Three 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 Mississippi’s use of the clean-up funds it received following the 2010 BP oil spill, to the expanding role of private sector investment in the fertility industry and the implications of the tech sector’s build-out of its physical infrastructure in the middle of the country.
In addition, funding will be provided for follow-up stories to the recent series that 2018 McGraw Fellows Jeff Kelly Lowenstein and Nick Penzenstadler produced for USA TODAY examining how troubled reverse mortgages have contributed to thousands of elderly borrowers losing their homes, a problem that’s been particularly acute in minority communities. The Puerto Rico-based Center for Investigative Journalism will also provide editorial support to this project.
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 ambitious coverage of critical issues related to the U.S. economy and business. The Fellowships – awarded twice a year – enable experienced journalists to produce deeply reported works of investigative or enterprise business journalism.
The new McGraw Fellows are:
Mya Frazier: A business and investigative journalist based in the Midwest, Frazier will use the Fellowship to examine the expanding physical infrastructure of Silicon Valley within Middle America.
A regular contributor to Bloomberg Businessweek, Frazier has written about the rise of dollar stores in rural food deserts, big tech’s drain on public services, and, as a 2016 recipient of the McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism, how Silicon Valley startup culture is transforming Midwest evangelicalism. Her work has also appeared in Outside, Columbia Journalism Review, NewYorker.com, The New Republic, Slate, The Atlantic, and Harper’s. She is a former staff writer for The Cleveland Plain Dealer and American City Business Journals.
Ryan L. Nave: Nave is the editor-in-chief of Mississippi Today, a nonprofit news organization based in Jackson. During the Fellowship, he will lead a team that is examining how the state of Mississippi spent billions of dollars received in the aftermath of the BP oil spill in 2010. The publication of the series will coincide with the 10-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, which led to the spill.
A journalist for more than 15 years, Nave started his career in Springfield, Ill., where he covered government, politics and energy. He has continued covering the intersection of government, politics, energy and the environment as a reporter and editor in Washington State, Colorado and Mississippi. He was a 2010-2011 Ted Scripps Environmental Reporting fellow at the University of Colorado and has won numerous state and regional awards for reporting and commentary.
Anna Louie Sussman: A New York-based freelance journalist, Sussman will use her Fellowship to explore the growing fertility industry, which has been attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and expanding into new markets as people around the world delay starting families.
Sussman has over a decade of experience writing on gender, reproduction, and economics, as well as arts and culture, and the economics of art. She writes for the website of The New Yorker, and her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, and other publications. She was previously an economics reporter at The Wall Street Journal focused on the labor market, a commodities reporter at Reuters, and the senior writer and editor of Womenintheworld.org.
More than 100 journalists working in a dozen countries applied for the latest round of Fellowships, our biggest applicant pool yet. Each winning project receives funding up to $15,000. In addition to financial backing, the McGraw Center provides Fellows with editorial guidance and, where needed, assistance in placing stories with media outlets.
Applications for McGraw Fellowships are considered twice a year. The next deadline for proposals is January 3, 2020. For more information and the online application, please go to www.mcgrawcenter.org.
The McGraw Center for Business Journalism was established in early 2014 by the family of the late Harold W. McGraw, Jr., former chairman and CEO of McGraw-Hill and long-time publisher of BusinessWeek magazine. The Center is dedicated to enhancing the depth and quality of business news coverage through training, student scholarships, and support for veteran journalists.
Contact:
Jane Sasseen
Executive Director, McGraw Center
jane.sasseen@journalism.cuny.edu
646-758-7781