Contact: Fred Knubel
Director of Public Information
212-854-5573, fhk1@columbia.edu FOR IMMEDIATE USE
Four Win Columbia's Highest Journalism Alumni Honor
Four leading journalists will receive the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism's highest alumni honor this Friday, April 25. They are:
Dinah Eng, columnist for the Gannett News Service and past
president of the Asian American Journalists Association.
Philip Hamburger, long time writer for The New Yorker.
James B. McClatchy, publisher of the McClatchy Newspapers and past president
of the Inter American Press Association.
Peter S. McGhee, vice president for national programming, WGBH-TV, Boston.
Each will receive a 1997 Columbia Journalism Alumni Award, given for
"outstanding journalistic achievement or a distinguished career in journalism or
journalism education." The presentations will be made at the Journalism
Alumni Association's spring meeting, beginning at 6 P.M. in the Faculty Room of
Low Memorial Library on the Columbia campus, Broadway at 116th Street.
Introducing Ms. Eng will be Hayley Sterling, assignment editor for the
nationally syndicated television program First Business. Mary Gordon, the
author and Barnard College faculty member, will present Mr. Hamburger. Mr.
McClatchy will be introduced by June Erlich, publications director for the David
Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. Judy
Crichton, former executive producer of The American Experience on PBS, will
present Mr. McGhee.
Information on the recipients follows:
Dinah Eng, class of 1977, writes the weekly column BRIDGES, the first
column by an Asian-American distributed nationwide. It examines ways to build
bridges in society - within families, between groups - covering a broad range of
contemporary issues and concerns. Distributed by the Gannett News Service,
where she is also special sections editor, the column is also available through the
Los Angeles Times Syndicate. She is the immediate past president of the Asian
American Journalists Association, was head of a coalition of minority journalists
groups named Unity '99 and helped found the Multicultural Journalists
Association in 1989. As mentor and role model, she has inspired many young
people of color to enter journalism. A graduate of Syracuse University, she has
written for The Houston Chronicle, The National Observer and The Detroit News.
She has won a number of writing awards and was a semi-finalist for the
Journalist-in-Space Project. She lives in Silver Spring, Md.
Philip Hamburger, class of 1938, is the famed "Our Man Stanley" who has
covered 14 presidential inaugurations for The New Yorker during his 58 years
with the magazine. Serving under all four of its editors, including Harold Ross,
he wrote for nearly every section, from Talk of the Town to Shouts and Murmurs.
He was an overseas correspondent during World War II and later covered music
and television, wrote Profiles and articles and produced a 55-part series on mid-
sized American cities titled "Notes for a Gazetteer." Six books of his New Yorker
pieces have been published, including The Oblong Blur and Other Odysseys (1949),
J. P. Marquand, Esquire (1952), Mayor Watching and Other Pleasures (1958), An
American Notebook (1965) and Curious World: A New Yorker at Large (1987).
Currently, he is assembling an anthology of his work, to be published by Alfred A.
Knopf. His undergraduate degree is from the Johns Hopkins University. He
received the 1994 George Polk Career Award.
James McClatchy, class of 1949, was born into a newspaper family and has
been a newspaper reporter and editor most of his life. The McClatchy
Newspapers publish more than 20 newspapers across the country; its flagship,
The Sacramento Bee, is well known throughout California for its dedication to
public service journalism. He has been president of the Inter American Press
Association and is respected for his efforts on behalf of press freedoms in all the
Americas. He organized the 1994 Hemisphere Conference on Free Speech in
Mexico, which issued the Declaration of Chapultepec, signed by newspapers,
individuals and heads of state, setting out principles describing the role of a free
press in a democracy. A graduate of Stanford University and an Air Force pilot
during the Korean War, he is a director and officer of a number of education and
conservation organizations in California.
Peter S. McGhee, class of 1960, began his broadcast career in public
television in 1964 at National Educational Television (NET) in New York and
moved to WGBH in Boston in 1969 to be executive editor of the public affairs series
The Advocates, which won Emmy and Peabody awards. He was executive
producer of the documentary series Arabs and Israelis in 1974, which won a
Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award. The following year he became WGBH's
program manager for national productions and later vice president for national
programming. He has overseen development of the ongoing series Frontline, The
American Experience, and Nova and many other series, including Vietnam: A
Television History, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, Inside Gorbachev's USSR,
Columbus and the Age of Discovery, and Made in America. He is a graduate of
St. John's College in Annapolis and a U.S. Navy veteran.
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