Watch video of Osnos’s Morris Lecture, from which this essay was adapted In 1948, the Harvard Sinologist John King Fairbank wrote, “China is a journalist’s dream and a statistician’s nightmare.” It was, he explained, a … Read more
In China, May has 35 days. All mention of June 4th, the day in 1989 on which the Tiananmen Square massacre took place, is forbidden. So Chinese journalists and … Read more
Technology development has been reshaping the media industry worldwide. In developed countries like the United States, traditional media companies felt the shock brought on by new technology several years ago. The global financial crisis made their survival even more … Read more
Two-thousand-and-three was a milestone year for investigative journalism in China. Some media organizations had been transformed from Communist Party propaganda tools into market-oriented news outlets. The Party line had weakened while market influences strengthened, leaving many journalists with an … Read more
Read Leiterman’s obituary in The Globe and Mail Douglas Leiterman, NF ’54, an acclaimed journalist in Canada, died on December 13, 2012 at his winter home in Vero Beach, Florida. He was 85. After his Nieman … Read more
Soon after starting high school in Tg. Mures, the small city in Romania’s Transylvania region where I grew up, I began skipping classes. What we want is to give voice to stories nobody has heard, to people who’ve … Read more
Nathaniel Nakasa left Harvard in the spring of 1965 ambivalent about his experience as a Nieman Fellow. According to his biographer Ryan Brown, he found studying race as an academic subject immensely frustrating. Read more
I think I should just come right out and admit it: I’ve become obsessed with gates. I don’t dream of them, but I fixate on them. Even when the word “gate” isn’t in italics or boldface type, it jumps … Read more
The wrought-iron decoration of the Class of 1881 Gate stands out in silhouette against the blazing white backdrop of Harvard’s neo-classical Littauer Center Students pass through the … Read more
Five years ago when I interviewed a schoolmaster campaigning against Taliban who had taken over his remote mountain valley of Swat in northern Pakistan, I couldn’t imagine how it would change my life. He was the father of Malala … Read more
