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.
By Jacqui Banaszynski It was a favorite diversion of mine, when I was teaching at the Missouri School of Journalism, to wander down the hall from my office to the newsroom of the Columbia Missourian. I would plug into … Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski As we turned the last pages of 2022, I am pondering the years past and the year ahead and the concept of writing practice. I’ve spent my professional life trading in the written word, but never … Read more
As the year comes to a close, we bring you our version of the best-of lists. We started with the reader’s choice awards: the Storyboard posts that ranked in the top 10 according to pageview analytics. Read more
Analytics measure more and more in our lives. I receive a report every week sending me stats that show how Storyboard posts performed on eight different measures. Eight. Everything seems to be about rankings these days, and especially this … Read more
Ads on radio and news sites here in Seattle are promoting “Potted Potter,” a romp of a stage play that retells all seven Harry Potter books — more than 4,000 pages worth — in 70 minutes. Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski Honorable readers, the writer stipulate: I once dreamed of attending law school. I took a few pre-law courses in college before reality, aka economics, led me away from more student debt and towards a reliable … Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski A long-time aspiration of mine has been to read more of the classics. My formal dip into that kind of literature was in high school, reading and discussing the usual suspects. I got to skate past … Read more
The 2022 National Book Awards were announced this week. I expect I am not alone in adding the winners in fiction and nonfiction to my wish list and handing it, not very discreetly, to my gift-giver-in-residence. Read more
Physical descriptions are challenging to write. More accurately, they are challenging to write well. And yet they are standard fare in much of our journalism, especially if we’re writing profiles or intimate stories that take readers deeply into other … Read more
Kindness isn’t a word often used to describe journalism or journalists. I get that. To those who don’t do this work, we can seem abrupt, aggressive, even cynical and certainly impolite. In the too-close village and crowded confines of … Read more
