Nieman Reports

Summer-Fall 2013

75th Anniversary Issue

Cover for Summer-Fall 2013

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.

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75th Anniversary

The Meaning of the Nieman

By 75th Anniversary November 1, 2013

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

Mother of Invention

By 75th Anniversary November 5, 2013

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. Read more

The Nieman Factor

75th Anniversary September 24, 2013

The world’s most famous physicist was, on September 9, 1920, just another press critic: “Like the man in the fairy-tale who turned everything he touched into gold,” groused Albert Einstein in a letter to fellow scientist Max Born, “so with … Read more

Taking Back Our Language

By 75th Anniversary September 24, 2013

The shape and content of my decade as curator was determined by unexpected events. Howie Simons’s time as curator was cut drastically short by his death. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of journalism’s economic model … Read more

A Gift Beyond Measure

By 75th Anniversary September 24, 2013

As I prepared to begin my tour as curator during the summer of 2000, I worked at framing a vision of how the Nieman Foundation might build on its legacy of educating journalists while expanding its global reach and … Read more

Present at the Creation

1939: Dinners

By Features September 20, 2013

In an interview published in the 1986 book, “Archibald MacLeish: Reflections,” the Foundation’s first curator described the origins of the regular Nieman dinners, which eventually evolved into seminars and, ultimately, into Soundings “Professors were falling over themselves to … Read more

1939: Seminars

By Features September 20, 2013

Writing in the Spring 1989 issue of Nieman Reports, Louis M. Lyons, NF ’39, explained the weekly seminar series added during his Nieman year The dinner guests [curator Archibald] MacLeish coaxed to Cambridge that year were distinguished and the … Read more

1945: Writing Courses

By and Features September 24, 2013

Fiction instructor Anne Bernays and nonfiction instructor Paige Williams, NF ’97, recall how the Nieman writing courses got started in 1945 and 1998 Signing on to teach crack journalists how to write is a little like contracting to teach Royal … Read more

1947: Nieman Reports

By Features September 20, 2013

James Geary, NF ’12, editor of Nieman Reports, on the magazine’s founding Nieman Reports, from the first issue to the most recent Nieman Reports, from the first … Read more

1972: Affiliates

By Features September 24, 2013

Ruth Daniloff, a ’74 Nieman affiliate, on the dawn of equal rights for affiliates When I heard in May of 1973 that my husband, Nicholas Daniloff, had won a Nieman Fellowship, I acknowledged that it would burnish his career. Read more

1974: Soundings

By Features September 11, 2013

Lois Fiore, hired in 1973 as assistant to curator James C. Thomson Jr., recalls the origins of the Sounding One of the things we told the Fellows—and, I’m sure, still do—is that among the most interesting people you’re going to … Read more

1989: The Hawk

By Features September 11, 2013

Jonathan Seitz, Nieman Reports researcher/reporter, chronicles the fortunes of the “Santa Clara Hawk” To a first-time visitor, the statue of a hawk in front of the Nieman Foundation may seem out of place. It is carved from smooth, gray-black … Read more

2008: Nieman Lab

By Features September 11, 2013

Joshua Benton, NF ’08, recounts the origins of the Nieman Journalism Lab By the time I applied for a Nieman in 2007, the changes in America’s newsrooms were too real to put out of mind. While some argued that the … Read more

Nieman Moments

Masthead

Publisher
Ann Marie Lipinski
Editor
James Geary
Senior Editor
Jan Gardner
Researcher/Reporter
Jonathan Seitz
Design
Stacy Sweat Designs
Production Assistant
Kerrie Kemperman
Research Assistance
Natalie Blosser, Kimberly French, Tara W. Merrigan, Anja Nilsson, Elizabeth Pike, Amanda Rodrigues, Alexandra Stote, Damia S. Towns, Zohra Yaqhubi, and Harvard University Archives
Translation
June Carolyn Erlick

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