The Edwin Diamond Award Winners

THE EDWIN DIAMOND MEMORIAL AWARD WINNERS

1997 Jordan Mamone
1998 Lola Ogannaike
1999 Mary Sisson
2000 Lauren Sandler
2001 Naween A Mangi
2002 Tatianna Feldman
2003 David Mc Kenzie,Caroline Binham
2004 Clay Smith, Tatianna Serafina
2005 Neil Parmar
2006 Serena Ng
2007 Laura Rivera
2008 Mary Pilon, Christopher Romig
2009 Kathryn Carlson,Cecilia Smith
2010 Michael Lee Humphrey and Mari Hayman
2011 France Costrel, Deena Sami
2012 Ian Duncan, Anna-Maja Rappard
2013 Matt Wolfe
2014 Tom Finn, Evelyn Cheng
2015 Yamiche Alcindor, Magdalena Petrova
2016 Nicole Puglise, Natalie Lampert

2016 Nicole Puglise

Nicole Puglise obsesses and stresses over every assignment and yet always produces excellent work--on deadline, too. Her senior year was not yet out when the Guardian awarded her with its sought after year-long fellowship. That speaks for itself.

Her senior thesis is about gender discrimination and triumphs over it in the women of the world of superhero comics. Here's a sneak peek as these stories are being pitched (password is shoeleather2016).

She is able, responsible, intellectually astute, indefatigable as a reporter. She went to 11 ComicCons to report this story, read everything ever written and interviewed every living woman in the industry. She is delightful, supremely talented, and genuinely deserving of this high honor.

-- Brooke Kroeger

2016 Natalie Lampert

Natalie began publishing pieces on serious medical issues the moment she arrived at NYU. In October 2015, she wrote "I Am 25. I don't Work at Facebook. My Doctors Want me to Freeze my Eggs," for Slate. Natalie is indefatigable, and after months of dedicated reporting and research she developed these ideas into a much-needed skeptical look at the way women's fertility issues were being exploited ( The New Republic piece ("A Modern Woman’s Burden How much does egg-freezing technology help delay reproduction?"). In the interim, she wrote about our culture's confused attitude towards miscarriages in The Daily Beast.

Perhaps her best piece was the one she wrote for The Atlantic, in which she used the news that the U.S. Army was considering paying for women's egg freezing. Most of Natalie's pieces have had a memoir dimension to them, but none of them were ever merely memoirs. She has become skilled at employing the form in the name of larger subjects. She wrote two great ones about her mother's distinguished military career: Medium and The New Republic.

I'm nominating Natalie because she exemplified the dogged reporting we encourage at NYU, along with the creative presentation that is the hallmark of Lit Rep. Fertility, feminism, science, the military--Natalie traverses through them all. All this while maintaining a 4.0 GPA.
-- Rob Boynton

2016 Yamiche Alcindor

Graduate Diamond Award Winner Yamiche Alcindor came to us as a reporter for USA Today. She was frustrated by her video reports and wanted to learn the right way to do it. We worked out an extended program for her to work part time and complete her Masters degree. She came to us as the winner of the National Association of Black Journalists 2013 Emerging Journalist of the Year. I can see why. She was the most engaged student I ever had. She always sought me out with great questions about a theory or practical aspect of the class. She used the academic experience to the utmost engaging with all her professors. Her desire to learn as much as possible was impressive. Her final doc was about the plight of the exonerated who leave prison with $90 and no support. They have to sue to get compensation that can take years. Many become homeless. her righteous indignation is always balanced and never emotional. She is a terrific interviewer and got an interview with the Brooklyn DA who admitted he had a slew of cases from the 90s that were improperly handled. At the screening, she had a people standing in the aisles.

-- Marcia Rock

2015 Magdalena Petrova

Undergraduate Diamond Award Winner Magdalena Petrova is a broadcast student who immigrated from Bulgaria with her parents at age 7. She wrote me, "I was inspired to pursue journalism in middle school after I had the opportunity to interview a Holocaust survivor for an oral history project. I was amazed that this woman could open up to a complete stranger about such a heart-wrenching experience and after hearing her story, I knew that I wanted to be a journalist. I chose to attend NYU because I knew the university had a strong journalism program and that New York City could offer amazing journalism internships." Those internships include, so far, CNBC, WNBC and Channel One News. As a junior, she took my senior seminar, Undercover Reporting. I remember Magdalena not only for her stellar work but for a question she asked. The class had just finished discussing Nellie Bly's story for The New York World about buying a baby. The article ends when Bly leaves the house of a baby-broker with her little bundle. Magdalena asked, “but what happened to the baby afterward?” The class set to work looking for an answer but found none. I was content to leave it at that, a historical mystery — but Magdalena wasn’t. Her closing comment, uttered half to herself: “She should have kept it.”

-- Ted Conover

2014 Tom Finn

Graduate Diamond Award winner Tom Finn is a Fulbright Scholar (winner of the Alaistair Cooke award) and also won the Overseas Press Club scholarship last year, which took him to Cairo to report for Reuters for the summer. His most recent piece was for the NewYorker.com, published Feb. 28, 2014, titled Beyond the Walls of Yemen's Revolution about a Yemeni film. Tom lived in Sana’a, Yemen from 2010 until June 2012 where he worked as an editor at the Yemen Times and later as a freelancer reporting on the uprising that ended the 33-year rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh. He has written for the Guardian, TIME, Reuters, Foreign Policy, The Economist, Newsweek, and other publications. He also worked as a correspondent for Al-Jazeera. In the summer of 2013 he reported from Egypt for Reuters on the military’s overthrow of president Mohammed Morsi and the subsequent crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.

