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Robert Greene, an award-winning investigative journalist who worked for the daily New York-based newspaper Newsday for 37 years, died last April 10. He was 78.
Greene started working for Newsday in 1955, first as a reporter, then as an editor. Throughout his journalism career, Greene showed keen interest in covering corruption and organized crime cases. He co-founded in 1975 the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), a national journalism teaching organization that focuses on investigative journalism. Greene also initiated the Arizona Project instigated by the murder of fellow IRE founder Dan Bolles. Arizona Project came up with a 23-part series report that compiled Bolles’s works.
Greene won his first Pulitzer Prize award in 1970 when he exposed land scandals in Long Island town in New York. His second Pulitzer Prize was in 1974 when he, along with other reporters, wrote a series of reports that traced heroin growing from Turkey to Long Island.
Greene taught Journalism in Hofstra University where he was voted Teacher of the Year in 2000 and in Stony Brook University, both in Long Island.
Photojournalist Dith Pran, who for four years became a captive and slave of the Khmer Rouge forces in Cambodia, succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the age of 65. He died last March 30 in New Jersey.
Pran worked as an interpreter for New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg in 1972. While covering the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975 to the Khmer Rouge, Pran was captured and had to endure four years of torture and starvation .
Pran finally escaped on Oct. 3, 1979 when he made it to a Thai refugee camp. Upon his transfer to New York in 1980, Pran worked for the Times as a photographer. He was specially regarded for his pictures that were taken with creativity and great imagination.
Appointed in 1985 as Goodwill Ambassador by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Pran was also a member of the Asian-American Journalists Association. Pran continued to help Cambodians who suffered under the Khmer Rouge by establishing in 1994, the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, Inc. that aims to educate people on the Cambodian genocide and how such a crime could be prevented from recurring. He also published in 1997 the book Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors, which contains his interviews with surviving victims.
His story of survival from the Khmer Rouge inspired the Academy Award-winning film “The Killing Fields.”
Ian Brodie, a British correspondent who worked for the papers Daily Express, The Daily Telegraph, and The Times, died of a stroke last May 8. He was 72.
Brodie made it to the Daily Express in 1961 where he was assigned to cover a number of momentous events. These included the fall of Nikita Khrushchev, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s First Secretary, in 1964; and a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan. He also covered the Vietnam War and reported on then President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China during his stint as the paper’s Far East Correspondent. Brodie became editor of the Daily Express in 1972 but was severely challenged by union disputes.
In 1975, he moved to the Daily Telegraph where he reported, among others, the trial of American newspaper heiress Patty Hearst and Roman Polanski’s flight to France after his conviction of rape. Brodie also interviewed Svetlana Stalin, Joseph Stalin’s daughter. Brodie was appointed the paper’s Washington Bureau chief in 1986.
He also worked for the Washington Bureau of The Times in 1993 and became the publisher of a local paper, Topanga Messenger, until his death. |
