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.
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
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
