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.
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
I’ve always questioned the old aphorism that misery loves company. When I let myself throw a Pity Party, it’s a pretty self-absorbed affair, with room for only one in the spotlight. But it is comforting to be reminded, now … Read more
A standard — some would say ideal — approach to effective narrative nonfiction is to follow a single, primary character through an intimate journey that illuminates a larger social situation. The key is to find a person to follow … Read more
The headlines coming out of last week’s public hearing of the Congressional Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol focused on the unanimous vote to issue a subpoena to a former president requiring his … Read more
