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.
Hang out at a journalism workshop, anywhere in the world, and inevitably the subject comes up: We’re being asked to produce more and more, in less and less time. It was no different when I was in Helsinki a … Read more
If this sentence seems lacking a word, it is. We’ll get to that in a moment. Until then, bookmark the notion of “good enough” — an aspiration that seems to elude most writers. But first a bit of context: … Read more
Journalism’s most idealistic missions are well-known and, despite the sine wave of attacks throughout history and the economic disruptions of the digital age, remain immutable: Give voice to the voiceless. Hold power accountable. Serve the public … Read more
My mother’s reverence for education, a solid grounding in middle-school grammar, and a long career in old-school journalism has chiseled me into one of those people who honors language, and tries to be precise — at least when I … Read more
It’s that date again. The one we might even not think about for awhile, or at least send to a distant corner, until it’s upon us with the force and dread of our continued disbelief and altered reality. Is … Read more
The ceremony was held in a gilded, 115-year-old opera house in Bern, Switzerland. A giant faux bear shared the stage with a prominent news anchor, who emceed the event in four languages. Theater troupes performed interpretative readings of journalist … Read more
In early December, 2016, a fire broke out during a concert at “Ghost Ship,” a one-time warehouse in Oakland, California, that had been turned, mostly illegally and in fits and starts, into a chaotic combination of artists’ collective, makeshift … Read more
You can’t turn around in the U.S. these days without bumping into a cry of “Fake News!” or a news story decrying the same. Not that spin is a modern phenomenon. Throughout human history, propaganda has been a tool … Read more
