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.
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
Modern society works hard to find ways to talk about subjects that have long been taboo, and that left sufferers isolated and shrouded in shame. Things like mental illness, abortion, addiction and even rape are more and more brought … Read more
Awards from elite, independent institutions always offer a reminder of the powerful work being done by storytellers of all stripes. None moreso in journalism than the Pulitzer Prizes. This year’s Pulitzer for fiction went to “The … Read more
Today marks the release of “Losing Earth: A Recent History,” Nathaniel Rich. The narrative tracks the story of a handful of scientists and politicians from 1979 to 1989 as they tried to build awareness of climate … Read more
Pitching rises again and again as one of the main challenges facing writers who want to make the leap from idea to publication. Whether you’re a reporter hustling support for an enterprise piece in your newsroom, or a freelancer … Read more
Storytellers in any medium can learn from those in others. Writers must know how to paint mental images through the hieroglyphics of text, apply (and break) rules of grammar to ensure clarity, and translate specialty jargon into widely understood … Read more
I‘m not much on Valentine’s Day. I liked the grade school tradition of exchanging Valentine’s Day cards with classmates. (Is that just a U.S. thing?) Each of us was supposed to have enough cards for everyone so no one … Read more
Editor’s note: We’re looking at the never-ending debate over what is called, in journalese, the “nut graf” — that so-what paragraph or section that pulls out of the news or narrative to provide context and significance. In earlier posts, veteran … Read more
Editor’s note: We’re looking at the never-ending debate over what is called, in journalese, the “nut graf” — that so-what paragraph or section that pulls out of the news or narrative to provide context and significance. In an earlier post, veteran … Read more