2008 Nieman Seminar for Narrative Editors

Faculty

This year’s faculty includes:

Alicia Anstead has been an arts and culture editor, reporter, and educator for the last 20 years. She edits the national magazine Inside Arts, published by the Association of Performing Arts Presenters in Washington, D.C., and is senior contributor to The Bangor Daily News in Maine. She teaches arts reporting at Harvard Extension, and is a 2008 Nieman Foundation fellow. She is a fellow of both the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia and the NEA Cultural Editor Program at Duke University.

Jacqui Banaszynski holds the Knight Chair in Editing at the Missouri School of Journalism and is an editing fellow at the Poynter Institute. She worked in newsrooms for more than 30 years, most recently as projects editor at The Seattle Times. While at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, she won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing and the SPJ Distinguished Service Award for “AIDS in the Heartland,” an intimate account of the death of a gay farm couple. She leads workshops for journalists around the world and has served four times as a Pulitzer juror.

Joshua Benton is editor of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, an effort to help the news industry adjust to the Internet era — from reporting to newsroom culture to business models. Before spending a year at Harvard as a 2008 Nieman Fellow, he spent 10 years in newspapers, most recently at The Dallas Morning News. His reports on cheating on standardized tests in the Texas public schools led to the permanent shutdown of a school district, the firing of a state testing director, the disciplining of dozens of principals and teachers, and various state reforms. He has won five first-place National Awards for Education Reporting and has reported from 10 overseas countries. He has been blogging (www.crabwalk.com) since well before blogging was cool.

Clark Boyd covers technology and science for The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, Public Radio International, and WGBH Boston. Based in Boston, he spends much time on the road seeking out global technology stories that focus less on gadgets and gizmos than on the people who shape, and are being shaped by those gadgets and gizmos. With The World for more than a decade, Boyd took over the technology desk in 2003. He also edits, hosts and produces the weekly “Technology Podcast,” one of the most popular technology podcasts on iTunes. Clark was a 2007 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Blake Eskin is the Web editor of The New Yorker. He was the founding editor of the Nextbook Web site, and, before that, worked at the Council on Foreign Relations and The Forward. His book, A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski, was a 2002 New York Times Notable Book. He has written for such publications as The New York Times, Newsday, The Washington Post Magazine, as well as for public radio.

Constance Hale is director of the Nieman Foundation’s narrative program and a writing coach for Nieman Fellows. She has worked as a reporter and editor at The Oakland Tribune, The San Francisco Examiner, Wired, and Health, and her freelance writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian, The Atlantic Monthly, and National Geographic Adventure. Hale edits books for Harvard Business School Press and for private clients ranging from IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti to bestseller Po Bronson. Her own books, Sin and Syntax and Wired Style, led one reviewer to describe her as “‘Marian the Librarian’ on a Harley, or E.B. White on acid.”

Nina Martin has been an editor and writer for 25 years. A graduate of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, she spent her early career at newspapers like The International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, and The San Francisco Examiner. She is currently articles editor at San Francisco magazine, where she has also served as executive editor and senior editor. She was the founding editor of BabyCenter magazine and a senior editor at Health. Her writing has appeared in Elle, O, and many other magazines, and she was nominated for a National Magazine Award in the public interest category in 2005 for “Innocence Lost,” her report on wrongful convictions in California.

Adam Moss took up his post as editor-in-chief of New York magazine in March 2004. Prior to that, Moss worked for over a decade at The New York Times — as editor of The New York Times Magazine and then as assistant managing editor overseeing Culture and Style, the Magazine, and Book Review. During his tenure, New York has won eight National Magazine Awards; nymag.com, relaunched in 2007 under Moss’s watch, has twice won the MPA’s Magazine Website of the Year in its category. Before joining The Times, he was the founding editor of 7 Days, a weekly New York publication that won a 1990 National Magazine Award for general excellence.

David Talbot is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Salon. He has been hailed as a “pioneer of online journalism” by The New York Times and as one of the “50 people who matter the most in the new media” by Newsweek. Talbot’s 2007 book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years was a New York Times bestseller, and he is co-author of Burning Desires and Creative Differences. Talbot was a senior editor of Mother Jones and the editor of The San Francisco Examiner’s Sunday magazine, Image. Talbot's articles have appeared in Time, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Playboy. He recently co-founded the Talbot Players, a media company that will produce books, documentaries, films, and Web specials.

Stuart Warner is the writing coach and projects editor at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland. He was the lead writer on “The Goodyear War,” the 20,000-word centerpiece of the Akron Beacon Journal’s 1987 Pulitzer-winning coverage of the attempted takeover of Goodyear Tire and Rubber. He supervised the 1994 Pulitzer Gold Medal–winning project “A Question of Color” and edited columns by Connie Schultz that won the 2005 Pulitzer for commentary. Warner has edited stories that have garnered more than 45 national prizes, including the Silver Gavel, the Dart, and Columbia’s Let’s Do It Better Award. Warner spent 29 years at Knight-Ridder papers before arriving at The Plain Dealer in 1999.