On a recent visit to my daughter’s college campus, I heard student musicians talking about a New York Times Magazine profile, “The Passion of Nicki Minaj,” but it wasn’t what the Times likely hoped for when putting … Read more
Where Are the Women?”—last year’s cover story on the decline of women in senior journalism roles—did not lack for sources. Women were overwhelmingly willing to talk candidly about their careers and frustrations and eager to wrestle publicly … Read more
The Facebook posting was striking, coming from a friend who writes powerfully about race and was now arguing against the University of Oklahoma’s expulsion of fraternity members for their racist chants. “Educational institutions ought to educate—or try … Read more
For those who care about foreign reporting, the news about the news isn’t good. Reporters kidnapped, beheaded, disappeared. The Committee to Protect Journalists documents the toll with a grim menu of online search options. Deaths by type: … Read more
The lunch for the summer interns was held at the editor’s swanky men’s club. The other interns and I had arrived ahead of the brass and I took my seat in one of the club’s private dining rooms, next … Read more
Even from a country generating waves of extreme news—accounts of Africa’s highest GDP alongside stories of terrorism—the reports of the schoolhouse kidnappings were shocking. About 300 Nigerian schoolgirls had been abducted from their dormitories by violent extremists and were … Read more
Winter is Nieman’s season of dreams. The applications pour in from elite newsrooms and single-person startups, from G8 nations and nearly invisible economies. Most of the international files arrive electronically, but some come to us handwritten, penned and pieced … Read more
Lippmann House has opened its doors to the 76th Class of Nieman Fellows, and with them to the future of journalism. To the counterterrorism reporter studying the quantitative social sciences for new tools to mine her urgent beat. To a magazine editor exploring the power of narrative to restore the soul of his country, a former police state. Read more
One tweeter boasted of a "game-changing victory" for crowdsourcing in the early hours of the Boston area manhunt. But what began as a low-grade fever on social media spiked with the wrongful naming of a bombing suspect. All the while, Nieman Visiting Fellow Hong Qu was testing his new tool Keepr as a screen for credibility and posting early results on Nieman Reports as the story unfolded. Qu and journalist Seth Mnookin, who tweeted live from the manhunt, write about how smartphones and their unprecedented power to publish require new journalistic tools and practices, while other Nieman Fellows consider the intersection of social media and journalism in the aftermath of the attack.
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They died the same weekend, one 26, a prodigy of the Internet age who took his own life, the other an 89-year-old whose moral battles were waged on newsprint and whose final assignment was … Read more
