75th Anniversary Issue
As she lay dying, the widow of a Milwaukee newspaper editor made a gift that has now invigorated journalism for 75 years. Agnes Wahl Nieman, a well-educated woman with a fondness for bicycling, willed money to Harvard to “promote and elevate the standards of journalism.” That $1.4 million bequest (worth about $23 million in today’s dollars) funded the Nieman Fellowship program that has brought 1,442 journalists from around the world to Harvard for a year of study. To celebrate the Nieman Foundation for Journalism’s 75th anniversary, Nieman Reports tells the stories of 75 Nieman Fellows, among them pioneers in biography, documentary filmmaking, and investigative journalism.
A medical writer and editor for the German weekly Die Zeit, Albrecht was one of the Nieman Foundation’s first Global Health Fellows
In 2007 I was in Gulu, in northern Uganda, an area where 80 percent of the population lives in camps for internally displaced people, nearly 20 percent of the children die before the age of five, and thousands of other children have been abducted by local rebels. The trip was part of my Nieman Fellowship in Global Health Reporting. After three months of seeing sick and desperate people, I wanted to share these experiences with someone, but I thought my friends and colleagues at home probably wouldn’t understand the challenges faced by a traveling reporter. So I sent out a group e-mail to my fellow Niemans. Within a few hours I received 10 replies from all over the world. The messages rekindled the special spirit I felt during my Nieman year. The responses also reminded me of our shared objectives: Fight shallow journalism, dig deeper, investigate harder.
From the Nieman Foundation’s 2007 annual report
In 2007 I was in Gulu, in northern Uganda, an area where 80 percent of the population lives in camps for internally displaced people, nearly 20 percent of the children die before the age of five, and thousands of other children have been abducted by local rebels. The trip was part of my Nieman Fellowship in Global Health Reporting. After three months of seeing sick and desperate people, I wanted to share these experiences with someone, but I thought my friends and colleagues at home probably wouldn’t understand the challenges faced by a traveling reporter. So I sent out a group e-mail to my fellow Niemans. Within a few hours I received 10 replies from all over the world. The messages rekindled the special spirit I felt during my Nieman year. The responses also reminded me of our shared objectives: Fight shallow journalism, dig deeper, investigate harder.From the Nieman Foundation’s 2007 annual report
