Category: Class Notes

Minnesota Public Radio named Duchesne Drew as its next president April 8, 2020.

Drew most recently an executive at the Bush Foundation and spent many years at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where he rose through the ranks from a summer intern to managing editor of operations.

The MPR division within American Public Media Group includes MPR News, Classical MPR, The Current and digital services.

While at the Bush Foundation, Drew served as community vice president, in charge of creating networks across the region. He also sits on the boards of a number of organizations, including the African American Leadership Forum and the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce.

“Charles Whitaker was a central part of my Medill experience,” Drew said. “Even though he focused on magazine journalists and I was heading toward a career as newspaper reporter, he made time for me and it mattered greatly, from conversations in his office to dinner at his house. I felt seen, valued and supported.”

He serves on the Leadership Council of Make It. MSP., an effort to attract “people from around the world” to live and work in the Twin Cities.

Photo courtesy of MPR.

Evan Hill, a member of the New York Times Visual Investigations team, was lead reporter on an investigation into the Russian bombing of Syrian civilians that won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting on May 4 and a George Polk Award for international reporting on February 19. The Pulitzer jury recognized the Visual Investigations team for two stories that proved, for the first time, that the Russian Air Force was responsible for a series of attacks on hospitals and other civilian sites in opposition-held Syria. The investigation has been cited during a United Nations Security Council meeting on Syria and during a congressional hearing on protecting civilians during armed conflict. Hill and his team relied on traditional reporting, contacting dozens of sources, and new open source techniques, such as geolocation and metadata, to carry out their investigation.

Local news publisher Justin Kerr announced that grants from the Robert R. McCormick Foundation and the Chicago Headline Club will power local journalism for the McKinley Park neighborhood of Chicago in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic. The McKinley Park News, Kerr’s micro-local news outlet that covers a single Chicago neighborhood, will use these funds to power a new journalism initiative to support the community.

“We are honored and humbled by this critical support for our publication,” Kerr said. “The pandemic has upended the already-battered news industry. This funding for Chicago journalism ensures our communities stay informed with reliable, high-quality news and information.”

The McKinley Park News is one of 48 recipients of the McCormick Foundation grant, which were awarded to both commercial and non-profit community news publications. The Chicago Headline Club disbursed grants of up to $500 each to help local journalists with their news reporting expenses.

Bill Healy (MSJ09) and Alison Flowers (MSJ09) met while studying at Medill. They recently co-produced a 7-part investigative podcast called “Somebody” for the Invisible Institute, The Intercept, Topic Studios and iHeartMedia. The podcast follows the story of Courtney Copeland, who was shot and killed in Chicago in 2016. “Somebody” is narrated by Copeland’s mother, who believes police are hiding something about his death. The series explores questions of police accountability and public trust.

Natalie and Michael Tomko (MSJ 12) welcomed a daughter, Amelia Grace, on April 29. Go ‘Cats!

Emily Glazer, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was recently featured in the Netflix documentary series “Dirty Money” for her reporting on Wells Fargo.

Glazer covered Wells Fargo for five years, breaking news and writing enterprise articles on countless regulatory investigations and problems across one of the largest U.S. banks. Through source development, Glazer convinced contacts to share internal documents, record phone calls and take notes during internal meetings to get a sense of what was happening inside the bank, an eye no other publication had. Her reporting has been cited in congressional hearings and has forced Wells Fargo to disclose more information.

Glazer is featured in the Dirty Money episode “The Wagon Wheel” that focuses on Wells Fargo’s misdeeds and wrongdoings.

Brian M. Rosenthal, an investigative reporter on the Metro Desk of The New York Times, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting on May 4 for a series of stories about predatory lending in the New York City taxicab industry. The five-part series showed how taxi industry leaders made hundreds of millions of dollars by inflating the price of taxi medallions — the permits that allow drivers to own their cabs — and trapping thousands of immigrant buyers in loans they could not afford. The stories prompted criminal investigations and arrests, government reforms and an ongoing $810 million effort by the New York State Attorney General to bail out cabdrivers. The series also won a George A. Polk Award on February 19.