On a late fall weekend in 2001, the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism convened its first conference. More than 800 journalists traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts to take part in three days of interactive seminars, lectures and readings with many of the nation’s leading practitioners. By the end of the conference, there had been 26 seminars, four plenary sessions, and three group readings, and it is from words spoken at these sessions that Nieman Reports compiled the report that follows. — Melissa Ludtke Read more
McPhee’s New Yorker article, “Travels in Georgia,” is a joint profile of a man and a woman. McPhee is following them along through the state of Georgia, watching what they do. Doesn’t tell us much about them. We know they’re … Read more
“What does ‘good work’ in journalism look like?” This question is at the heart of a book written by three distinguished psychologists who set out to examine, through The Project of Good Work, the factors that permit and sustain work … Read more
Adam Hochschild focused on the basics of writing narratives. Pick compelling characters and breathe life into them. Think in scenes, as if you were a filmmaker. Create suspense by strategically withholding information or by setting up and then delaying conflicts. Read more
In her 2010 Niemen Reports essay, the late pioneering journalist Kay Mills observed that “in 2009, women were 34.8 per cent of newsroom supervisors and 37 percent of newsroom employees, and those figures are down slightly in each category from the previous year. In 1971, 22 percent of daily newspaper journalists were women. This doesn’t seem like enough progress to have made in nearly four decades, especially at a time when there are far fewer newsroom jobs.” Read Kay’s essay and the stories American women journalists wrote for Nieman Reports a decade ago. Read more
