MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

“Foreign Press Association of New York celebrates 90 years”

The Foreign Press Association of New York, the oldest media organization in the United States, is celebrating its 90th Anniversary this year with Carl Bernstein as the keynote speaker at a gala dinner to be held on May 13 at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan.

The dinner will also celebrate 15 years of the FPA Scholarship awards, and five scholarships will be presented to foreign students enrolled in graduate schools of journalism in the United States. This year's FPA Scholarship Fund Awards winners include an Iraqi Kurd; a daughter of Vietnamese émigrés; and other talented future journalists. The first-prize winner is Anup Kaphle of Nepal, who is a master's candidate in the new media program at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. The story of his struggles with hardship and his working two full-time jobs--one an unpaid internship, the other for income--while enrolled at Columbia are amazing and inspiring. There are two second-prizewinners: Mariwan Hama-Saeed, an Iraqui Kurd who is pursuing his master's degree in journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Vinod J. Jose, a Bollinger Fellow at Columbia Journalism School. Vinod was born into a subsistence-farming family; grew up 300 miles away from the nearest city, Bangalore, and is the first person from his family to go to college. There are also two third-prize winners: Adeola Eunice Oladele of Nigeria, who is studying at the CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate School of Journalism, and Lam Thuy Vo, daughter of Vietnamese émigrés, who grew up in Germany and has lived in Frankfurt, Houston, London, Berlin, and now New York, where she is getting a master's in new media at Columbia University. As a measure of the Foreign Press Association's commitment to the future of journalism, it established the FPA Scholarship Fund in 1993 to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the Association. Each year since then, the FPA has awarded scholarships to foreign students enrolled in graduate schools of Journalism in the United States. In the past years, recipients have been from Argentina, China, Colombia, Denmark, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Iraq, Italy, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Moldova, and Viet Nam. Many major corporations including Bloomberg LP, Burson-Marsteller, Coca Cola, Daimler, Estee Lauder, FedEx, Ford, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Porsche, Proctor & Gamble, Reuters, UBS, and UPS sponsor the Scholarship Fund Awards. This year, in recognition of the FPA's 90th Anniversary, British Airways is donating two Business Class Tickets to Europe. Past Special Guests, Keynote Speakers, and FPA Award recipients have included Walter Cronkite, Albert Einstein, Peter Jennings, Henry Kissinger, Stanley Kramer, David Lean, Mike Nichols, George Stephanopoulos, Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Volker, Mike Wallace, Billy Wilder, and Tennessee Williams.