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.
Bonner was a reporter and editor at The Washington Post, a newsroom recruiter for Gannett, and has taught journalism at several universities
My reporting career had barely begun when Bob Maynard, NF ’66, suggested I should someday pursue a Nieman Fellowship. He introduced himself to me soon after I became a copy aide at The Washington Post in 1970. I was a shy college junior; he was a star national correspondent, having covered the era’s social upheavals. He was the first person to endorse my yearning for a news career. Soon, he became my friend and mentor, in a newsroom where females were few, minorities were rare, and no professional was both.
In 1971, I became Howard University’s first journalism graduate and Maynard left the Post on sabbatical, settling in northern California to write a book. Less than a year later, he shortened his sabbatical, shelved his manuscript, and returned east to direct Columbia University’s Summer Program for Minority Journalists, with Earl Caldwell of The New York Times. I was their first recruit. We were not entering journalism just for jobs, Maynard emphasized. Our goal was to make a difference through the profession toward building a more perfect America.
For more than 30 years—at the Post, at Gannett as a newsroom recruiter, and at the Freedom Forum as journalism education director—I strove to perpetuate Maynard’s vision. Maynard’s story consumed my doctoral research as a Freedom Forum Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I wrote a history of press integration centered on his contributions. In many ways, Bob Maynard’s Nieman experience never ended; it continued through his distinguished, eloquent championing of newsroom diversity and through the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, an institution that launched a thousand careers and inspired many more. Certainly, my Nieman year and later decades of work supporting newsroom careers owed much to his influence and investment.
My reporting career had barely begun when Bob Maynard, NF ’66, suggested I should someday pursue a Nieman Fellowship. He introduced himself to me soon after I became a copy aide at The Washington Post in 1970. I was a shy college junior; he was a star national correspondent, having covered the era’s social upheavals. He was the first person to endorse my yearning for a news career. Soon, he became my friend and mentor, in a newsroom where females were few, minorities were rare, and no professional was both.In 1971, I became Howard University’s first journalism graduate and Maynard left the Post on sabbatical, settling in northern California to write a book. Less than a year later, he shortened his sabbatical, shelved his manuscript, and returned east to direct Columbia University’s Summer Program for Minority Journalists, with Earl Caldwell of The New York Times. I was their first recruit. We were not entering journalism just for jobs, Maynard emphasized. Our goal was to make a difference through the profession toward building a more perfect America.
For more than 30 years—at the Post, at Gannett as a newsroom recruiter, and at the Freedom Forum as journalism education director—I strove to perpetuate Maynard’s vision. Maynard’s story consumed my doctoral research as a Freedom Forum Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I wrote a history of press integration centered on his contributions. In many ways, Bob Maynard’s Nieman experience never ended; it continued through his distinguished, eloquent championing of newsroom diversity and through the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, an institution that launched a thousand careers and inspired many more. Certainly, my Nieman year and later decades of work supporting newsroom careers owed much to his influence and investment.
