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.
Two foundational definitions of news are proximity and immediacy. The closer and more urgent an event or issue, the more likely it is to grab a reader’s attention. That can make it challenging to draw readers into stories about … Read more
Lizzie Johnson’s work covering the deadly wildfires that have scorched California in recent years has earned a place in these posts in the past. Most notable was an annotation of a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle in which … Read more
The daughter of a friend reached out to me recently, seeking a bit of advice. She’s a young millennial and, after dabbling in various dabbles, she’s come back around to an early passion: Writing. Her father, whom I’ve known … Read more
Some core questions I have about the challenges facing journalists were revived by a few things I read last week. None were surprising, but all carried nagging concerns that date to the upheaval of the digital age. You might … Read more
We invite you to spend a few moments traveling the world with photographers who, despite the risks of COVID, have remained on the front lines of storytelling. For more than a year now, photographers have taken us into the … Read more
Congratulations to winners of the 2021 NLA Awards, announced this week by the News Leaders Association (the merger of the former American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Associated Press Managing Editors). As the contest season … Read more
You love the games and the writing and become a sports journalist. You devote a career to that passion and the craft, writing for some of the best mastheads in the country. You write several books, most about sports … Read more
Speculation runs hot these days about a return to some kind of post-pandemic normal. Among my employed journalism friends, that raises the question: When do you think you’ll go back? In this case, it doesn’t mean back to work. Read more
A lame inside joke in many of the newsrooms of America: The sports department is also referred to as “the toy department.” After all, the coverage focuses on games. Until you read more closely. Sports is about so much … Read more
