Articles

12 Things BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith Thinks You Should Know about Journalism

12 Things BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith Thinks You Should Know about Journalism

Ben Smith became editor in chief of BuzzFeed in 2011 when the website known for its listicles and cat photos got into the business of breaking news. Smith, an early…
Scientists, Journalists and the Quest for Objectivity

Scientists, Journalists and the Quest for Objectivity

Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert said there is a scientific basis for the advice that mothers give about how to be happy: get married, make money, and have children. The…

Parsing Politics in China, Egypt, and an Orthodox Jewish Community

Harvard law professor Noah Feldman spoke to the 2014 Nieman Fellows about the intense scrutiny and criticism he faced after writing about his work in Tunisia and writing a personal…
Master of the Craft

Master of the Craft

Through his scrupulously researched books chronicling the rise to power of President Lyndon Johnson and New York urban planner Robert Moses, Robert A. Caro, NF ’66, set a new standard…
Command and Control

Command and Control

The Communist Party has long striven to control freedom of speech in China. Websites from around the world are blocked. Major social media cannot be accessed, and advanced software is…

Big Data, Income Mobility, and the American Dream

Harvard economics professor Raj Chetty shows a data visualization model that The New York Times created from research he and his colleagues did on income mobility in the United States.…

James Risen’s First Amendment Battle

For six years, New York Times national security reporter James Risen has been fighting to keep his promise of anonymity to a source who told him about a failed CIA…

Keeping the Faith

The idea for New Canadian Media came to me at the 2009 Nieman Narrative Conference. During a workshop session I met an editor named Andrew Lam who, like me, is…

Evan Osnos: The Challenges of Covering China

Evan Osnos, who covered China for eight years with the Chicago Tribune and The New Yorker, spoke about the difficulty of covering modern China in the 2013 Joe Alex Morris…
Clear and Present Danger

Clear and Present Danger

In the fall of 2013, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) quietly began booting up its Utah Data Center, a sprawling 1.5 million-square-foot facility designed to store and analyze the…