Carmel Delshad

Created by Jigar Mehta and Yasmin Elayat, the project aims to to discover the stories that have yet to be told through traditional media. There are thousands of Egyptians walking around with cell phone pictures, videos, and memories from the revolution and beyond — and the 18 Days of Egypt team seeks to find those stories.

Carmel began working with 18 Days in Egypt in mid-January as a reporting fellow, uploading stories from her previous summer interning in Egypt. Shortly after she arrived in Cairo, the team of six fellows (five reporters, one social media expert) fanned out of Tahrir Square on Jan. 25 and collected stories from average Egyptians on the one year anniversary of the uprising.

Stories ranged from a man who was attacked while praying in Alexandria on Jan. 28, 2011, the “Friday of Anger”, to V (of V for Vendetta fame) heading to Tahrir Square.

Powered by GroupStream, a new platform, the website marries virtually every kind of medium in one cohesive site: users can upload pictures and video, connect their Facebook statuses and Tweets, and add videos from YouTube or pictures from Flickr. It’s a one-stop media shop that enriches the tale of the Egyptian revolution.

Carmel says her time at the CUNY J-School prepared her for her role as a reporter at 18 Days in Egypt. Framing video interviews, live Tweeting events, collaborating with a larger team — everything she practiced in her 18 months at CUNY were put to good use in Cairo. Now in her new role as a community manager, overseeing the fellows in Egypt and working on partnerships with local groups, she has built upon the networking and organizational skills taught at CUNY to help this project reach a wider audience.

The group is currently looking to expand its fellowship program for an additional six months, to a total of 20 fellows reporting from all over Egypt. You can find out more on its Kickstarter page.

The money will be used to establish the Benjamin and Mildred Greenwald Journalism Internship Fund, named for the group’s beloved mentor and his wife. Greenwald, who had degrees in English, medieval literature, and comparative linguistics from NYU and Columbia, spent 36 years at the NYSP before retiring in 1976. He was credited with launching the nation’s first high school program with a major in journalism.

The Greenwald fund will pay a stipend of at least $3,000 a year to a CUNY J-School student who graduated from a New York City public high school or a City University of New York college.

As part of the J-School’s curriculum, all students are required to work in a full-time journalism internship during the summer between their second and third semesters. The gift from the NYSP alumni will help the School meet its guarantee that every student intern will receive a minimum of $3,000. Unique to the CUNY J-School, the paid internship program helps students support themselves while getting valuable professional experience.

Osipova wants eventually to produce multimedia international stories and to own an international media company. “I would like to stand against biases and deliver the audience the objective view on world events, and resist the influence of government and sponsor control of content,” she said.

In her native Russia, journalism can be a life-endangering pursuit. In her application to the Foreign Press Association, Osipova wrote about the power of social networking in both protest and journalism there.

She said she would use the scholarship money to help fund her studies. She quit her job working for a television station in Moscow to attend the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

“I feel grateful that the money will help me to continue my professional development, and, hopefully, to come up with ways journalists all over the world could protect themselves and their readers against biases,” Osipova said.

The Foreign Press Association, founded in 1918, is an organization of journalists from other countries who cover the United States. It has more than 400 members from 50 countries. The awards go to students from other countries attending U.S. graduate schools of journalism.

Previous CUNY Journalism School winners have been Adeola Oladele from Nigeria in 2008, Damiano Beltrami from Italy in 2009, and Jennifer Hamblett from Great Britain last year.

Osipova is the School’s first winner of the FPA’s top prize. Osipova will receive the scholarship at the FPA’s May 8 dinner.

Here are some great stories to help kickoff the new semester. (Note: Work from Class of 2011 members who have completed their studies soon will be moving to our increasingly crowded Alumni Corner.)

•Elbert Chu wrote about a principal in trouble for The New York Times’ SchoolBook blog. Hannah Miet’s follow-up story on the death of a bicyclist killed by a truck in Brooklyn found a home in the City Room blog.

•Speaking of The Times, the latest on The Local includes posts by, among others, Minty Grover, Mary Shell, Joe Stepansky, Christine Streich and Jane Teeling. A special shoutout is due Mitch Trinka, who recently capped his year as our post-graduate Local fellow. Join us in congratulating Mitch on a job well done and in welcoming Kyle McGovern of the Class of ’11 to the key slot.

•If you missed the broadcasts of any of the last three installments of 219 News Magazine, they’re now online. Contributors include: Tamy Cozier, Christina Diaz, Rachel Dzanashvili, Elis Estrada, Alva French, Brenda Gonzalez, Jennifer Hamblett, Kahliah Laney, Judy Le, Debra Pangestu, Bianca Seidman, Samantha Stewart and Malgorzata Wojtunik.

