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.
Much attention has been rightly paid to the congressional hearings into events before, during and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. By any account, it qualifies as a big deal. Perhaps one of the biggest … Read more
A Storyboard standard was tracking and reporting on as many of the top annual journal conferences we could, from association events — like the Society of Environmental Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Association of Health Care Journalists and … Read more
Every afternoon when I was a kid, the Green Bay (Wisconsin) Press Gazette landed in the driveway of our house. Actually, squinting back, I think it got tucked between the storm door and screen door. Such were the small … Read more
One of the few things I appreciate about Facebook, besides tours of my friends’ faraway lives and photos of the babies being born to my former “Baby Js”, is the SAVE feature. It’s also, for me, one of the … Read more
With something of a literary apology to Garrison Keillor … It was anything but a quiet week in Lake Woebegone, aka These dis-United States, as we headed into the nation’s 246th birthday. Rulings from the U.S. Supreme … Read more
Just when I think the dominant news of the day is too big to be pushed aside, it is eclipsed by other news. I was working through an early draft of the newsletter last Friday morning (June 24, 2002) … Read more
Conclusion based on anecdotal evidence: Anyone who writes a regular column for a newspaper or magazine works harder than you know. Corollary: Community newspaper columnists, who usually can’t tap events outside their small community, work even harder. Ashley Lodato … Read more
In the 100-plus days since Vladimir Putin ordered his Russian army into Ukraine, I have done something I rarely do on social media: Forwarded shares, many days a week, of art from and about Ukraine. I’ve wondered, of course, … Read more
Sometimes the words just don’t work. I don’t mean they don’t come together easily or work well or string together in pretty rhythms. Those are annoyances we seldom get to indulge in deadline journalism. I mean they simply don’t … Read more
After 19 students and two teachers were gunned down in a classroom in Uvalde, Texas, the chorus rose: “Enough!” It came with a sad refrain: “It will happen again.” And it did. As many as 15 mass … Read more