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.
Mykkänen has been a reporter for Helsingin Sanomat since 1995
The story I tell most often is about Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, a former Finnish president who, as a spy for the Russian military, rode horseback to China during expeditions from 1906–1908. I was especially interested in documenting his story as I had been posted in China before beginning my year as a Fellow. I had already contacted a friend in Finland to get some material that I needed for my research. Then I decided to see if Harvard’s libraries had anything on Mannerheim, obviously not expecting too much. The online Hollis catalog found more than 100 results for him, many of them in Finnish. Not only was I within shouting distance of some of the leading scholars on China, I was a mere five-minute bicycle ride away from Mannerheim’s China travel diary.
From Nieman Foundation 2007 annual report
The story I tell most often is about Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, a former Finnish president who, as a spy for the Russian military, rode horseback to China during expeditions from 1906–1908. I was especially interested in documenting his story as I had been posted in China before beginning my year as a Fellow. I had already contacted a friend in Finland to get some material that I needed for my research. Then I decided to see if Harvard’s libraries had anything on Mannerheim, obviously not expecting too much. The online Hollis catalog found more than 100 results for him, many of them in Finnish. Not only was I within shouting distance of some of the leading scholars on China, I was a mere five-minute bicycle ride away from Mannerheim’s China travel diary. From Nieman Foundation 2007 annual report
