The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY is pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 Alumni Awards for Excellence. The ceremony will take place on Monday, May 12 at the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice in New York City.
“These alumni award winners exemplify the boldness, creativity, and commitment to excellence that we seek to nurture in all our graduates. Their achievements across diverse sectors of our industry illustrate the many paths to meaningful impact,” said Dean Graciela Mochkofsky. “As we celebrate their accomplishments, we also celebrate the values and vision that connect our entire alumni network.”
The 2025 honorees are:
- Mia Hollie (‘24) is the recipient of the Sidney Hillman Award for Social Justice Reporting. Hollie is a data reporting fellow at THE CITY, where she supports the newsroom on data-related projects. She previously participated in a data journalism internship at Chalkbeat where she contributed analyses to stories about the proliferation of private school vouchers, the use of COVID-era funding at low-income schools, and successes in curbing chronic absenteeism. She has previously reported on education, criminal justice and social services, and her career goal is to “examine criminal justice, education and social services through data-driven reporting.”
- Genna Contino (‘24) is the recipient of the Frederic Wiegold Prize for Business Journalism. Contino got her start covering housing and local government at newspapers in the Carolinas. Wanting to get better at following the money, she applied to the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism for its business and economics reporting program and data specialization. At the Newmark J-School, Contino learned how to cover the economy, markets and companies as well as creative ways to build and use datasets to bolster her reporting. She received the Equity Through Data Award for demonstrating potential to become a high-impact data journalist. She is currently a reporting fellow at Forbes magazine where she has covered the world’s billionaires and financial markets.
- Ana Valdez Saravia (‘24) is the recipient of the Newsweek Alumni Prize. Valdez Saravia is a bilingual multimedia journalist and news anchor from Bolivia, currently based in Wichita, Kansas. Her work has been published in both English and Spanish by Telemundo 47, NBC New York, El País, CNY Latino, and more. During her first year at the Newmark J-School, she received an award from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists for her story on how Indigenous immigrants in NYC preserve their culture through dance. She has successfully launched two Spanish-language news programs, one for a local radio station in Kansas and another at KWCH, a CBS affiliate, where she currently works. Inspired by the impact of the Newmark J-School’s bilingual program, she is passionate about developing news programs for Hispanic audiences, ensuring that language is not a barrier and vital news reaches the communities that need it most.
- Virginia Jeffries (‘19) is the recipient of the Stephen B. Shepard Prize for Investigative Reporting. Jeffries is an independent journalist in New York City covering health care, international affairs, and human rights. In 2024, her story “Gaza’s Insulin Crisis” ran in Newsweek, sharing the cover with the magazine’s Paris Olympics issue. The story follows three young men with diabetes—one in high school, one in college, and one doctor—trying to survive war, blockade and the collapse of Gaza’s health care system last Spring. Her reporting contradicted Israel’s official communications about the operation. Jeffries has also reported on the political and economic crisis in Sri Lanka for Foreign Policy, on threats to the Affordable Care Act and the long COVID epidemic. She previously interned for the Jewish Daily Forward and Coconuts Singapore. Prior to becoming a journalist, she was a paraeducator for students with special needs in a NYC public school.
- Ethar El-Katatney (Executive Program ‘21) is the recipient of the Vivek Shah Executive Leadership Alumni Award. El-Katatney is a digital newsroom manager and strategist. She is currently editor-in-chief at Documented, a non-profit local newsroom dedicated to reporting with and for immigrant communities in New York City. Previously, she was News Product Strategy Lead for the Americas at Bloomberg and the former Young Audiences Editor at The Wall Street Journal. She was also the executive producer overseeing the AJ+ newsroom, the digital video arm of Al-Jazeera she helped pilot, launch and lead. A published author, she’s been awarded a CNN African Journalist of the Year Award, a Samir Kassir Freedom of the Press Award, and an Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Journalist Award. She is a board member at the Online News Association, an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, and a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations.
About the Alumni Awards for Excellence: Established in 2008, the annual awards honor alumni and other members of the Newmark J-School community for their outstanding reporting and leadership across various categories. The Sidney Hillman Award recognizes reporting that advocates for social justice issues. The Frederic Wiegold Prize honors exceptional talent in business reporting. The Newsweek Alumni Prize highlights graduates who embody the values and spirit of Newsweek through their journalism. The Stephen B. Shepard Prize, named after Founding Dean Emeritus Stephen Shepard, honors exemplary investigative journalism that exposes injustice. The Vivek Shah Executive Leadership Alumni Award acknowledges an alumnus of the Executive Program in News Innovation and Leadership who has demonstrated an outsized impact in their career, newsroom, and the news industry.
The 2025 ceremony is hosted by Ali Velshi (NBC News & MSNBC) in conversation with Charlamagne Tha God and featuring a keynote speech from Kara Swisher. The ceremony is open to special guests by invitation only. Inquiries can be sent to development@journalism.cuny.edu.