Editor’s note: Reporter and teacher Shaheen Pasha (2018 Nieman Fellow) met John J. Lennon when she interviewed him for a larger package she did on writing programs and newspapers inside America’s prisons. (Her in-depth report can be found at our … Read more
Editor’s note: Our third Shop Class – part of our Story Craft posts – grew out of breaking news stories and blogs that offer rich lessons on how to do the work we do. Even in narrative, we need to know … Read more
Editor’s note: This is our second edition of Shop Class, a new Story Craft feature. The goal is to break down the work that goes into creating stories, and offer prompts or small suggestions to help you practice the craft that … Read more
Editor’s note: We are trying out a new feature. Call it writing practice (with a nod to Natalie Goldberg’s “Writing Down the Bones,” where I first encountered the term). Or virtual workshopping. Or maybe simply shop class. The goal is to … Read more
In the first half of my Nieman Fellowship, a great number of class discussions revolved around analyzing the outcome of the election that brought Donald Trump to power. Why had it happened? How? What did we (the media, especially) miss … Read more
Access is everything when it comes to documentary photography. Of all the challenges that immersion storytellers face in their work, perhaps none is more formidable. “Humanity should always come first. What better way to help a person carry on … Read more
You could say there’s a certain symmetry to the fact William Melvin Kelley, the black “lost giant of American literature,” as The New Yorker called him earlier this year, was “rediscovered” by a white writer. One question could … Read more
The third-grade students in Misterbianco, a small town at the foot of Mount Etna in eastern Sicily, watched, rapt, as the heavy puppets moved on a school auditorium stage. The kids laughed, open their mouths with astonishment, then clapped. When … Read more
Six years ago, in the early days of the Syrian uprising, a group of anti-government activists in a Damascus suburb decided to start their own newspaper. “If I look back to myself reporting at that time, we were amateurs. Read more
It isn’t often that you open a book and leap into your childhood. A wave of nostalgia washed over me as I flipped through New York-based photographer Ayesha Malik’s book, Aramco: Above the Oil Fields. “We don’t … Read more
