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
In their press freedom ranking of 180 countries, Reporters Without Borders this year named Norway its valedictorian. So free is the country from censorship, political pressure, or violence against journalists, that the headline atop the annual … Read more
For the first time in his long career, Academy Award winner Errol Morris has made a film that no one will distribute. Perhaps distributors don’t like the documentary. Perhaps they don’t like the subject—Stephen … Read more
How are great journalists made? Whatever your image of an inspired origin story, it is unlikely to feature a young reporter sitting on the floor of her apartment reading a weekly from Omaha. But that was … Read more
