75th Anniversary Issue
As she lay dying, the widow of a Milwaukee newspaper editor made a gift that has now invigorated journalism for 75 years. Agnes Wahl Nieman, a well-educated woman with a fondness for bicycling, willed money to Harvard to “promote and elevate the standards of journalism.” That $1.4 million bequest (worth about $23 million in today’s dollars) funded the Nieman Fellowship program that has brought 1,442 journalists from around the world to Harvard for a year of study. To celebrate the Nieman Foundation for Journalism’s 75th anniversary, Nieman Reports tells the stories of 75 Nieman Fellows, among them pioneers in biography, documentary filmmaking, and investigative journalism.
An investigative reporter for The Washington Post, Mintz broke the story of the birth defects associated with thalidomide
I owe to Louis Lyons the marvelous experience of a Nieman year. I was educated; I wrote a book. The book [“The Therapeutic Nightmare”] was mainly about the pharmaceutical industry, the Food and Drug Administration, and the American Medical Association. When I arrived in Cambridge, I had no thought of doing a book, but once the opportunity arose, Louis in his shy but uniquely warm and wonderful way encouraged me. In a speech he had made in 1958 ... he said that as the role of modern government inescapably grows greater, its functions more complicated, the penetration of these forests of our public affairs becomes an increasing challenge to the talent, energy, and manpower of the press. He also said that too few reporters take up “the lonely search of the less publicized, more impenetrable corners of the public domain. Their tribe must be increased.” By nurturing and motivating Niemans with serious books in them ... he helped greatly to increase that tribe.
From “The Growth of a Reporter,” by Morton Mintz, Nieman Reports, Summer 1983
I owe to Louis Lyons the marvelous experience of a Nieman year. I was educated; I wrote a book. The book [“The Therapeutic Nightmare”] was mainly about the pharmaceutical industry, the Food and Drug Administration, and the American Medical Association. When I arrived in Cambridge, I had no thought of doing a book, but once the opportunity arose, Louis in his shy but uniquely warm and wonderful way encouraged me. In a speech he had made in 1958 ... he said that as the role of modern government inescapably grows greater, its functions more complicated, the penetration of these forests of our public affairs becomes an increasing challenge to the talent, energy, and manpower of the press. He also said that too few reporters take up “the lonely search of the less publicized, more impenetrable corners of the public domain. Their tribe must be increased.” By nurturing and motivating Niemans with serious books in them ... he helped greatly to increase that tribe.From “The Growth of a Reporter,” by Morton Mintz, Nieman Reports, Summer 1983
