Category: Featured Class Notes

Leigh Ann Winick was named Lead Medical Producer for CBS Network News. She was previously medical producer for CBS Mornings. Earlier this year, Winick was awarded Best Television report from the American Association for Cancer Research.

Susanni Douville is retiring from the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine on July 31, 2024, after 26 years as a career law clerk to three successive U.S. Magistrate Judges. After obtaining her M.S.J. from Medill in 1980, she worked as a copy editor at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, The Washington Post, and the Hartford Courant before switching career gears and obtaining her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1990. She looks forward to decompressing, spending more time with family and friends, including her husband, John R. Hull, Jr., and daughters Kate and Christie Hull, and being able to savor sunrises (with coffee) and sunsets (with wine) at home in Harpswell, Maine, instead of commuting on I-295.

Bill Healy (MSJ ’09), Dana Brozost-Kelleher (MSJ ’19) and Alison Flowers (MSJ ’09) were all part of a team Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting and a Peabody Award win last week for the podcast “You Didn’t See Nothin” by the Invisible Institute and USG Audio. The podcast also won the International Documentary Award for Best Audio Documentary, an Ellie Award, Lisagor Awards, among other honors.

Lisa’s MeatingPod podcast, covering the meat and the alt-meat industries, in April 2024 took home its third Jesse H. Neal Award in four years for “Best Podcast” in its category — this, for a production only four years old! Chris Scott is the podcast’s producer, and Lisa is its editor in chief. The Neals program is managed by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA).

Sean Collins Walsh was part of a team of reporters at The Philadelphia Inquirer who won the Toner Prize for Excellence in Local Political Reporting for coverage of the 2023 mayoral election in Philadelphia.

More info: https://newhouse.syracuse.edu/centers/robin-toner-program-in-political-reporting/toner-prizes/

Yvette Walker was named VP Editorial Page Editor at the Kansas City Star to lead an award-winning team in 2023. She left academia, where she previously was assistant dean at the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma.

Coming back to the news industry, this time in the Opinion section, was unexpected but welcomed, she said. It is the second stint at The Star, working in features and news in the early 2000s.

“It really just feels like coming home,” she told The Star. “People like to hear what we’re thinking,” she said. “… We are helping people make decisions about their daily lives through the information that we’re imparting online and in the paper. Opinion does that, too, but in a way that the audience can really understand what we’re thinking and how we’re thinking about it. So that’s a little different, but really so enticing to me.”

The comedy film, “Queenpins,” co-written and co-directed by Gita Pullapilly will stream on NETFLIX globally starting January 18. The film stars Kristen Bell, Vince Vaughn, Paul Walter Hauser, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste. It’s inspired by the true story of two women who counterfeited coupons and made $40 million off the scam.

The film originally sold to Paramount Plus and Showtime in 2001 for a record sale and was recently acquired by Netflix for worldwide rights. Queenpins topped #1 on Netflix in the UK and Ireland.

Pullapilly is currently prepping her next film starring Jeremy Renner.

Leslie Krohn was named Executive Vice President and Chief Brand and Communications Officer at The Joint Commission Enterprise, a global driver of quality improvement and patient safety in healthcare, in Oakbrook Terrace, IL. She was previously Chief Communications Officer at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, IL.