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: It’s Thanksgiving, that singular and, for many, favorite American holiday. We welcome you to hunt around for stories of the true origins of the day, rather than the many mythical versions framed over the years. Here, we just … Read more
Defining a writer’s “voice” has always stumped me. It came up again recently, when a journalism professor put me on speaker phone with her class of college freshmen, who had a straightforward question: What is the difference between personal … Read more
It takes many held-breath pages and held-breath sentences and held-breath thoughts to reach Page 407 of “The Testaments” where, in something of an epilogue to the main story, you come across this line. And then you hold your breath … Read more
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