2022 Scholarships Winners

2022 Deadline Club Scholarship Winners

Deadline Club scholarships highlight the work of students from Newmark, Columbia, Fordham and St. Thomas universities.

The Deadline Club, the New York City chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, is pleased to announce six winners in its 2022 scholarship competition.

The six winners have demonstrated an extraordinary dedication to storytelling in underrepresented communities and uphold the standards of truth and fairness. Each will receive $2,500 acknowledging their journalistic accomplishments.

Undergraduate Winners

Reyna Iwamoto

An incoming senior at Long Island University Brooklyn majoring in journalism, Reyna Iwamoto serves as the Managing Editor of Seawanhaka, the LIU Brooklyn student newspaper, reporting on the most recent events happening on-campus and within the school community. In addition to reporting, I help to manage, edit, and lay out content for online and print publication. I also serve as a copy editor of the LIU Honors Journal, collaborating with authors to edit and publish their research in academic publication. This summer, I will be Paris interning at Forbidden Stories, a non-profit organization “whose mission is to protect, pursue and publish the work of other journalists facing threats, prison, or murder.”

Lana Green

Lana Green is a senior journalist and politics major at New York University with a focus in multimedia. She is passionate about investigative journalism and using new media techniques to reach diverse audiences. She has previously worked on documentaries at FRONTLINE, and her work is published at Mediate, Bronxnet, NBCNews, Voice of America, and Street Sense Media. As a current social newsgathering intern at NBC News, Green helps to verify all videos regarding the invasion of Ukraine with geolocation, reverse-imaging, detailed reporting, satellite imaging, and more for all NBC News platforms. She hopes to pursue a career in investigative journalism and documentary filmmaking.

Rainier Harris

Rainier Harris is a freshman at Columbia University. He was an apprentice for Dustlight Productions on Renegades: Born in the USA, a podcast hosted between former President Barack Obama and musician Bruce Springsteen. He’s published in The New York Times, Business Insider, CNBC, and many other places. Recently, his first radio story aired on WNYC’s Morning Edition through the Radio Rookies program. Harris likes to report on social justice issues, especially those that uniquely impact youth. At Columbia, he’s a staff writer for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, a programmer for the student-run radio station, WKCR-FM NY 89.9, and an online journal writer for the Columbia Undergraduate Law Review.

Graduate Winners

David Ben Moshe

David Ben Moshe is a coach, speaker, and writer whose life is a testament to the power of positive change. While serving a prison sentence for selling drugs and guns, he decided to build a better life. After his release, he underwent an Orthodox Jewish Conversion at B’nai Israel Synagogue in Baltimore, Maryland, and became a successful personal trainer. He has a B.S. in Exercise Science, Magna Cum Laude. After finishing his degree, he was prevented from attending graduate school in physical therapy due to his criminal record. Following this disappointment, he began writing his story. Since then, his writing has been featured in Newsweek, Business Insider, The Forward, and The Jerusalem Post. He is currently working on a memoir of his incredible journey and studying for a master’s degree in journalism from New York University.

Yadira Lopez

Yadira Lopez is a master’s student in journalism and French Studies at New York University. She previously worked as a reporter at the Miami Herald, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, and the Malheur Enterprise in rural Oregon. Between journalism jobs, she also worked as a teaching assistant in northern France for two years. Yadira is currently a bilingual workshop coordinator at the journalism nonprofit Feet in 2 Worlds and will intern at the Musée Picasso in Paris this summer. She was born in Cuba and grew up in Miami.

Tope Alake

Tope Alake is a Nigerian journalist who writes for Bloomberg News. Her reporting experience spans five years at Bloomberg News, where she joined as an intern in 2016. Tope has covered Nigerian companies, economy, politics, technology, clean energy transition, and climate change. She covered the stock market, bond markets, and the central bank’s unconventional management of inflation before enrolling in the Master of Arts program at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Since the outbreak of Covid-19, Tope has reported on Nigeria’s foreign exchange woes, as well as how a poorly managed oil dependent economy and misguided central bank policies caused the local currency to depreciate over time. Besides writing, she reported on camera for Bloomberg Quicktake. Tope has a B.A. in English studies from Adekunle Ajasin University, Nigeria and a Master of Science degree in Media and Communication from Pan-Atlantic University.