The 13-week fellowships, aimed at encouraging coverage of international news by the US news media, will begin in January 2006 and the American journalists will focus on stories in Brazil, India, Kenya, Mongolia, Nepal, Nigeria, Russia, and Uganda.
IRP combines eight weeks of study in Washington and five weeks of individual overseas reporting. Since 1998, when the program was established, IRP fellows have reported from more than 75 different countries.
Each year, two separate groups of eight US journalists are selected as IRP Fellows, and the 130 journalists who have been selected since the inception of the program have reported for scores of news organizations. Reddy will travel to different parts of India to research and report on farming communities, particularly in Andhra Pradesh.
Sonja Matanovic, communications coordinator at the IRP program told rediff-India Abroad that that "it is worth noting that we have sent more International Reporting Project Fellows to India than to any other country."
She said that only last week, two Fellows returned from India Julie Schlosser, a writer for Fortune magazine and Alex Kuffner, a reporter for The Providence Journal. Schlosser reported on literacy and technology, and Kuffner on water management.
Reddy, born and raised in a small, rural town called Bolton in Connecticut, said, "This is a fellowship I've long wanted to apply for, but I was never at a paper long enough and could never secure permission to do so."
"I'm thrilled that my editors at The Baltimore Sun supported my application. I've long had an interest in foreign reporting; this will give me my first chance to try my hand at it."
Reddy said, "I'm especially happy that my proposal will take me to India, a country that I'm obviously familiar with and have a particular interest in."
She said, "It should come as no surprise that India has been very well represented by past and current IRP Fellows, and it is especially important now that very few US newspapers consistently cover this very large and significant country."
Reddy graduated from Bolton High School in 1993 and received a BA in English literature from Barnard College at Columbia University in 1997.
"In college, I started off pre-med, taking chemistry, organic chemistry, biology and even spending a summer killing a massive number of rats in a cardiology lab at the University of Connecticut. But once I joined the Columbia Daily Spectator, all that went down the drain. I became very involved with the newspaper and became the news editor in my junior year."
She said that after college, she was fortunate enough to land a two-year reporting job at The Providence Journal, where she covered the town of Cumberland in its bureau, averaging seven stories a week for two years, on everything from school board and town board meeting stories to police news and general features.
She went over first to The Raleigh News & Observer in North Carolina, covering education for its Chapel Hill bureau, and then, in 2001, to Newsday, thus moving back to New York City.
There, she covered from local politics and stories on arranged marriages to national stories ranging from a profile on PFC Jessica Lynch, a soldier rescued in Iraq, the Columbia shuttle disaster and the fire at West Warwick, Rhode Island.
She also did a session in Albany covering the state legislature and some stories important to the state, such as gay marriage and the opening of the state's first gambling terminals.
She said she moved to Baltimore last fall to live with her husband Jonathan Rockoff, a reporter at The Baltimore Sun she married in 2003.
Reddy said that shortly after moving to the Sun she covered state politics from Annapolis, the capital of Maryland. Since then she's been in the city office.
Her parents, Narasimha Reddy a retired engineer who worked for Otis Elevators and Nirmala Reddy a homemaker, still live in Bolton, Connecticut. She has one sibling, a sister, Sujani, who is studying for a PhD in American Studies at New York University.