•A documentary about climate change in Africa that Megan Izen worked on was screened at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban last month. You can find the film here.

•Eli Chen’s story about an effort to protect old ferry stations found a home in the Mott Haven Herald. Alex Robinson reported on the participatory budgeting process.

•Justin Mitchell’s video about birdwatchers in Prospect Park landed on the News Service.

•Lindsay Armstrong’s feature about a photographer who specializes in positive images of the Bronx got nice play in the Daily News. Check out the pdf here.

•Ashley Welch’s story about a band of kayakers testing the Hudson River for toxins made DNAinfo.com.

•Sherrina Navani’s video-and-text package about a youth literacy program that enlists the aid of pediatricians found a home on the Staten Island Advance’s site.

•Daniel Prendergast’s look at the impact of a housing subsidy program’s impending end got nice play on The Brooklyn Bureau, a new site from the folks at City Limits.

Some news from our Alumni Corner:

•Jenni Avins’ profile of a New Jersey muskrat trapper made New York magazine.

•You’ll find Jessica Firger’s piece about “The Dr. Oz Show” in the February issue of ELLE.

•Mike Reicher’s story about a wave-powered turbine proposal for Newport Beach made the Los Angeles Times.

•Jordan Shakeshaft, representing Greatist.com, appeared on Channel 4 to discuss foods that aren’t as healthful as some might think.

• Sophia Tewa’s documentary, “The People The Rain Forgot,” which tells the story of victims of climate change in Africa, took top honors at the Hollywood Cinema Film Festival.

•Almudena Toral’s video about a teenage girl from Afghanistan working toward a better future made Time’s website.

Congrats to all – and keep ‘em coming!

Cheers,

Jere

Leonard Tow

Matthew Winkler, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism while Leonard Tow, a pioneer in the cable television industry, will be the first recipient of the Distinguished Service to New York Award. The event will also honor three alumni from the recently graduated Class of 2011.

Dean Stephen B. Shepard praised Winkler for bringing “traditional journalism into the digital age,” and he called Tow “one of the great unsung philanthropists in New York history.”

Winkler has built Bloomberg News from scratch into one of the world’s biggest news organizations. He joined Bloomberg L.P., the financial information company founded by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in 1990. Prior to that, he was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and news services of Dow Jones & Co. in New York and London. Early in his career, he was a New York-based reporter and assistant editor at The Bond Buyer and a reporter for the Ohio-based Mount Vernon News.

Matthew Winkler

Winkler is the author of The Bloomberg Way: A Guide for Reporters and Editors, published in September 2009 by Bloomberg Press. He is a graduate of Kenyon College with an A.B. in history and an honorary doctorate of laws. He serves on the CUNY J-School’s Board of Advisers.

Tow has spent more than two decades contributing to worthy causes in the fields of education, medicine, the performing arts, and youth and family services in New York and Connecticut through the family foundation he runs with his daughter Emily Tow Jackson.

At the CUNY J-School, he issued a $3 million challenge grant that led to the establishment of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism in the fall of 2010. The Center, which was initially funded by The Tow Foundation’s $3 million and a matching amount from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is dedicated to finding new business models for sustaining quality journalism.

His philanthropy has also helped create the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College, the Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center, the Claire Tow Pediatric Pavilion at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and the Claire Tow Professorship in Motor Neuron Disorders at the Columbia University Medical Center. His foundation has supported medical research, public service internships, and juvenile justice programs in Connecticut.

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., he is a graduate of CUNY’s Brooklyn College and has a PhD in economics from Columbia University.

Matt Draper

The prize is one of five awarded annually to undergraduate or grad students who have demonstrated an interest in and aptitude for copy editing. It includes free registration and travel expenses to the ACES conference in New Orleans in April.

Matt was a Dow Jones sports copy editing intern last summer at the New York Post. Since graduating from the CUNY J-School in December, he has been freelancing full time as a reporter/producer for DNAinfo.com and copy editor for Bloomberg BusinessWeek‘s education resource center.

Titled Judith Clark’s Radical Transformation, the story chronicles Clark’s life in prison and her evolution from an unrepentant young revolutionary to a model inmate. Robbins reported the story during a series of prison visits with Clark starting in 2006. He first knew her as the former high-school sweetheart of a good friend.

Clark was 31 when she was one of four people, including Weather Underground member Kathy Boudin, arrested for armed robbery and murder in the Brinks heist.

Filmmaker Sophia Tewa

Tewa, a native of France, is a 2009 alumna of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and a graduate of CUNY’s Lehman College. She has worked with CNN and CBS and teaches multimedia production at the Meridian, Lehman’s student news site.

