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.
Alves holds the Knight Chair in International Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He arrived in academia after more than a decade as a foreign correspondent
I came to my Nieman year with a promise from my editor that after Madrid, Buenos Aires, Mexico and a second tour in Buenos Aires, I would finally be sent to Washington, D.C. at the end of my Fellowship. My dream at the time was to become a Washington correspondent for Jornal do Brasil. I was tired after almost a decade of covering crises, coups, wars and earthquakes in Latin America, so I used my time at Harvard to get ready for Washington.
I studied American politics. My dream of finally having a bureau chief position in the First World came through, but I found it boring. It did not take much time for me to miss covering the crises, coups, wars and earthquakes. I left my heart in Latin America but found another passion, a surprising one, during my Nieman year.
Andrew Lippman visited our class just a couple of years after co-founding the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. I was fascinated by Andy’s predictions about the huge impact digital technologies would have on the media industry. In Washington I was always looking for signs of the upcoming revolution, mesmerized by my new laptop computer, Compuserve’s online service, the brick-sized cellphones, the Bloomberg terminals, the Lexis-Nexis database, the fax machine.
When I returned to Rio as an editor in 1991, I launched the first Brazilian computer-based, real-time financial news service. In early 1995, I launched the first Brazilian Web edition of a newspaper. I brought that passion back to the U.S. in 1996 when I moved to Austin and started the University of Texas’s first course on online journalism, created a global conference on the topic, and became a digital newsroom evangelizer.
I came to my Nieman year with a promise from my editor that after Madrid, Buenos Aires, Mexico and a second tour in Buenos Aires, I would finally be sent to Washington, D.C. at the end of my Fellowship. My dream at the time was to become a Washington correspondent for Jornal do Brasil. I was tired after almost a decade of covering crises, coups, wars and earthquakes in Latin America, so I used my time at Harvard to get ready for Washington. I studied American politics. My dream of finally having a bureau chief position in the First World came through, but I found it boring. It did not take much time for me to miss covering the crises, coups, wars and earthquakes. I left my heart in Latin America but found another passion, a surprising one, during my Nieman year.
Andrew Lippman visited our class just a couple of years after co-founding the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. I was fascinated by Andy’s predictions about the huge impact digital technologies would have on the media industry. In Washington I was always looking for signs of the upcoming revolution, mesmerized by my new laptop computer, Compuserve’s online service, the brick-sized cellphones, the Bloomberg terminals, the Lexis-Nexis database, the fax machine.
When I returned to Rio as an editor in 1991, I launched the first Brazilian computer-based, real-time financial news service. In early 1995, I launched the first Brazilian Web edition of a newspaper. I brought that passion back to the U.S. in 1996 when I moved to Austin and started the University of Texas’s first course on online journalism, created a global conference on the topic, and became a digital newsroom evangelizer.
