'JP' journalist goes to Harvard

JAKARTA: The Jakarta Post's deputy chief editor, Endy M. Bayuni, will be going to Harvard University this coming academic year for the prestigious Nieman Fellowship program.

The Nieman Foundation announced in Boston, Massachusetts, on Tuesday that Endy would be among 25 journalists who will take part in the 10-month program starting in August. Thirteen Americans and 12 non-Americans have been picked for the 66th class of Nieman Fellows at Harvard.

Endy is the fifth Indonesian journalist to have been accepted to the program.

Earlier Nieman fellows from Indonesia were Sabam Siagian (Class of 1979), who was then with Sinar Harapan daily newspaper and later became The Jakarta Post's first chief editor in 1983, and between 1991 and 1995 served as Indonesia's ambassador to Australia; Goenawan Mohamad (Class of 1990), founding member of Tempo magazine and now its senior editor; Ratih Hardjono (Class of 1994), then with Kompas daily and a spokeswoman for president Abdurrahman Wahid in 1999/2000; and Andreas Harsono (Class of 2000), then correspondent/stringer for a number of foreign publications, and now editor of Pantau, the journalist's watchdog magazine/website.

Endy's fellowship will be supported by the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Institute and the Asia Foundation.

The fellowships are awarded to working journalists for an academic year of study in any department in the university. Endy has picked the war against terrorism and its impact on civil liberties as his area of study.

More than 1,000 U.S. and international journalists have studied at Harvard as Nieman Fellows. Established in 1938, the program is the oldest midcareer fellowship for journalists in the world.

This year's other foreign participants come from Tanzania, Iran, Russia, China, Columbia, South Africa, Scotland, Finland, Uruguay, Nigeria and Canada. Among the American fellows is Indira Lakshmanan, who as the Hong-Kong based Asian correspondent for the Boston Globe is a regular visitor to Indonesia. --JP