Articles

The Future Is Ours

The Future Is Ours

In 1808, as Napoleon’s forces marched across southern Spain, a group of Spanish exiles set up shop across the Atlantic in New Orleans. There, they capitalized on Louisiana’s newly acquired…
Follow the Money

Follow the Money

In the fall of 2011, while researching a story on China’s business elites for The New York Times, I made a startling find: a set of corporate documents that linked…
The Secret Life of Keywords

The Secret Life of Keywords

I became a journalist in 1979. Back in those days, two basic skills were required of any journalist: reporting and writing. Three decades later, in an era of dramatic technological…
Up Close and Personal

Up Close and Personal

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.”…
Moral Hazard

Moral Hazard

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 bloggers…
Commerce & Corruption

Commerce & Corruption

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.…
Under Pressure

Under Pressure

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…
“Seven Days” That Shook Canada

“Seven Days” That Shook Canada

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.…

Stories To Live By

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…
A Native of Nowhere

A Native of Nowhere

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…