Alumni News Archives: Spring 2002

Marco R. della Cava(’92) recently had a brush with “in-flight terror” as part of an assignment for USA Today. della Cava reported on a simulated training exercise designed for sky marshals in the wake of September 11, and his reporting including a session playing a marshal charged with thwarting a terrorist attack.

In one of the video-based scenarios, della Cava, armed with a Beretta 92F pistol, had to stop a man who was menacing a flight attendant. He managed to nail the terrorist after five shots—but not before shooting several passengers. “No one will be rushing to fly Air Marco,” he wrote.

Diane Brozek Fancher (’82) was recently named Maryland editor of The Baltimore Sun, where she was previously Anne Arundel county bureau chief. In her new post she will supervise state coverage. During her time in Anne Arundel, she directed coverage of the county and the city of Annapolis, as well as the Naval Academy and the National Security Agency.

Patrice Gaines(’89) joined actors Danny Glover and Susan Sarandon on a New York stage at a December benefit to raise money for the women and children of Afghanistan. Gaines and the actors, along with theater director Alvan Colon-Lespier, read a letter written by the former Fellow, entitled “Dear America.” The letter urges the United States to “not answer hatred with hatred or anger with anger” but to find a new way to resolve conflict.

Bruce Strong(’01) and his wife, Claudia, are the masterminds behind “Photo Night,” an effort to unite photographers in Southern California through monthly discussions and photography presentations. Now in its seventh year, Photo Night (www.photonight.com) regularly features prize-winning guest speakers and as many as 500 photographers noshing on pot-luck dinners. In February, Photo Night featured a showing of “Dying to Tell the Story,” a documentary by Amy and Kathy Eldon that explores the motivation, tactics, and traumas of journalists who risk their lives to do their jobs. Strong, a staff photographer with The Orange County Register, is also the author, with John Hughes, of Armenia: The Story of a Place in Essays and Pictures (Fourth Millennium Society), which focuses on Armenia’s beauty and its struggles since the collapse of the Soviet system. Strong visited the country for the first time in 1996 and made three more trips to document life there. Fifty-six of his photographs are included in the book.

Sharon Walsh (’90) left New York after a stint at the Industry Standard, the new-economy magazine that had a spectacular ride up—and an equally amazing ride down—before it closed in August. She was the deputy bureau chief for a 20-person New York bureau of the San Francisco-based magazine. Now back in Washington, D.C., where she worked for The Washington Post for 17 years, she is the senior editor for the Faculty section at The Chronicle of Higher Education, editing and, when time permits, writing for the weekly publication.

---

Life after MJF

Three fellows from the class of ’01—Andrea Guthmann, Patricia Vila, and Yumi Wilson—followed up their MJF stints with new fellowships, overseas no less.

Guthmann went to China for two weeks in March on the Hong Kong Journalism Fellowship, sponsored by the East-West Center in Hawaii. She examined the press in China and traveled to Beijing, Xian, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. “This fellowship is even more interesting when you keep in mind that it was originally scheduled to begin on September 11,” she says. “I am certain I never would have applied, let alone been chosen to participate, were it not for my Michigan Fellowship.”

Vila was awarded a two-week fellowship for travel in Japan from the International Center for Journalists, based in Washington, D.C. “It opened my eyes to the Asian world, which I had never seen,” says Vila, who visited Kyoto, Osaka, Hiroshima, and Miyajima. “I highly recommend doing other fellowships,” she adds.

Wilson, meanwhile, spent three months in Japan on a Fulbright research grant. Wilson’s proposal was to track down her mother’s relatives to learn more about her mother’s life in Muroran, Hokkaido. "I had proposed writing a memoir based on this trip," she says, "but now I am convinced that the book should be a novel based on the experience of women like my mother."