“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
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
In an excerpt Niemen Reports published from a book about gender and journalism, Margaret Gallagher wrote in 2001: “Wherever one looks in the world, women still have relatively little decision-making power either inside the media organizations themselves, or in the political and economic institutions with which these organizations must interface.” From Europe to Africa, Indonesia to India, from Arab countries to South America, women journalists share stories from the newsroom and describe how news coverage changes when women are among the decision-makers. Read more
Through the night of September 11, 2001, photographer Peter Turnley took refuge in a second-floor office in a clothing store, its windows blown out by the force of the attack on the World Trade Center. As he tried to absorb what he was seeing, he documented the devastation. At dawn, he moved close to the site and fastened his journalistic eye on faces whose expressions evoke our feelings of loss. From covering war, Turnley knew that “the most important pictures…are after the battle, when one sees the human impact.” Read more
Cutbacks. Lay-offs. Buyouts. Early retirement packages. Offered under different names and circumstances, the bottom-line objectives are similar: trim the staff to keep the enterprise afloat. Few journalistic homes have been spared cuts in staff during this economic slump, though newspapers, … Read more
At a time when so much of journalism is quicker, shorter and hyped to grab the public’s presumed short-attention span, the documentary—with its slower pace and meandering moments—is finding receptive audiences in many old places and some new ones as well. In this issue of Nieman Reports, we’ve asked those who document our world to explore how their work converges with ours. How is what they do related to journalism? And what does the documentary form allow its adherents to do in reporting news or exploring issues that other forms of journalism do not? Read more
Washington Post editor and columnist Meg Greenfield put it this way in her posthumous autobiography: “Few journalists have much appreciation of the enormous impact we have on the lives of those we write about.” In a speech “NBC Nightly News” … Read more
The battle over the ownership of NTV television—Russia’s largest non-government national TV network—appeared to Western eyes to be a story about the role that President Vladimir Putin was playing in the demise of freedom of the press. Andrei Zolotov, … Read more
David Nyhan, a columnist with The Boston Globe, describes why—at a time of deepening public mistrust of journalism—there needed to be a way of recognizing and rewarding fairness. “Rare is the subject of a news story who does not … Read more
Four years ago, 25 of this nation’s most influential journalists came together at Harvard University with a shared sense that something was seriously wrong with their profession. “They barely recognized what they considered journalism in much of the work of … Read more
