“Why do I do what I do?” they asked. So, I went to the source of all wisdom to contemplate my place in the world: folk singer Todd Snider, the barefoot poet laureate of me. A man once said that … Read more
In 2002, Mark Schleifstein and a team of reporters in New Orleans wrote “Washing Away,” a five-part series in The Times-Picayune that predicted the devastation of Hurricane Katrina three years later. When the series ran, the public was … Read more
The following is an excerpt from Will Steacy’s “Deadline.” Perhaps like many children of newspaper reporters, I came to understand small pieces of my father’s job before the full picture of what he did came into focus. I knew … Read more
To accompany an excerpt from Will Steacy’s “Deadline,” Nieman Reports asked longtime Philadelphia Inquirer staffer Dan Biddle, a 1990 Nieman Fellow, to summarize the paper’s recent history and its current state: Things are going to get worse before they … Read more
Chinese journalist Liu Binyan joined the Nieman Class of 1989 at age 62, after he became a target of the Chinese government’s campaign against “bourgeois liberalism.” Binyan was a writer for the People’s Daily at the time, and his work … Read more
In the first three decades in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the journalists called their newspapers “loudspeakers” and “bulletin boards” of the Communist Party and the government. Newspapers were not newspapers in the Western sense. The foremost … Read more