The Nieman Foundation has selected three journalists as Visiting Fellows for the 2013 calendar year. Each will spend a period of time at Harvard University to work on a project designed to enhance journalism in some unique way. The 2013 visiting fellows are Hong Qu, a UX designer; Kate Smith, a lecturer in journalism at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland; and Daniel Eilemberg, the founder and editor-in-chief of Animal Político, a political website in Mexico.

• Hong Qu will work on developing a new mobile and open source application that will enable journalists and others to easily tune in to and draw meaning from any live-tweet event. At Harvard, he will collaborate with groups and individuals to brainstorm and gather feedback on the software’s design, usefulness and sustainability.
• Kate Smith will examine literary journalism in the war reporting of Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn to glean what lessons their writing can offer war correspondents today. While in the Cambridge area, she will conduct research using the Hemingway collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and the Gellhorn archive at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University
• Daniel Eilemberg, the founder and editor-in-chief of the Animal Político website, will use his time at Harvard to build the site into the leading digital editorial company in Mexico. While on campus, he hopes to work in partnership with others to conceptualize and build the platforms, teams and tools needed to expand his organization into a modern, digital newsroom, integrating the best technology and journalistic practices.

The Visiting Fellowship program at Nieman was established in 2012 to invite individuals with promising research proposals to Harvard to take advantage of the many resources on campus and at the Nieman Foundation. Those who are welcome to apply include publishers, programmers, Web designers, media analysts, academics, journalists and others interested in enhancing quality, building new business models or designing programs to improve journalism.

Learn more about Nieman’s inaugural Visiting Fellow, Paul Salopek, who spent several months at Harvard in the spring of 2012 preparing for a seven-year reporting trip in which he will walk around the world tracing the path of human migration. His Out of Eden Walk will cover more than 20,000 miles and bring him from East Africa to Tierra del Fuego by the end of the decade.