As one of the world’s leading experts on media manipulation and disinformation, Joan Donovan studies the darker side of the internet — online threats, conspiracy theories, extremist rhetoric, to name just a few examples. Donovan is an assistant professor of … Read more
What makes Steve Stadelman, an Illinois state senator, so concerned about local news? It’s not just his 25-year career in local broadcast media, which he left to enter politics in 2013. Stadelman says it doesn’t take someone from within the … Read more
In January 2024, Pulitzer-prize winning photographer Barbara Davidson traveled from her Los Angeles home to the California-Mexico border town of Jacumba. The month before, U.S. law enforcement had taken into custody a record number of migrants — more than 225,000 … Read more
Social media and the ways journalists use it are facing a legal reckoning in the courts. This reckoning is easy to miss. We’re accustomed to a seemingly never-ending stream of news and commentary about internet regulation, powerful companies like Meta … Read more
The news industry is entering a new era, and after so many failed attempts at transformation over the past two decades, we’re wrestling with the fundamental question of our time: What kind of business is journalism, and whom does it … Read more
Farooq Ahmed used to be on Twitter a lot. The D.C.-based science journalist and novelist posted plenty of hot takes, diving into wide-ranging discussions of the day’s most pressing events with pithy humor. He even invented a hashtag, #mybrownass, for … Read more
A reunion is a corrective, a response to a period of separation. Families, colleges, even countries reunite, often in celebration, sometimes in longing. In the five years since the last Nieman Fellows reunion, the world has been torn by pandemic … Read more
I was done. Absolutely done with writing, and especially done with writing books. This was in 2008, and I had just finished my book “Rin Tin Tin.” It was a story of the most famous dog in Hollywood, and it … Read more
This month has been brutal for journalism jobs. The Los Angeles Times laid off 115 employees. Time announced layoffs that the magazine’s guild said amounted to 15% of staff. Univision announced 200 layoffs and Conde Nast folded the … Read more
There are things that you think would never happen to you, like an airplane crash — or a war. As a child, every time the TV was on, I heard the words Bosnia and Herzegovina. These two words stuck with … Read more