The People the Rain Forgot is the first documentary she directed and produced. She said she became interested in covering the drought in Kenya and the efforts of people to fight global warming by scouring obscure international and U.S. news outlets for ideas. “I want to paint intimate portraits of regular people in extraordinary circumstances, but whose stories are overlooked or under-told,” she said. She added that she hopes by telling these stories, she gives people in the power the impetus to make change.

Here is her synopsis of the film:

The People the Rain Forgot is the story of how climate change and drought has ravaged the livelihoods of millions in Kenya, home to one of Africa’s most vibrant economies.The documentary follows the country’s farmers and nomadic pastoralists as they grapple with land that will no longer sustain their livestock or feed their families. In this journey, we encountered men and women who never lost hope in the face of a changing world. It’s been four years since many of the country’s Northeastern areas haven’t had sufficient rain to feed their livestock and water their crops. Malnutrition rates there have drastically risen since the drought started, with 2.4 million people in need of food assistance, according to the World Food Program.

Kenya’s economy is largely dependent on agriculture and some of its citizens wonder whether God is punishing them for their failure to properly steward the land. Others contend that the phenomenon of global warming is man-made and that they can help combat the sustained dry seasons they’ve endured. This film will take you from the border of Ethiopia to the margins of Somalia where more and more Africans are experiencing this new climate.

Global warming is often presented as a hypothesis, the effects of which only our grandchildren will have to face. The People That the Rain Forgot shows that its results are manifest in the world right now and that its consequences are dire. Scientists have shown that the warming of the oceans, caused by the increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere’s ozone layer, is linked to the irregular rainfall patterns that have inundated the Horn of Africa with sustained droughts.

The film records the despair and desperation of a people in thrall to massive, life-changing alterations to their natural environments. But it’s also the tale of people who have chosen to not give up and fight back against a force they did not create. From the village people who build a water dam with their own hands, to the farmers who create a microclimate in their valley by planting thousands of tree seedlings, this film is the story of people who find the courage and determination to try and make the rain fall again.

The new four-semester degree program will be offered in conjunction with the School’s Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism that was established a year ago with the help of $3 million from The Tow Foundation and $3 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

“It is the first such degree in the country,” said Stephen B. Shepard, dean of the CUNY J-School. “We’re very proud to break new ground in fusing journalism, technology, and business.”

The foundation of the new degree is a one-semester academic program the School ran on a trial basis this past spring. The curriculum includes a business fundamentals course, a technology immersion module, a survey of practices in journalism revenue generation, an entrepreneurial incubator, and a new-media apprenticeship. Students and mid-career journalists who participated in the pilot program developed their own media businesses and were awarded an Advanced Certificate in Entrepreneurial Journalism. Leading the entrepreneurial initiative are Tow-Knight Center Director Jeff Jarvis, and Jeremy Caplan, the Center’s education director.

Candidates for the new master’s will spend their first three semesters taking most of the same courses required for the School’s traditional M.A. in Journalism degree. In their fourth semester, as they work towards their M.A. in Entrepreneurial Journalism, they’ll be sharing classes with mid-career professionals and students who will earn the advanced certificate.

The first entrepreneurial journalism master’s class will be selected next spring from a pool of applicants from all over the U.S. and the world.

Yudith Ho, who won $10,000 for her entrepreneurial project

“Pitch Day never gets old,” said Jarvis, who started the innovative third-semester course five years ago. “You can feel the enthusiasm and energy in the room. And there’s always such a unpredictable mix of ideas.”

On this year’s Pitch Day, the projects included a new approach to connecting small businesses to each other and their local customers, an interactive platform for weekend athletes to exchange advice about sports injuries and share training tips, and an online magazine aimed at the holistic health and wellness audience. Following the presentations, the jury convened and after an hour of sometimes heated deliberations, announced this year’s prizes:

• Yudith Ho: $10,000 to launch Abaka, a personal finance site aimed at Indonesia’s emerging middle class.

• Michael Mccutcheon: $5,000 to refine Newsfly, a platform for disaggregating and reorganizing news articles.

• Brianne Garcia: $5,000 to develop WTF Would I Wear With This? – a fashion platform that allows brands to compete for customers.

• Amy Stretten: $5,000 to develop Achimó, a platform for indigenous youth in the U.S. and Canada who are interested in arts and culture.

• Tim Verheyden: $5,000 to launch Crosstalk.be, which aims to become the hub of political discussion and opinion for Flemish-speaking Belgians.

The awards are funded under the School’s Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, which is committed to helping create a sustainable future for quality journalism. “Jeremy Caplan and I are teaching students to become disrupters and innovators,” said Jarvis.

“For the most part, the awards help finance the students as they move their projects from ideation to prototype,” he continued. “At that point they can approach angel investors for further funding of their business plans. And for some students, the awards actually help them create their own jobs – to become independent, self-supporting journalists. That’s a good thing.”

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View the Pitch Day photo gallery.