2014 Evelyn Cheng

Undergraduate Diamond Award winner Evelyn Cheng has been dedicated to journalism since her freshman year at NYU. When she was studying abroad in China, she interned with the New York Times Shanghai bureau chief David Barboza and helped him with some of the research for his Pulitzer Prize winning investigation of the Chinese prime minister. Other internships and fellowships had her reporting on neighborhoods in Queens and exploring journalism in Japan. During her senior year, Evelyn was editor-in-chief of NYU's Asian American interest magazine, Generasian. She also completed the print journalism honors course with two semesters of reporting and writing for a long-form piece about the last luxury, pre-war apartment house on Park Avenue in East Midtown. Currently she's at CNBC, writing digital stories on business. Evelyn's goal is to become a foreign correspondent in Asia.

2013 Matt Wolfe

Graduate Diamond Award winner Matt Wolfe is far and away the best student in his year. In his first semester at NYU, he covered OWS (Occupy Wall Street) for Capital New York, filing a dozen stories, including a report on the very first day of the occupation and an on-the-scene report on the raid of Zuccotti Park. He also filed stories on OWS for Dissent, Guernica, and the Rumpus. During his second semester, he interviewed men who go to prostitutes for Ted Conover's ethnography class, which culminated in a story for New York Magazine's sex issue about a secret mixer between johns and escorts.During his third semester, he strung for the New York Times and wrote long piece on a doctor who removes tattoos from ex-cons, which appeared in Narratively and Salon. For his thesis, he is currently writing a feature for Newsweek/Daily Beast about the incarceration of military veterans.

[Wolfe recently wrote: "One of the stories [the] award helped me write was recently published in the Daily Beast. The middle section, about the veteran's court, was reported using money from the Diamond award."]

2012: Ian Duncan, Anna-Maja Rappard

Graduate Diamond Award winner: Ian Duncan. Ian, a Briton and a graduate of Oxford where he was editor of the student newspaper, spent a year in Japan teaching English before coming to NYU with a departmental Stenbeck scholarship award. As a member of the GloJo class of 2012 (Journalism and International Relations), he completed both his course work and his thesis by January and graduated early (our program is two years) with a 3.94 GPA. His thesis, “Middletown On the Edge,” involved interviews and field research in Muncie, Indiana, and a close reading of the original Middletown studies by Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd. His finding? That the globalization of manufacturing has weakened Muncie’s middle class, and that the city will have to continue to move towards a more diverse service-based economy if that middle class is to be rebuilt. He concludes that education will play an important role in making that transition, but notes that political and social leaders in Muncie will find it difficult to act alone. Along the way, Ian also excelled during his term as a student in the second Hyperlocal class, enough to be awarded one of six paid and highly competitive New York Times-branded internships on the Local during the publication’s first summer, selected from dozens of applications that were solicited nationally. As a student and as an intern, he expanded coverage on the NYTimes.com/NYU Local East Village to include census data-mining and real estate news that made the paper pages of the New York Times as well as the City Room blog. His internship on the politics blog of the New Yorker resulted in dozens of posts. This exceptional publishing record during his studies won him a coveted fellowship from the Center for Washington and Politics, which placed him in the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times, where he is now writing prolifically on everything from Senate bills to GPA waste to the travails of Roger Clemens. He is, on our view, the consummate graduate of GloJo and our graduate program at large.

Undergraduate Diamond Award winner: Anna-Maja Rappard is a broadcast major, with a 3.8 overall GPA, interested in international reporting, especially on the Middle East – “smart and ambitious,” one faculty member calls her. She had a yearlong internship at CNN International covering the United Nations and has also worked at MTV in Berlin. Anna-Maja spent last summer studying at an intensive Arabic language at the American University in Beirut program to improve her language skills and broaden her experience in the Middle East. She is currently living in Lebanon to become fluent in Arabic.

2011 France Costrel and Deena Sami

Deena Sami, an undergraduate Journalism and Near Eastern Studies major. From Prof. Mohamad Bazzi: "Her work stands out for its depth of research, insightful writing, and deep engagement with the subject matter. Deena has a wide range of interests, including Middle East studies, international reporting, creative writing, and learning Arabic. She has displayed these interests throughout the two courses that she has taken with me. She often does additional research and reaches out to me over email or during office hours to ensure that she has mastered the subject matter. Deena is highly self-sufficient, motivated, and resourceful. In my "Foreign Reporting"course, I assign every student to cover an ethnic community in New York. Deena chose to cover the Egyptian immigrant community, which has allowed her to make use of her Arabic language skills to conduct interviews and gain the trust of sources."

France Costrel. A masters student in our News and Documentary program. From Prof. Marcia Rock: "[She] did a strong and insightful documentary about how her hometown in Normandy, France, cares for the children of WWII soldiers who lost their lives on Day. France also was executive producer of our election special this year and showed exceptional leadership. She is the kind of journalist we need in this world.