“Never stop asking for public documents,” says Boston Globe reporter Jenifer B. McKim, NF ’08, in the first of a series of Q. and A.'s with Nieman Fellows about watchdog reporting. “Sometimes a simple public records request can lead to stunning discoveries.” In McKim’s case, her request for reports about lead poisoning, made when she was a reporter at The Orange County Register in California, kicked off a two-year investigation into candy tainted with lead that prompted changes in state and federal laws. Read more
PROGRAM UPDATE: Please note that the Nieman seminar with Harvard Business School Professor Clayton M. Christensen planned for Wednesday, Dec. 5, has been postponed. We will reschedule the event and share the new date with you soon. We apologize for … Read more
Marty Kaiser has been editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for 15 years, and during that time he has had to make a lot of cuts to his newsroom. The path he chose was to give up daily, incremental stories that don't move the ball, in favor of emphasizing watchdog stories that expose problems that need fixing. "What I love about it is that in a way it's the old-fashioned newspaper crusade," he says. "I think you should stand up for what you believe in and say that's what you're doing." Read more
Working with reporters across borders is the new frontier for accountability journalism, says Sheila S. Coronel, director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Born in Manila, Coronel co-founded the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism and served as its director for 17 years. Now blogging as the “WatchDog Watcher,” she argues that journalists can’t “follow the money” if they’re not going global with their reporting. Read more
This is the adapted text of the Hedy Lamarr Lecture Meyer delivered at the Austrian Academy of Sciences on October 3. The lecture was also sponsored by Medienhaus Wien, a think tank based in Vienna, Austria. Philip Meyer is Emeritus … Read more
Journalism is an escape artist. For the generation raised on Watergate, that lesson landed hard. The most powerful men in the world could not shut a story down. They lied and conspired, then bullied … Read more
Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation provides a framework to understand how businesses grow, become successful, and falter as nimble start-ups muscle in on their customers. It’s a familiar story, one that has played out in the steel and auto industries, among others. Now Christensen, in collaboration with 2012 Nieman Fellow David Skok, has applied his analysis to the news industry. Their goal in this issue's cover story, “Breaking News,” is to encourage news executives to apply the lessons of disruption to the media industry as a means of charting new paths to survival and success. Read more
Foreign policy has taken a back seat in the U.S. presidential election, especially the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But reporters should at the very least press Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on a related domestic issue: the treatment of veterans. So asserts Kennedy School lecturer Juliette Kayyem, who notes that neither candidate is addressing the challenges facing those who bore the heaviest burden of war. Read more
1946 Robert Manning, an influential editor of The Atlantic Monthly, died of lymphoma at a hospital in Boston on September 28th. He was 92. Read his obituary … Read more
