Event

In this special session, offered as part of programming to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Nora Magid Mentorship Prize, seven Nora Prize-winners will discuss the process of developing a great idea into a piece of impactful journalism. 

Guests will share examples of their own process on a complicated or counterintuitive long-term story — how the seed of an idea came to them, what they did next, how they determined it could actually work as a piece — and attendees will be invited to talk through their own current ideas with the group.

MATT FLEGENHEIMER (C'11) is a correspondent at the New York Times. His primary focus is long-form profiles of notable figures — in politics and otherwise — for the Times and Times Magazine. Since joining the paper in 2011, he has covered two presidential campaigns, the Trump era in Washington, New York City transportation and City Hall.

ASHLEY PARKER (C'05) is senior national political correspondent for the Washington Post, and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. Most recently, she served as the White House bureau chief, covering the first two years of the Biden presidency, as well as the entirety of the Trump presidency. In 2022, she was part of the Washington Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, for their coverage of the causes, costs and aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. She was part of the Washington Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2018, for their coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. She was also part of the Washington Post team that won the George Polk Award for national reporting in 2022, for the project “The Attack,” which chronicled the January 6 attack. In 2019, Parker served as one of the moderators for the Democratic presidential primary debate in Atlanta, hosted by the Washington Post and MSNBC. Parker joined the Post in 2017, after 11 years at the New York Times, where she covered the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns, and Congress, among other things. She is an NBC/MSNBC senior political analyst, and has also written for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Glamour, and the Washingtonian, as well as other publications. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005, with a degree in both English (creative writing) and Communications, and lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, New York Times political correspondent Mike Bender, and their three daughters.

LUIS FERRÉ-SADURNÍ (C'17) is the Albany bureau chief of the New York Times and covers New York State politics. He joined the New York Times in June 2017 and previously wrote about housing for the Metro desk. He is originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico.

MADELEINE NGO (C'20) is an economic policy correspondent at the New York Times, based in the Washington bureau. She previously covered economic policy at the Times as the 2021–22 Rosenbaum fellow. She has interned at the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, the Dallas Morning News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Vox. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020 and was senior news editor of the Daily Pennsylvanian's 135th board.

JASON SCHWARTZ (C'20) is the senior editor for investigations and enterprise at Sports Illustrated. Previously, he worked as a media reporter for POLITICO, a senior editor for ESPN The Magazine and in ESPN’s Outside the Lines investigative unit, and as an editor and writer for Boston Magazine. His writing has also appeared in Grantland, Slate, and the Boston Globe, among other places.

JESSICA GOODMAN (C'12) is the New York Times bestselling author of young adult thrillers They Wish They Were Us, They’ll Never Catch Us, The Counselors, and The Legacies. She is the former op-ed editor at Cosmopolitan magazine, and was part of the 2017 team that won a National Magazine Award in personal service. She has also held editorial positions at Entertainment Weekly and HuffPost, and her work has been published in outlets like Glamour, The Cut, Elle, and Marie Claire.

ISABELLA SIMONETTI (C'21) is a media reporter at the Wall Street Journal where she covers cable news, streaming and sports media. She joined the Journal from the New York Times where she was the David Carr Fellow in Business Reporting. At the Times, Isabella covered breaking business economics news and wrote a number of enterprise stories on topics ranging from media to personal finance. Over the course of her fellowship, she wrote half a dozen stories for the front page of the Times. Previously, Isabella was a media reporter at the New York Observer. Isabella is originally from New York City and is a 2021 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, she served as president of the Daily Pennsylvanian.

STEPHEN FRIED is an award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author who teaches at Columbia University and at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of seven acclaimed nonfiction books, including Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West—One Meal at a Time (a New York Times bestseller that was the subject of a PBS documentary); Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia (which inspired the Emmy-winning HBO film Gia starring Angelina Jolie); Bitter Pills: Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs (which triggered an FDA inquiry into CNS adverse reactions to antibiotics); The New Rabbi (a behind-the-scenes look at one of the nation’s most powerful houses of worship struggling to choose a new spiritual leader) and a collection of his magazine columns on being a spouse, Husbandry. He is also co-author, with Patrick Kennedy, of the 2015 New York Times bestseller A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction. His latest book is Rush: Revolution, Madness, and the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father (Crown).