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PHILLIPS FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES 2006 JOURNALISM FELLOWSHIPS - EIGHT FELLOWSHIP AWARDS TOTALING $284,000

The Phillips Foundation today announced eight winners of its thirteenth annual journalism fellowship awards. 

Winners of four $50,000 full-time fellowships: Paulette Chu, 25, a general assignment business and financial reporter at AP in New York; Meghan Keane, 26, deputy culture editor at The New York Sun; Shawn Macomber, 30, a freelance journalist living in Massachusetts; and Laura Vanderkam, 27, a freelance writer in New York City. 

Winners of three $25,000 part-time fellowships: Brendan Conway, 27, an editorial writer at The Washington Times and associate editor at Doublethinkmagazine; Duncan Currie, 24, a reporter at The Weekly Standard; and Carrie Sheffield, 23, a staff writer at The Hill newspaper in Washington, D.C. 

Winner of a special $9,000 Alumni Fund fellowship: Isaac Wolf, 22, a senior at the University of Chicago where he served as news editor of The Chicago Maroon. The full-time and part-time fellowships are for year-long writing projects. The Alumni Fund Award is for one magazine-length article. 

The fellowship winners were introduced during an awards dinner last night at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Michael Grebe, President and CEO of The Bradley Foundation, served as honorary dinner chairman, and The Phillips Foundation presented its 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award to Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corporation. 

The 2006 Phillips Foundation journalism fellows will work on the following projects which they proposed as part of their fellowship application. 

  • Paulette Chu: “Home of the Brave – How the World’s Refugees Become American Patriots.” 
  • Meghan Keane: “Shameless – How America Lost Its Sense of Decency and How to Get It Back.” 
  • Shawn Macomber: “Another Worthy Victim: Preaching Class War Lite to the Bourgeoisie.” 
  • Laura Vanderkam: “Full Court Press: The 25-Year Battle to Win the Judiciary.” 
  • Brendan Conway: “Running from Iraq, the Use and Abuse of War Veterans in the Coming Election and Beyond.” 
  • Duncan Currie: “Seizure Salad: The Revolution—and Counterrevolution—in Eminent Domain Law.” 
  • Carrie Sheffield: Her project, “Latter-day Saints in the Policy Arena—The Political Influence and Climate of Modern Mormonism.” 
  • Isaac Wolf: “America’s Efforts to Replace Petroleum as the Transportation Industry’s Main Fuel Source.”



The Phillips Foundation, a non-profit organization founded in 1990, established its journalism fellowship program to advance the cause of objective journalism. The Foundation has awarded 61 fellowships since 1994 for journalism projects supportive of American culture and a free society. The fellowship program is open to working print journalists with less than five years of professional experience. For more information, visit: www. thephillipsfoundation.org/fellowship.htm.