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.
Some years ago, I spent three weeks at a mountain-climbing base camp in the interior of Antarctica. The reporting trip was supposed to be a two-day in-and-out, but a dispute over airplane fuel kept a motley crew of us … Read more
Forgive the movie reference, especially if you long ago ditched the Mel Gibson fan club. But a moment early in “The Patriot” offers apt wisdom when struggling with a story pitch. The short version: Colonial settler … Read more
Even the most dramatic news about the journalism is seldom a surprise. Budgets are cut. Awards are given. Veterans retire or are bought out. Book contracts are signed. But collecting a sampling and studying what came before can offer … Read more
Meet Bethany Grace Howe, above. I met her a little over 10 years ago when she came to the Missouri School of Journalism as a nontraditional graduate student. “Nontraditional” essentially meant that she was older than most of her … Read more
If you’re not a fan of “A River Runs Through It,” it can only be because you haven’t read it yet. Norman Maclean’s 1976 novella of family dynamics plays out on Montana’s Blackfoot River and is an enduring … Read more
The Memorial Day weekend caught me by surprise. After 16 months of no travel, and a schedule dictated only by this weekly newsletter, I lost the daily rhythm of showing up somewhere for work, and the longer rhythms of … Read more
Of what we’ve unscientifically defined as the seven fatal flaws of story pitches, this one probably seems the most lame. Of course, your idea is interesting; you wouldn’t be pitching it if it weren’t. (Unless, of course, you’re … Read more
My morning NPR ritual recently brought back two major landmarks in my journalism career this past week. May 18 was both the 41st anniversary of the eruption of Mount St. Helens and the 40th anniversary of the first newspaper … Read more
I spent the early years of my journalism career struggling with pretty much everything about the job, but especially with the writing. The reporting was often uncomfortable as I pushed past my mother’s three cardinal rules, all variations on … Read more
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
