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.
It would be folly to follow the thousands (millions?) of sentences that have been written since Tuesday (Aug. 11, 2020), when presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden announced that U.S. Senator Kamala Harris of California would be his vice … Read more
Seventy-five years ago, on Aug. 6, 1945, a plane called the Enola Gay, manned by a crew from the U.S. Army Air Force, flew over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and dropped the world’s first atomic bomb. The bomb … Read more
The self-checkout line at my funky neighborhood grocery was wide open, but I waited for the old-fashioned line, with a checker and a bagger. I don’t like to weigh my own Honeycrisps any more than I’ve ever learned to … Read more
As the daily read of crucial issues — racial injustice, the pandemic, the political divide, the battered environment, the brutal economy — expands and deepens, I keep looking for those moments of insight and clarity that prompt a silent … Read more
Major League Baseball, that beloved summer sport, returns to a shortened season later this month. Or at least it is scheduled to, but as with all things in the time of coronavirus, schedules are subject to change. In honor … Read more
During the 15 years that Chip Scanlan taught writing workshops at the Poynter Institute, he wrote a popular column called “Chip on Your Shoulder.” Searching Poynter’s archives takes some work, but you can find a … Read more
In a work-related Zoom meeting recently, a colleague referred to Reddit as “lightning in a bottle.” I’m not entirely sure what that meant, despite her best efforts to explain it to my dial-up mind, but it made me want … Read more
It’s not possible for the everyday reader to know who wrote that sentence. The lead writer who was pulling feeds from several reporters in the field? One of the field reporters who had scratched it in theirs notes? An … Read more
On May 23, 2020, (May 24 in print), the New York Times landed a daring and historic front page: A wash of overwhelming gray, which jumped to two more gray pages inside the print paper. To mark the deaths … Read more
All news is the stuff of history. But some deserves more than a dusty archive to be stumbled upon by a research scholar. It is an immediate marker that demands be heeded for the ages. We are living in … Read more
