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In this Issue: Writing the Book

Nieman Fellows & Contributors in the Field

  • Never Stop Digging
    Stanley Nelson has won the 2011 Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism from the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky. Nelson, editor of the Concordia Sentinel in Ferriday, Louisiana, investigated the unsolved murder of Frank Morris, a black man who was killed in 1964 after the Ku Klux Klan burned down his business. His work implicated a new suspect though a grand jury has yet to return an indictment and earned him a finalist spot for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting.
  • Blogging a Shifting Industry
    Micheline Maynard, senior editor of Changing Gears: Remaking the Manufacturing Belt, has added a blog to her portfolio. The former longtime business and Detroit correspondent for The New York Times is writing Voyages at Forbes.com. She promises “useful information about cars, car shopping, the auto companies, and the people who run them.” She also plans to explore alternative modes of transportation. “I mean everything from car sharing and Zipcars to walking, mass transit, cycling, skateboarding (no kidding) and people who lease cars by the week,” she wrote in an e-mail.
  • Shining Light on a Serious Issue
    Nieman Reports has often featured the work of MediaStorm and its founder Brian Storm. Now the online documentary production house has been honored with a 2012 Alfred I. DuPont Award for excellence in broadcast and digital journalism. “Undesired,” Walter Astrada’s “haunting multimedia report about India’s lethal social customs that devalue the lives of women and girls,” is MediaStorm’s second piece to receive the award, given by Columbia University.

Professor's Corner

The Road to New Media
Two new essays on Professor’s Corner offer insights into the changing media landscape students will face. University of Nebraska professor Sue Burzynski Bullard writes about teaching students to include links in their articles and offers resources for teaching linking. And University of Arkansas professor Gerald B. Jordan takes the temperature of a newsroom in transition at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he works during summer breaks.

Nieman Notes

  • Leaving Baghdad, Heading to Washington, D.C.
    In March Matthew Schofield, NF ’02, a longtime staffer at The Kansas City Star, will move to McClatchy’s Washington, D.C. bureau to join the national security reporting team. In December, he reflected on his time covering the war in Iraq following the news that McClatchy would close its Baghdad bureau now that the U.S. military has formally ended its combat operation. “Baghdad memories all eventually take on a melancholy tinge,” he wrote. He expressed gratitude to the Iraqis who had helped him, including a fixer named Yasser who was mistaken for a threat and killed by a U.S. soldier.
  • A Correspondent Returns Home
    After 15 years abroad as a foreign correspondent for The Toronto Star, Bill Schiller, NF ’06 is back home in Canada. In an e-mail to Nieman Reports, he writes that even though the paper has closed all its bureaus outside North America, “management remains dedicated to covering the world and we've been sending people here, there and everywhere continuously over the past year. At one point during the Arab Awakening, we had eight reporters in the zone.” In the immediate future, he’ll be covering the 2012 presidential race in the United States.

Recent Issues

Old Meets New

Love and the Ombudsman
With all the heat ombudsmen have been getting lately, we look back to 1986 when then-recently-departed Washington Post ombudsman Sam Zagoria discussed the pains of being the reader’s advocate. Their opinions can make them unpopular figures inside and outside the newsroom. But that may be the point. As he writes, “Ombudsmen are not meant to be loved.”