Rezendes wins Knight fellowship

Michael Rezendes, a veteran investigative reporter for the Boston Globe, was among 12 journalists today who were awarded John S. Knight fellowships for a year of independent study at Stanford University beginning this fall.

Rezendes, a member of the Globe's Spotlight Team who shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for the newspaper's coverage of the clergy sexual abuse crisis, will study the threat of secrecy in a democratic society during the 2008-2009 academic year.

Also named to the Stanford fellowships yesterday were Christopher Allbritton, a freelance journalist; Stephanie Banchero, an education reporter with the Chicago Tribune; Diane Cardwell, city hall bureau chief for the New York Times, Babak Dehghanpisheh, Baghdad bureau chief for Newsweek, Jeff Elder, a columnist with the Charlotte Observer, Andrew Haeg, a senior producer and analyst for American Public Media; Lee Hockstader, an editorial board member of the Washington Post; Burt Herman, Korea bureau chief for the Associated Press; Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, managing editor for Rumbo newspapers in Houston; Geri Smith, Mexico City bureau chief for BusinessWeek, and Janine Zacharia, a diplomatic correspondent with Bloomberg News.

The fellows will join nine from other countries who were announced in March. Financial support for the US fellows comes chiefly from an endowment by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.