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 Let’s, for a moment, consider squirrels. Stick with me. There’s a reason for this, and it has to do with things threatened and endangered. More specifically to that point, the subject is the western … Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski The details are what always hold me. The numbers matter, of course. Horrible numbers that matter horribly. I follow them as they rise. When the news of the shallow earthquake broke on Monday, devouring a vast … Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski I sat down to watch the State of the Union address this week out of a sense of obligation and, to be honest, a somewhat dark curiosity. How scripted would it be? How predictable? How long? … Read more
It’s a common and happy reframe among my retired friends: They are busier than they’ve ever been. They can’t remember how they managed to do all the things they needed to do — make friends, keep a house, have … Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski My fingers felt heavy on the keyboard last week as I edited two special posts that were long in the making. The posts themselves explore the kind of craft tools and inspiration — the partnership of … Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski It’s a common theme when a Storyboard contributor interviews a journalist about a descriptive analogy or metaphor in a written piece: How did you come up with that analogy? The same question comes up again and again when … Read more
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
