In her 2010 Niemen Reports essay, the late pioneering journalist Kay Mills observed that “in 2009, women were 34.8 per cent of newsroom supervisors and 37 percent of newsroom employees, and those figures are down slightly in each category from the previous year. In 1971, 22 percent of daily newspaper journalists were women. This doesn’t seem like enough progress to have made in nearly four decades, especially at a time when there are far fewer newsroom jobs.” Read Kay’s essay and the stories American women journalists wrote for Nieman Reports a decade ago. Read more
Jon Franklin got me to sit up right away as he talked about things like “character” and “plot”—words I’d associated with novels and short fiction, not journalism. These, he said, were important elements to any good story, fiction or nonfiction. Read more
Ideas and insights, opinions and suggestions—all of these surfaced again and again in the swirl of presentations. What follows are snippets from these sessions that didn’t find a home on the previous pages but merit consideration. ‘So what is … Read more
“What Price the News” was written a couple of years ago but certainly resonates today because of the subject matter. The writer is a young man named Ian Stewart. And at the beginning of the story, Ian is drifting in … Read more
Tim O’Brien had the bad fortune to be caught up in the Vietnam War, and he’s written about it several times, and he wrote a book called “The Things They Carried.” There’s a passage in his book where he’s talking … Read more
