Jacqui Banaszynski retired as the endowed Knight Chair in Editing at the Missouri School of Journalism in 2017, is editor at Nieman Storyboard, and a faculty fellow at the Poynter Institute. She won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for “AIDS in the Heartland,” a series about a gay farm couple facing AIDS, and was a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer in international reporting for her account of the sub-Saharan famine.
By Jacqui Banaszynski I long ago abandoned the illusion that I could block spam from my inboxes, prevent hacks of my accounts or keep much of my private business private. Unless you live way off-the-grid — maybe in a … Read more
Ireturned from a recent three-day watercolor workshop with three marginal values’ studies in gray (trying to see and control the range of light-to-dark without being distracted by color), and a scrap of paper scribbled with doodles and notes. Some … Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski As I read Celeste Ng’s most recent novel, I couldn’t help but think of George Orwell’s “1984” or Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale.” Nor could I avoid echoes to discordant times in real life in recent … Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski A large property sprawls on the north side of the state highway that runs from mountain cabin in the Washington Cascades to the town where I buy groceries. At least I assume It’s a large property. Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski Let’s, for a moment, consider squirrels. Stick with me. There’s a reason for this, and it has to do with things threatened and endangered. More specifically to that point, the subject is the western … Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski The details are what always hold me. The numbers matter, of course. Horrible numbers that matter horribly. I follow them as they rise. When the news of the shallow earthquake broke on Monday, devouring a vast … Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski I sat down to watch the State of the Union address this week out of a sense of obligation and, to be honest, a somewhat dark curiosity. How scripted would it be? How predictable? How long? … Read more
It’s a common and happy reframe among my retired friends: They are busier than they’ve ever been. They can’t remember how they managed to do all the things they needed to do — make friends, keep a house, have … Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski My fingers felt heavy on the keyboard last week as I edited two special posts that were long in the making. The posts themselves explore the kind of craft tools and inspiration — the partnership of … Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski It’s a common theme when a Storyboard contributor interviews a journalist about a descriptive analogy or metaphor in a written piece: How did you come up with that analogy? The same question comes up again and again when … Read more
