Author

Sound Business: Mary Meehan, NF ’16, masters the art of storytelling on radio after a long career in print

In Powell County, Kentucky,  a nurse, a preacher, and a physician assistant challenged deep religious beliefs to save their community. In the process they also taught me both the importance…
May 19, 2017
A Winning Turnaround: Betsy O’Donovan, NF ’13, is leading the charge to reverse the deficit at a college newspaper

A Winning Turnaround: Betsy O’Donovan, NF ’13, is leading the charge to reverse the deficit at a college newspaper

I became executive director at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Daily Tar Heel in August 2016, at a make-or-break moment for our nonprofit newspaper. We’d lost $272,000 in the…
May 18, 2017
How News Flows on Social Media

How News Flows on Social Media

Zeynep Tufekci is a scholar of social movements and the technologies on which they rely. In “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest,” published May 16…
May 16, 2017
Images that Offer Fresh Takes on Minority Communities

Images that Offer Fresh Takes on Minority Communities

[sidebar style=”right” head=”Related”]Why We Need More Visual Journalists and Editors of ColorBy Tara Pixley[/sidebar]The best visual journalism displays the human condition as honestly and thoroughly as possible. The photographers highlighted…
May 15, 2017
Why We Need More Visual Journalists and Editors of Color

Why We Need More Visual Journalists and Editors of Color

A tall man—handgun tucked in his waistband and face wrapped in a shirt leaving only his eyes visible—stares at the journalists staring at him. He is looting a Ferguson, Missouri gas…
May 15, 2017
Border Patrol: Panama Papers veteran Wahyu Dhyatmika, NF ’15, finds a way forward with another cross-border investigative story

Border Patrol: Panama Papers veteran Wahyu Dhyatmika, NF ’15, finds a way forward with another cross-border investigative story

Being an investigative reporter used to be a lonely job. You rarely talk about your story to colleagues in your newsroom, let alone a journalist from another publication. You guard…
May 15, 2017
“The way journalists interact with the communities we cover needs to change”

“The way journalists interact with the communities we cover needs to change”

I met Kate Geiger when I was doing a piece for NPR in 2013 about a former GM assembly plant Dayton. She’s worked there most of her career, and when…
May 12, 2017
Yes, We Need A Special Commission…

Yes, We Need A Special Commission…

The media, along with former FBI Director James Comey, helped Donald Trump become president. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com has detailed why. But it doesn’t take a mathematician to understand that…
May 11, 2017

Facebook, Advertisers, and the View from a Daily Editor in Middle America

Should advertisers spend more money at local newspapers? The question was up for debate this week after Jim Rutenberg, media columnist for The New York Times, published “Ad Buyers Have…
May 10, 2017
The Sting of the Lie

The Sting of the Lie

I first read the lie under a competitor’s byline: the results of DNA testing on a rape case I was covering. My reporting partner and I didn’t know it was…
May 10, 2017