Lauren Feeney and Renee Feltz are the first two Molly Ivins Scholars at Columbia’s Journalism School. Both received their M.S. degrees in May, 2008. They talked about their experiences as journalists at Columbia in August, 2008.
Lauren Feeney
Lauren Feeney is a Web producer for PBS.org based at WNET-TV in New York. Since she joined public television in 2008, Lauren has produced short Web-exclusive documentaries for Wide Angle/Focal Point, PBS’s series about international issues. When she returns from maternity leave in early 2010, Lauren will produce Web stories on PBS.org for various PBS news and public affairs programs.
Lauren had already produced several independent films before attending Columbia Journalism School, where she was a research assistant for the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards and received a Molly Ivins Scholarship. Her first film, Garlic and Watermelons, followed a Gypsy settlement in Athens that was demolished for the 2004 Olympics. A more recent film, The Alphabet Book, was shot on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where she chronicled a secular tribe’s struggle for cultural survival.
PBS Series Wide Angle/Focal Point
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/category/video/web-exclusives/
To follow Lauren’s independent films
http://www.patternfilms.com
Learning to cover New York City
My work as a Web producer on Wide Angle
The value of Columbia and what the Molly Ivins scholarship means to me
Renee Feltz
Renee Feltz is a multi-media investigative reporter and teacher based in New York City. In January, 2010, she was a contributing reporter to The New York Times series on medical radiation problems, including “As Technology Surges, Radiation Safeguards Lag.”
Also in January, Renee’s investigation of prisoners on death row in Texas appeared in the Texas Observer. Headlined “Cracked,” the cover story examines how many prisoners on death row are mentally retarded yet have been evaluated as fit for trial despite a U.S. Supreme Court ban on executing the retarded. This complex story and the accompanying interactive Web site exemplify Renee’s expertise on the justice system in her home state of Texas.
While at Columbia in the Class of 2008, Renee was a Molly Ivins Scholar and a fellow with the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, focusing on video and new media. She and her classmate, Stokely Baksh, produced an award-winning multimedia investigative project, www.BusinessofDetention.com, an ongoing report on how the government has turned to the private sector to detain undocumented immigrants. They published a Web story on the Obama Adminstration’s policy toward illegal immigrants,“Detention Retention,” on the American Prospect’s Web site in June, 2009.
As the former news director for KPFT-FM in Houston, Texas, she coordinated national coverage for the Pacifica radio network during Hurricane Katrina. She has also reported for the BBC, NPR, CBC, FSRN, Air America, Making Contact, Indymedia, The Indypendent, Columbia Journalism Review, NACLA: Report on the Americas, and Mother Jones.
The New York Times story on radiation in medicine
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/us/27radiation.html?scp=2&sq=Renee%20Feltz&st=cse
The Texas Observer, “Cracked”
http://www.texasobserver.org/cover-story/cracked
The American Prospect, “Detention Retention”
http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=detention_retention
What Molly Ivins has meant to me
My work as an investigative reporter
Mollyscholars 