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.
EDITOR’S NOTE: A version of this essay was first published Feb. 19, 2021, as a Storyboard newsletter. That was two days before the tragic news that COVID deaths in the U.S. had topped 500,000. In retrospect, this reflection seems both … Read more
It’s been just over two years since we wrote about Tyrone Beason, then a Seattle Times columnist who had fallen out of love with the city as its tech-fueled growth seemed to discard funk and character and anyone without … Read more
It has become an all-too-common question, from students and young journalists and even struggling veterans: Why does this work matter if nothing changes? I could spend a lifetime of study and meditation to parse that question, and still find … Read more
Curiosity grounds all good journalism. Following up on curiosity — wondering about everything, and then caring to find out — is what makes journalism soar. Read more
Clichés are a bane of original writing. Unless you turn a worn and tired cliché on its ear (I sure hope you notice what I did just there) and make it new. Then all the meaning people attach to … Read more
About this time every year, the stories start rolling out, urging you to reset your New Year’s resolutions — and make them realistic. That’s because by this time, every year, the vast majority have already been abandoned. The sting … Read more
The retirement of newspaper editors is usually the stuff of insider industry news. Occasionally one breaks through to merit attention far more broadly. Martin Baron is one of those. The announcement of his retirement, effective Feb. 28, 2021, as … Read more
By now, you’ve no doubt seen a few dozen — or several thousand — of the creative memes featuring Bernie’s Chair. Or is it properly thought of as Bernie’s Mittens? Maybe we need an art naming contest: “Bernie on … Read more
Question to a successful writer (newspapers, magazines, book) who now does contract editing for top mastheads: What are your expectations for a clips search when a writer pitches a story? Answer: That they did one. After we stopped laughing, … Read more
Worthy books are released almost every day. No doubt more than a few authors bemoaned the publication of their hard work this past year, when so much of the world’s attention was distracted by a lethal pandemic and lethal … Read more
