbury received a Pulitzer traveling fellowship upon her graduation in 2004, and used the grant money to spend time reporting from Shanghai, China. She went on to write for the Boston Globe and win a Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing in 2015.
Her essay on how the fellowship’s impact on her career is here: