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.
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
Novelists often speak of their characters as real people. They are people who have lives that existed before the moment the novel begins and outside its frame, and who reveal their full selves over time, as the writer writes. They … Read more
Jill Lepore is not a florid writer. No trickery with words. No embellishments to wow the reader. Rather, her writing typically demonstrates deep curiosity, methodical reporting, and clear connections. If another writer or student asks me for examples of intelligent, … Read more
A chronic reality of writing: It’s a struggle. Or so it often (always?) seems if you’re the writer. You aren’t sure whether your information is sound, where to start your story, what’s essential and what you can leave out. Read more
We love hearing from Storyboard readers. A message from one, in response to last week’s pieces, inspired this U.S. Memorial Day post — something of a thoughtful holiday bonus. Among last week’s posts, we included two about war: A … Read more
As the Memorial Day weekend approaches in the United States, war stories become part of an annual narrative commemorating those who served and died in battle. The stories often are woven from threads of horror and honor, of despair … Read more
Now and again, in the wonderful world of reading, you stumble across a sentence that not only evokes a response or feeling because of what it says, but because of how it says it. This is one of those sentences. Read more
