It once seemed to take a million moving parts to put out a newspaper—a real, printed-on-paper edition of, say, The New York Times, the Herald Tribune or Le Monde. It was an overwhelmingly analog and artisanal process, born … Read more
When I met Brit Bennett, in 2016, it was to discuss her first novel, “The Mothers,” a Baldwin-inspired tale of the friendship between two Southern California girls growing up amid all kinds of absences. But Bennett, then … Read more
Nieman 80 More Nieman Fellows on exemplary journalism that influenced them You don’t find books; books find you. That’s what essayist Joseph Epstein told us in our writing classes at Northwestern. All these years later, … Read more
I first read Jeffrey Fleishman’s 2007 article about poor roof dwellers in Cairo nearly 10 years after he wrote it, while I was teaching a course at the American University of Beirut on narrative reporting and the legacy of Anthony … Read more
In her illustrious, richly crafted book “The Warmth of Other Suns,” Isabel Wilkerson brilliantly shows the journey that many African-Americans embarked on during the Great Migration. But it’s another Wilkerson work that I return to, over and over, as a … Read more
Walter Lippmann’s long and extraordinary career embodied what magazine magnate Henry Luce described as the “American Century.” Lippmann chronicled it, tried to understand it, and ultimately shaped American politics, diplomacy, and journalism. Read more
Edward Wong, NF ’18 Sometime in my 20s, when I was starting out as a reporter, I read two collections of Joan Didion’s early articles and essays. They changed the way I thought about journalism. Here were pieces … Read more
It was the mid-’60s and I was in college and a guy I had never heard of—an alumnus of my college [Washington and Lee University] as it happened—was coming to speak. He was a journalist from New York. I was … Read more
Nieman 80 More Nieman Fellows on exemplary journalism that influenced them One of the eternal struggles for journalists is between the need to belong to something bigger than themselves and the urge for independence. Nearly every reporter … Read more
How are great journalists made? Whatever your image of an inspired origin story, it is unlikely to feature a young reporter sitting on the floor of her apartment reading a weekly from Omaha. But that was … Read more
