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Alumni and Friends

Welcome back to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. As alumni, you are part of a community of 12,287 strong who have graduated from the Journalism School since it first opened its doors in 1912. Please use this website to stay involved with the School and one another.
 

Winners of the 2012 Annual Alumni Award to be Honored in April

Four prominent alumni of Columbia Journalism School will receive the 2012 Alumni Award. The winners are Gail Collins (Knight-Bagehot Fellow) ’82, Lolis Eric Elie ’86, John Fialka ’62 and Simon Li ’70.

The awards will be presented on Saturday, April 21, 2012, as a feature of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism’s Alumni Weekend (April 20-21), which is also the kickoff of the School’s year-long Centennial Celebration. The awards ceremony will take place in Low Memorial Library on the Columbia campus.

The Alumni Awards are presented annually for a distinguished journalism career in any medium, an outstanding single journalistic accomplishment, a notable contribution to journalism education or an achievement in related fields. The awards, which represent recognition of excellence by professional peers, are highly prized by the Journalism School’s alumni, many of whom go on to become respected leaders in the field. The winners are selected by a panel of jurors composed of previous award winners, headed by David Peterkin ’82, chair of the Alumni Board.

 

Gail Collins (Knight-Bagehot Fellow) ’82, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, was the first woman ever appointed editor of The Times’ editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down to begin a leave of absence in order to finish her book “When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present,” a sequel to her book “America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines.” Before joining The Times, Collins was a columnist at New York Newsday and the New York Daily News, and a reporter for United Press International. Her first job in journalism was in Connecticut, where she founded the Connecticut State News Bureau, which provided coverage of the state capitol and Connecticut politics. Besides “When Everything Changed,” published in October 2009, Collins is the author of “America’s Women,” “Scorpion Tongues:  Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics,” and “The Millennium Book,” which she co-authored with her husband, Dan Collins. She teaches as an adjunct at Columbia Journalism School.

 

Lolis Eric Elie ’86 is story editor and staff writer for the HBO series “Treme,” created by David Simon (“The Wire”) and Eric Overmyer (“Law and Order”). Much like the show itself, Elie’s career has been focused on journalism, food, New Orleans and music. For more than a dozen years, as columnist with the The Times-Picayune, he chronicled the politics, idiosyncrasies and appetites of New Orleans. As a special correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning, he documented New Orleans culture for a national audience. In partnership with documentary filmmaker Dawn Logsdon, Elie produced and wrote the award-winning 2008 documentary “Faubourg Treme,” which details the history of The New Orleans Tribune, the country’s first black daily newspaper. In 1996 Elie published “Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country,” an examination of American culture through the prism of its most emblematic food. That book was the basis of a documentary of the same name. He is the editor of “Cornbread Nation 2: The Best of Southern Food Writing.” His work has appeared in such publications as The Oxford American, Gourmet, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Best Food Writing, Best African American Essays and Saveur. His fiction has appeared in the anthologies “Streetlights” and “That’s What I Like About the South,” and has been read on the public radio program “Selected Shorts.”

 

John Fialka ’62 is the editor of ClimateWire, an Internet newsletter devoted to the myriad issues surrounding global warming. Until January, 2008, he was a reporter with the Wall Street Journal's Washington Bureau, where he covered a wide variety of beats over 25 years, including defense and intelligence matters. He served abroad as the lead reporter for the Journal in the first Gulf War and in the London bureau, during the waning days of the Cold War. His specialties have included nuclear power, nuclear proliferation, war mobilization, and politics and money. From 1996 until retiring in December 2007, he covered energy and environmental matters in the Washington Bureau, a set of issues that became increasingly dominated by climate change. He is the author of three books, including "Hotel Warriors," an exploration of the battles between the press and the military during the Gulf War that led to the implementation of the "imbed" system used during the War in Iraq; "Economic Espionage in America” and "Sisters, Catholic Nuns and the Making of America," which has been the subject of two television documentaries. Fialka has won several major awards including the Worth Bingham and the Raymond Clapper awards for investigative journalism.

 

Simon Li ’70, editor and leadership consultant and a vice chairman of the board of the International Press Institute, had a newspaper career spanning 42 years, the last 23 of them with the Los Angeles Times, where he was an assistant business editor, foreign editor and assistant managing editor. With nearly two decades of management experience, Li believes that moral courage, the human touch and coaching others are the hallmarks of the best leaders, managers and editors. Born in London and a graduate of Oxford University where he is a Fleming Fellow and a member of the Rector's Council of Lincoln College, Li began his career as a reporter at the Hong Kong Standard, the English-language daily, during an exciting time—the Cultural Revolution was underway and the politics had spread to Hong Kong. He was recently honored with the “Leadership in Diversity Award” at the Asian American Journalists Association National Convention in Detroit, in recognition of his efforts to diversify the newsroom during his long career as editor and recruiter. He was known in the Times newsroom for his championship of international coverage and directed the paper’s coverage of the Persian Gulf War. Li is member of the Board of Overseers of the Huntington Library and a member of the Columbia Journalism School Board of Visitors.