Winner of Interfax 2015 Fellowship named

Interfax Information Services Group and the Department of Journalism of Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU) have unanimously voted to award the 2015 Grishchenko Scholarship to Satenik Airapetyan, a full-time second-year student.

The name of the Interfax 2015 fellowship holder was announced at the annual Practice Day at the MSU Department of Journalism on December 19.

Airapetyan has won the annual journalistic portfolio contest: the first Interfax fellowship was awarded in 2005. Satenik submitted a series of materials she had prepared during her internship at the REGNUM information agency, which had been published there, to the commission.

Seven students participated in the contest for the Interfax fellowship. Among them are Marina Bochkaryova (fourth-year student), Sofya Groisman (fourth-year student), Darya Kozhanova (third-year student), Anastasia Rybalchenko (second-year student), Polina Sitnikova (third-year student), and Valentina Fillipenko (fifth-year student).

Prizes for high levels of professionalism and creative potential have been awarded by the tender commission to all students who submitted their work for the fellowship contest.

The tender commission, which comprised three representatives of MSU and three representatives of Interfax, evaluated the quality of the work provided by the students (at least twenty articles published in the media) and their grades for this semester.

The Interfax fellowship was established in 2004 in memory of Boris Sergeyevich Grishchenko (01.06.1937-21.04.2004), who worked in journalism for almost forty years and worked for Interfax for ten years. Grishchenko was a member of the "Kremlin pool" of correspondents and had a thorough knowledge of the life of the Kremlin from the Brezhnev era to the first years of the 21st Century. In 1999, his work was recognized with a high state award, the Order of Honor.

The Interfax fellowship, which is paid over the course of a whole calendar year, is 5,000 rubles a month.

*** Interfax Information Services Group is the largest diversified information group in the CIS. Since the early nineties, Interfax has been a key source of information on Russia and former Soviet countries for the international community.

Interfax was founded in 1989, when a group of journalists formed an information agency that became the first nongovernmental channel for the latest political and economic news about the Soviet Union. Interfax subscribers include virtually all media outlets in Russia, as well as the leading international media outlets.

Interfax offers political and economic news, fundamental and exchange data, along with professional solutions for asset management, marketing, Investor Relations and PR.