Legendary blues guitarist B.B. King told Nieman Fellows about his hardscrabble beginnings and played for them one afternoon at Lippmann House back in the fall of 1980. That visit came about through the efforts of Bulgarian journalist and … Read more
Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson is currently teaching narrative nonfiction at Harvard, where she received her undergraduate degree in 1976. She was an investigative reporter and deputy Washington bureau chief with the Wall Street Journal from 1988 to 1997 before moving to The Times, where she served as Washington bureau chief, managing editor and, ultimately, executive editor. As a Harvard senior, Abramson was arts editor of the Harvard Independent. She met with the current class of Nieman Fellows for a discussion about female newsroom leadership, the future of foreign correspondents and the Obama administration’s legal pursuit of journalists. Read more
Brian McGrory, who has been a White House correspondent, columnist, and a deputy managing editor during his 25 years at The Boston Globe, has been editor of the paper since 2012. The following year The New York Times sold the … Read more
Of all the papers and newsmagazines in France, one in particular should have been well prepared for the challenges of this digital era: Libération. With its witty headlines, striking photo portraits, and its passionate and often provocative coverage of … Read more
Members of Cuba’s mass media, which is completely in the hands of the state, cover only what’s convenient for the government. Because of that, in February of 2009, a group of seven independent journalists and human rights … Read more
Henry Constantin was a 22-year-old journalism student at a Cuban university in 2006 when he proposed a thesis critical of the country’s brand of reporting. He was promptly kicked out of the university. Two years later, he was … Read more
As recently as 2008, it was illegal for Cubans to own a cell phone and impossible for them to buy a computer. No independent journalist had a mobile device, and only a handful had a phone line at home. Read more
In Cuba, it’s called “D-Day”—that hypothetical future date on which the Castro regime falls. D-Day is a date long-awaited by broad sectors of the population, the Cuban diaspora, media outlets around the world, and foreign correspondents based on the … Read more
Many years ago, I asked Anja to show me her favorite picture, the one she liked the most. The photo she sent showed an elegant older man sitting on the wreckage of a large destroyed vehicle as if it was … Read more
In December of 2011, Turkish military jets bombed the village of Uludere, about five miles from the border with Iraq, killing 34. Was the attack a tragic mistake or a planned strike on suspected Kurdish separatists? Were the casualties … Read more