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Fred Knubel, Director of Public Information
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1996 Knight-Bagehot Fellows Named at Columbia

Eight Knight-Bagehot Fellows in Economics and Business Journalism for 1996-97 have been named by Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

They include journalists at Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, The Record of Hackensack, N.J., Florida Trend of St. Petersburg, Fla., and The Weekly Review Magazine of Kenya.

The mid-career fellowships provide full tuition and a living stipend of $20,000 for experienced journalists to take graduate courses at Columbia's Schools of Business, Law and International and Public Affairs. Fellows also attend special seminars at the Journalism School led by scholars and business experts during the nine-month program, which begins in August. The program is open to journalists with at least four years' experience.

Founded in 1975, the fellowships are named for John S. and James L. Knight, brothers who established the Knight Foundation, and Walter Bagehot, the 19th-century British economist and editor of The Economist. They are administered by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and directed by Terri Thompson, a former associate editor of U.S. News & World Report and reporter for Business Week.

Funds are provided by an endowment from the Knight Foundation and by grants from foundations and corporations, which have included The McGraw-Hill Foundation, The Starr Foundation, The Reuter Foundation, State Street Bank, Time Inc., Pfizer Corp., The New York Times Foundation, Ford Motor Company, Dreyfus Corporation, Merrill Lynch, and Dow Jones & Co.

These are the 1996-97 Knight-Bagehot Fellows:

Greg Farrell, 37, is editor-at-large for Adweek magazine, where he writes features and columns on subjects ranging from Coca-Cola's push into the former East German market to Pepsico's appetite for a larger share of the global fast-food market. His in-depth profile of an advertising agency executive won him this year's Jesse Neal Award for Investigative Reporting. During his ten years at Adweek, he has worked as bureau chief in Boston, New York and Chicago. Previously, he was editor of Ad East and a reporter for Swampscott Reporter in Massachusetts. He is a graduate of Harvard University.

Deirdre Fretz, 32, works for Institutional Investor, where three years ago she helped launch Emerging Markets Week, a newsletter for professionals dedicated to third world capital markets. Her first job in journalism was as a reporter for The Hudson Reporter in Hoboken, N.J., and then briefly as a writer for The Mexico Journal and The North Jersey Herald & News. She joined Institutional Investor in 1991. She has a B.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Chicago.

Pia Jeanne Hinckle, 31, is managing editor of San Francisco Bay Guardian, one of the country's oldest independent alternative weeklies. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College, where she concentrated her studies on Italian, environmental science and economics, she lived in Rome and reported for the Associated Press and Newsweek. She returned to her native San Francisco in 1992 to help her father start a new literary and political journal called Argonaut. She joined the Guardian in 1993 and during her three-year tenure there the weekly has grown from an average of 90 pages an issue to more than 120 pages.

Faith Keenan, 34, is based in Hong Kong as media and marketing correspondent for Far Eastern Economic Review, published by Dow Jones & Co. Upon graduating from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in 1983, she went to the Philippines to work for six months at the Refugee Processing Center and then worked briefly as editorial assistant for Congressional Quarterly. She went back to school, earning a Master's in International Affairs from Columbia in 1986. She then spent seven years as a reporter for Hearst Newspapers, and one year launching a fortnightly news magazine covering advertising, marketing and media in Asia. In 1994 she joined Far Eastern Economic Review and was deputy business editor before returning to reporting.

Iraki Peter M. Kibiriti, 34, acting business editor of The Weekly Review, Kenya's oldest news magazine. He took his first journalism job in 1986 as an economic writer for News Publishers Ltd. where his journalistic debut was an investigative piece on Kenya's banking industry. He later wrote for Development Horizons and Industrial Review. On the basis of several articles he wrote on the collapse of communism, he was nominated in 1991 by the German government to represent the Kenya media at a three-week international conference in Bonn. He is a graduate of the University of Nairobi.

Phillip Longman, 40, senior editor of Florida Trend, a monthly business magazine based in St. Petersburg, received the Gerald Loeb Award in 1995 and first place award for magazines from Investigative Reporters & Editors in 1990. A graduate of Oberlin College, his first journalism job was as a senior editor at New Jersey Monthly. The author of two books (Born to Pay: The New Politics of Aging in America in 1987 and The Return of Thrift in 1996), he also worked for one year as legislative assistant for U.S. Representative Kenneth MacKay.

John J. Oslund, 43, assistant business editor of the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, joined the newspaper as a copy editor in 1977 and worked as a reporter covering science, energy, the environment, medicine, transportation and international trade. In 1992-93, he led the newspaper's coverage of Northwest Airlines' financial crisis, and in 1994 he assumed his current duties as staff writer responsible for coverage of technology, innovation and management for the business group. He has a B.A. in journalism from the University of Minnesota.

Anne Tergesen, 31, reporter on the business staff of The Record of Hackensack, N.J., took her first reporting job in 1989 covering U.S. and European firms out of Tokyo for The Japan Times, Japan's leading English-language daily newspaper. After returning to New York in 1990, she worked for NHK, Japan's largest television network, reporting off-camera on business and financial news. Before joining The Record in 1993 she worked for a year as a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. She graduated with honors from Princeton University.

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