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 the impact of big data on the farm economy and California’s role in regulating the ride-hailing industry to allegations of corruption in the Chinese healthcare sector.
The new McGraw Fellows are:
Ben Knight: A freelance reporter based in Berlin, Germany, Knight will explore how a network of multinational tech companies has allegedly exploited corruption in the Chinese healthcare system.
In 12 years as a journalist, Knight has worked as a freelance political correspondent for Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle in addition to writing for The Guardian, The Observer, 100Reporters, Prospect, Exberliner, The Berlin Policy Journal, Vice, and a handful of German publications. He has covered the German arms industry, far-right extremism, late Nazi trials, and the German company Siemens.
Clint Rainey: An award-winning Brooklyn-based journalist, Rainey’s fellowship project will examine increasingly popular farm management tools that rely on big data to optimize things like crop yields. He will focus on the vast amounts of proprietary data being concentrated in platforms owned by the world’s largest agriculture companies and the implications for the future of farming.
Rainey has spent a decade writing about food and agriculture for magazines, including Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, and New York, where he was on teams that won James Beard and National Magazine awards. He was a 2018 UC Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Fellow. His articles have also been featured in The Best American Food Writing and The Best American Infographics.
Seth Rosenfeld: A San Francisco-based investigative reporter, Rosenfeld’s project will review the safety record of Uber and Lyft in California and explore how well the California Public Utilities Commission, the first agency in the nation to legitimize ride-hailing, has performed its regulatory duty to ensure that the services are safe.
The project builds on Rosenfeld’s reporting for the San Francisco Public Press, an independent nonprofit newspaper that focuses on public policy and its impact on people. His freelance stories have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Magazine, and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. For many years, he was a staff reporter at the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle. His work has won numerous awards including a George Polk Award for Health Reporting. His best-selling book Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power, won a Ridenhour Prize, a PEN USA Award, an American Book Award, and a Society of Professional Journalists Sunshine Award.
In addition to financial backing, the McGraw Center provides fellows with editorial guidance and, where needed, assistance in placing stories with media outlets. Roughly 40 journalists have won McGraw Fellowships to date.
Applications for McGraw Fellowships are considered twice a year. The next deadline for proposals is July 10, 2020. For more information and the online application, 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.