PD reporter among Nieman Fellows

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard has named 28 journalists from the United States and abroad to the 71st class of Nieman Fellows. They include print reporters and editors, online journalists, columnists and editorial writers, broadcasters, a photojournalist and a filmmaker.

Bob Giles, Nieman Foundation curator and a 1966 Nieman Fellow, chaired the committee. Giles is a former managing editor of the Beacon Journal.

Established in 1938, the Nieman program is the oldest midcareer fellowship for journalists in the world. The fellowships are awarded to working journalists of accomplishment and promise who come to Harvard University for a year of study, seminars and special events. More than 1,200 journalists from 90 countries have received Nieman Fellowships.

Among those chosen was Andrea Simakis, Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter, who will study U.S. immigration and refugee policy and its impact on how newcomers learn and navigate American culture.

Also selected was Hannah Allam, Cairo bureau chief, McClatchy Newspapers, will study sectarianism within Islam, focusing on Arab-Persian relations and Sunni vs. Shiite doctrine on governance, armed struggle and family law.

Simakis graduated from New York University with honors and a degree in journalism. She worked as a freelancer for The Village Voice and Glamour magazine. Her work for the Voice earned her an award from the Newswoman's Club of New York.

She joined The Plain Dealer in 1999 after completing a year-long Kiplinger Fellowship in public affairs reporting at The Ohio State University, where she honed her investigative reporting and non-fiction writing skills and earned a master's degree in journalism.

Within a year of her arrival in Cleveland, Simakis became the first social services writer for the PD. During her tenure covering the beat, she earned a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism for her profile of a court-appointed guardian who championed abused and neglected children in one of the most overcrowded juvenile courts in the country. .

In 2002, she moved to the Sunday Magazine, where she specialized in long-form narrative journalism. In 2004, she chronicled the case of Robert Kreischer, whose single well-placed punch landed him in prison for two years. Her two-part-series, "Road to Ruin," exposed injustices that happen in America's courtrooms every day but rarely make the news: botched police investigations, inept legal representation, prosecutorial misconduct, and judges who disregard clear constitutional violations.

The piece moved 2,000 readers to demand -- and win -- Kreischer's release from prison and won her a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for "distinguished service to the American people and the profession of journalism."

In 2006, Simakis joined the Arts & Life staff as a feature writer and authored a series of articles questioning the conviction of Tyrone Noling, on Ohio's death row for gunning down an elderly couple. Her investigation uncovered new and long-buried evidence that pointed to another killer and prompted his attorneys to request a new trial. The articles won her a first place award from the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists for Best Social Justice Reporting.

Recently, she investigated the legal entanglements that plagued a family of Somali refugees trying to navigate life in America. Two members -- girls barely out of their teens -- faced deportation and death if convicted of multiple counts of child abuse for burning children in their care. Simakis discovered that differing child rearing practices, not sadism, led to the crime and that such cultural misunderstandings and collisions are common and continue to dog refugee resettlement across the country.

The U.S. fellows were selected by Amy Nutt, a reporter for The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., and a 2005 Nieman Fellow; Marshall Ganz, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School; Sam Fulwood, Plain Dealeer columnist and a 1994 Nieman Fellow; J. Richard Hackman, Edgar Pierce Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology, Harvard University; and Giles.

Click on the headline to see details of the fellows.