The Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism Initiative

[administrator]

Moment launched the Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism Initiative in 2010 in honor of the 38-year-oldWall Street Journal reporter slain by terrorists in 2002 to encourage young journalists to write in-depth stories about a modern manifestation of anti-Semitism or another deeply ingrained prejudice. With the help of our prestigious panel of journalists, Moment select and mentors the writer, providing her or him with journalistic as well as financial support. The fellowship offers $5,000 to cover the costs of the project—$2,500 up front, and $2,500 upon completion of the story. The edited stories will be published inMoment, perhaps in conjunction with another media outlet. Applicants must be between the ages of 22 and 38; international applicants are welcome to apply.

 

Fellows will be mentored by a group of prestigious journalists, including: Wolf Blitzer, Linda Feldmann, Martin Fletcher, Glenn Frankel, Bill Kovach, David Lauter, Charles Lewis, Clarence Page, Robert Siegel, Paul Steiger, Lynn Sweet and David Wessel. The DPIJI project director is Mary Hadar.

 

“Our son Danny has come to symbolize both the power and nobleness of principled journalism and the rising dangers of the hatred that took his life. The Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism Initiative will harness the former to combat the latter and will lead us a step closer to Danny’s ideal of a hate-free world.”–Judea Pearl

 

“The DPIJI fellowship provided me the stability, feedback and guidance critical to developing a complex story about a charged issue. This web of professional and personal support is rare these days and was crucial to my growth as a journalist.”

–Emily Keeler Alhadeff, 2011 DPIJI winner. Read her story, An Olympian Struggle here.

 

To apply, please send an email to dpiji@momentmag.com including:

• Your name, date of birth and contact information
• Your resume
• Three clips from a print or digital publication, including at least one long-form story
• A description of your story proposal, including how you plan to execute it
• Two recommendations, one from an editor about your work as a journalist, and one from a journalist or scholar about the content of your proposal.

DEADLINE: June 7, 2014

 

 

Past Winners:

 

2012: Eve Fairbanks is a writer living in Johannesburg and completing a book about South Africa. Her piece “A House Divided” (published in May/June 2013) tells the story of demographic transformation and racial anxieties at an iconic historically white university in South Africa. The University of the Free State story is an unsettling one, because, in the beginning — as it began to integrate in the early 1990s after South African liberation — integration went exceptionally well. As the school’s demographics shifted, however, strange changes began to emerge in the university community’s feelings about integration — culminating, a decade later, in a completely re-segregated society, in which dorms, classes, social activities had re-divided into white-only and black-only, like a new apartheid. Fairbanks investigates  what caused social progress to surge forward and then reverse course?

 

2011: Emily K. Alhadeff is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and the associate editor of JTNews, Washington State’s Jewish newspaper. Her story, “An Olympian Struggle,” (published in Moment’s July/August 2012 issue) details the collision of deeply held worldviews in Olympia, Washington, home of Rachel Corrie, the International Solidarity Movement activist killed by an Israeli military bulldozer in Gaza in 2003. Two years after the Olympia Food Co-Op launched its boycott of Israeli products, the first—and only—of its kind in the United States, the community remains sharply divided. Alhadeff conducted interviews with both sides of the boycott battle and examined the conspiracy theories that continue to tear Olympians apart, as well as tracking local, national and international organization funding sources. She also explores the causes that have led Olympia to become a fulcrum of anti-Israel sentiment and activism.

 

http://www.momentmag.com/the-daniel-pearl-investigative-journalism-initiative/