Mary Knoblauch, my first full-time editor, died recently. There was a photograph at the wake showing her with a small team of reporters celebrating a series that won some awards. I am one of the reporters in the photo, but … Read more
Michelle Ye Hee Lee has sharp memories of her first traumatic assignment. It was 2011, and U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords had been shot in a suburban Arizona supermarket parking lot, the victim of a gunman whose rampage that January morning … Read more
If I asked you to name a country where press freedom has grown stronger in recent years, could you? How about countries where press freedom is increasingly under attack? If you’re still struggling with the … Read more
When I asked Brent Renaud where he wanted his picture taken, he chose a stairwell lined with Nieman Fellows’ photographs at Harvard’s Lippmann House. He was giving a big talk that night during his own fellowship year, and I was … Read more
Jonas Heese was skeptical. The Harvard Business School professor had heard the standard claims: When local newspapers close down, corporate corruption goes up. Yes, there was anecdotal evidence that national media could act as a corrective — perhaps a Wall … Read more
The word had so thoroughly infiltrated the language that I no longer noticed it. Then one afternoon, walking across a windy plaza, it brought me to a full stop. A coffee shop had printed it on a long, wide banner, … Read more
I traveled once to Tripoli to interview Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Colleagues and I met him in a Bedouin tent under a full moon on the grounds of Bab al-Azizya, his walled barracks. He was a man who both courted … Read more
Dear Journalism. Those two words formed the silent call I heard throughout the summer as anguish over George Floyd’s killing and an amplified Black Lives Matter movement forced a news industry reckoning. Yes, there was deep pain and disillusionment … Read more
Goenawan Mohamad, the Indonesian journalist and poet, had considerable impact on the members of my Nieman class. His parents had suffered exile to an internment camp; his father was later executed for political activism. Tempo, the magazine he founded, … Read more
In October 2010, I was having dinner with Paul Salopek, sorting through the news industry’s vanishing support for foreign reporting, his work. “I have an idea,” he said, and on the back of our receipt he drew a crude map … Read more
