Fellowships go to two Globe journalists

Slated to study at Stanford, MIT

Two Boston Globe journalists have won professional fellowships for the 2008-2009 academic year.

Michael Rezendes, a veteran investigative reporter for the Globe, is among 12 journalists who have been 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 to a democratic society.

Karen Weintraub, the Globe's deputy health and science editor, was named a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, where she will study biology.

Also named this week to the Stanford fellowships 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.

They 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.

GLOBE STAFF