By Jacqui Banaszynski Four long-time friends stopped for a lunch at an old-style diner in the rural ex-urbs of Philadelphia. We hadn’t all been together since before COVID and were fully absorbed with catching up. But we were barely … Read more
By Carly Stern Imagine that you’ve reached your long-held journalism dreams. You worked your way to the staff of a big masthead newspaper. Then you moved beyond the breakneck pace and tight word-count limits of that world to the … Read more
By Herbert Lowe In my favorite moment of the 25-minute documentary, “Reporting From the U.S. Civil Rights Trail,” one of my students is descending church steps in Alabama to do a TV standup: All eyes were on Birmingham, … Read more
When I asked Saadia Khan whether or not she identifies as a journalist, she said no. Her definition of a journalist: “someone with a degree in journalism or has worked in the field.” Without those credentials, Khan considers herself … Read more
In 1990, Joan Didion received an assignment from Bob Silvers, editor at the New York Review of Books, to write about a highly publicized, emotionally fraught crime almost nobody wanted to read about after it was, in theory, solved. Read more
Mitchell S. Jackson was worried. It was May 2020, and he had just sent his agent the prologue of his latest novel. Jackson, a contributing writer for Esquire and author of two celebrated books, said to himself, “I really … Read more
As an early-career environmental journalist, I guessed that objectivity was the most important goal in the field. But as a poet finishing up an MFA at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, this kind of writing doesn’t come naturally to me. Read more
Angel Jennings is not a native Angeleno, but since she joined the Los Angeles Times through its Metpro program 10 years ago, she has made a home in the city and at the newspaper. She recently was promoted to … Read more
It was the kind of tweet a lot of people would thumb past with no more than a quick “like.” But when Jaweed Kaleem read about a one-woman Black Lives Matter protest in small-town America during this past raw-nerved … Read more
