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 and Caroline Binham
2004 Clay Smith and Tatianna Serafina
2005 Neil Parmar
2006 Serena Ng
2007 Laura Rivera
2008 Mary Pilon and Christopher Romig
2009 Kathryn Carlson and Cecilia Smith
2010 Michael Lee Humphrey and Mari Hayman
2011 France Costrel and Deena Sami
2012: Ian Duncan, Anna-Maja Rappard
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 a 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.

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.