The John B. Oakes Award Jury
Jody Calendar is the founder of Calendar Communications, LLC, a firm specializing in motivational speaking and customized transitional change models to help news organizations and companies navigate the myriad of challenges caused by a changing landscape. She is an award-winning journalist who worked for The Asbury Park Press and the Bergen Record, where she was responsible for news, personnel and budget. She is a nationally recognized editor, author and charismatic seminar leader. She has also judged prestigious journalism contests for the Associated Press, numerous newspaper chains and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She writes a column for the American Society of Newspaper Editors about national trends in the media. She was named a Woman of Achievement by the State Advisory Council on Women, was a State Department Fellow and noted as one of the state's 50 most interesting people by New Jersey Monthly.
Jim Detjen is the director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University’s School of Journalism. Formerly an award-winning science and environment reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Detjen is also a co-founder and past president of the Society of Environmental Journalists. The Center, founded in 1995, offers academic and professional training for current and future environmental journalists and was created to house the first endowed chair in environmental journalism by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Under Professor Detjen’s leadership, the program has gained a worldwide reputation for the study, practice and research of environmental journalism.
Peter Dykstra is a publisher of Environmental Health News and The Daily Climate, websites that publish original work on science, health and environment and aggregate over 200 news stories each day. From 2009 to 2011, he was Deputy Director at the Pew Charitable Trusts. From 1991 to 2008, he was at CNN, most recently as the Executive Producer science, technology, environment and weather units. He shared a 1993 Emmy Award for coverage of the Mississippi River floods, a 2005 Peabody Award for coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, and a 2006 DuPont Columbia Award for coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami. He is a former Visiting Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, and a former Board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists. In 2009, he launched the Science Nation video series fir the National Science Foundation.
Tom Herman is teaching a seminar on business news coverage at the the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and at Yale College in the fall of 2010. Herman started writing for The Wall Street Journal in 1968, after graduating from Yale. He was based in several Journal bureaus, including New York, Atlanta, Hong Kong and Singapore. Herman covered the credit markets for about a decade and started the Journal’s semi-annual interest rate and economic outlook survey. From mid-1993, he wrote a weekly column on taxes until he retired in May, 2009. Herman continues as a columnist for The Wall Street Journal Sunday, a personal finance section that appears in more than 60 newspapers around the nation. He also writes a column for The Fiscal Times.
Marguerite Holloway is Director of Science and Environmental Journalism and an assistant professor. She has been teaching at the journalism school since 1997. She won a Presidential Teaching Award in 2009, and the Distinguished Teacher of the Year award in 2001. Holloway is a contributing editor at Scientific American, where she has covered many topics, particularly environmental issues, public health, neuroscience and women in science. Holloway has a B.A. in comparative literature from Brown University and an M.S. from the journalism school (’88).
Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1999. Her series on global warming, "The Climate of Man," appeared in The New Yorker in the spring of 2005.It won a National Magazine Award, a National Academies Communications Award, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine writing award. It was extended into a book, "Field Notes from a Catastrophe," which was published in 2006. Prior to joining the staff of The New Yorker, she was a political reporter for The New York Times. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts with her husband and three sons.
Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books about the environment, including "The End of Nature," which was the first book for a general audience about global warming. A scholar in residence at Middlebury College, he is the founder of 350.org, the largest grassroots global campaign to fight climate change. Named to Foreign Policy magazine's inaugural list of the 100 most important global thinkers, McKibben is a frequent contributor to various publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, The Middlebury Campus, Granta, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and Outside. He is also a board member at and contributor to Grist Magazine.
Don J. Melnick is the Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Conservation Biology at Columbia University and executive director for the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation (CERC) at Columbia. Melnick holds a Ph.D in Physical Anthropology from Yale University and has done extensive research in population genetics and conservation and molecular evolution. He directed an environmental workshop for journalists in Punta Cana, the Dominican Republican in March 2005 as part of the New York Times Foundation Institutes program.
John G. H. Oakes is the son of John B. Oakes and co-founder of OR Books (www.orbooks.com), an alternative publishing company that embraces e-books and other new technologies. Oakes started in publishing with Barney Rosset’s legendary Grove Press. Among the authors he has published are Louis Begley, Andrei Codrescu, R. Crumb, Cory Doctorow, Andrea Dworkin, Abbie Hoffman, Gordon Lish, Harvey Pekar, Rudy Rucker, John Waters and Edmund White. Oakes is a member of P.E.N. America’s board of trustees and has written for the Review of Contemporary Fiction, the Associated Press, the International Herald Tribune, and most recently The Huffington Post.
Judy Pasternak is a non-fiction writer who focuses often on environmental issues. She is the author of the forthcoming "Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed," which chronicles the deadly legacy of uranium mining on the Navajo homeland for use in nuclear bombs. She has also freelanced for AOL News, the Daily Beast, the Investigative Reporting Workshop and the Nonproliferation Review, among others. Until 2008, she worked for the Los Angeles Times, first on the local staff in Los Angeles and then on the national staff in Chicago and Washington. She has won numerous national prizes for environmental and investigative reporting, including a 2007 Oakes Award. A partial draft of her book won the 2009 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.
David Ropeik is a consultant and speaker on risk communication and risk perception to government, business, trade associations, consumer groups, and educational institutions. A former instructor of risk communication at the Harvard School of Public Health and co-director of the school’s professional education course “The Risk Communication Challenge, he is co-author of "RISK, A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Dangerous and What’s Safe in the World Around You," published by Houghton Mifflin in 2002. Ropeik is the creator and director of the program “Improving Media Coverage of Risk”, a training program for journalists, and a member of the risk communication working group of the Global Roundtable on Climate Change, part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Ropeik worked as a television journalist, specializing in coverage of environmental issues for 22 years in Boston and a member of the Board of Directors of the Society of Environmental Journalists for nine years.
Jonathan Weiner is an award-winning science writer. His works include "Planet Earth," companion book to an Emmy-award-winning seven-part PBS television series (1986); "The Next One Hundred Years" (1990); "The Beak of the Finch" (1994), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science (1994) and the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction (1995); "Time, Love, Memory" (1999), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, and finalist for the Aventis Science Prize (2000); "His Brother's Keeper" (2004), finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize (2005). He is a contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and others.