Dororthy Parvaz, the Al Jazeera journalist who was detained in Syria earlier this year while reporting, has been awarded the John Aubuchon Press Freedom Award for 2011. She won the international prize, as the judges decided she had demonstrated commitment to news reporting despite suffering bad treatment. Parvaz is a 2009 Nieman Fellow. Read more
Boston Globe reporter Jenifer B. McKim has won a 2011 Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism. She was honored for “People Need to Know What These Guys Have Done,’’ her portrait of a young woman, the sex trade from which she escaped, and her fight against her former tormenters. McKim is a 2008 Nieman Fellow. Mark Pothier, the editor on this story, is a 2001 Nieman Fellow. Read more
Richard Chacón, a 2005 Nieman Fellow and director of Massachusetts' Office for Refugees and Immigrants, has resigned for a fund-raising position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Read more
The plan was for Roanoke (Va.) Times reporter Beth Macy, NF ’10, to follow doctors on an aid trip to Haiti months after an earthquake struck. She was doing that when a cholera outbreak sparked riots across the country and the medical team had to be evacuated. The harrowing experience became part of “Life and Death in the Time of Cholera,” a winner of the Associated Press Managing Editors award for international perspective. Read more
Nieman Foundation curator Bob Giles retired at the end of June after 11 years on the job. During his tenure, he found new ways to strengthen the Nieman Fellowship program and expand the foundation’s critical role in discussions about the future of serious journalism. Giles recently reflected on his time at Harvard and began by describing what it has been like to lead the Nieman Foundation for more than a decade. Read more
Two Latin American journalists will receive Nieman Fellowships to help them discover new ways to inform and engage their communities and foster a free press in their own countries, thanks to a new grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to the Nieman Foundation. The funding expands the scope of the long-established Knight Latin American Nieman Fellowship by supporting new experimental fieldwork projects for the journalists at the end of the academic year, with a new grant of almost $200,000. Read more
