Anthony Lewis, a former New York Times reporter and columnist, author, and longtime advocate for free speech and justice, has died at the age of 85. A Nieman Fellow in the class of 1957, Lewis was a constitutional law expert whose groundbreaking coverage of the Supreme Court changed the way complex legal matters are reported in the United States. Read more
New York Times reporter Sam Dolnick has won the 2012 Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism for his three-part series Unlocked: Inside New Jersey’s Halfway Houses.
During an exhaustive 10-month investigation of New Jersey’s privately run halfway houses, Dolnick discovered a broken and horribly flawed correctional system in which gang activity, drug use, sexual assaults and other violent behavior were commonplace and where lax security led to hundreds of annual escapes. While at large, some fugitives committed violent crimes, including murder, yet the state failed to punish the halfway house operators responsible for the runaways. Read more
Grady Clay, NF ’49, a journalist and a leading national authority on urban design who wrote for The Courier-Journal and edited Landscape Architecture Quarterly, died Sunday, March 17, at 96. Architect and friend Steve Wiser called Clay “one of the nation’s leading urban design thinkers.” Read more
Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen, a 2003 Nieman Fellow, has won the Batten Medal for individual achievement in public-service journalism from the American Society of News Editors. Cullen, who also received the award in 2008, is the only journalist to have won the Batten twice. Read more
Longtime Washington Post reporter and Nieman Watchdog Project founder Murrey Marder died on March 11, 2013, at the age of 93. A tireless crusader for watchdog and accountability journalism, he retired as a diplomatic correspondent for the Post in 1985 after reporting there for nearly four decades. During his long and storied career, he covered topics ranging from the Alger Hiss trial the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and was perhaps best known for challenging Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist investigations in the 1950’s. In 1957, Marder opened the Post’s London bureau, the first of the Washington Post Foreign Service. Marder was a Nieman Fellow in the class of 1950 and used his life savings to fund the Nieman Watchdog Project at Harvard. Read more
Journalist Dorothy Parvaz, a 2009 Nieman Fellow who was jailed and interrogated for several weeks in 2011 while attempting to cover the civil war in Syria, will receive the McGill Medal for Journalistic Courage. A reporter for Al Jazeera’s English channel in Qatar, she was detained and jailed when she entered Syria in April 2011. Authorities there held for three days then deported to Iran, where she was held and interrogated for more than two weeks before being sent back to Qatar. Read more
Robert A. Caro, NF ’66, has won a National Book Critics Circle Award for The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson the fourth installment of his widely acclaimed biography of the 36th president of the United States. Earlier volumes of Caro’s biography of Johnson have won top literary and journalism awards including two Pulitzer Prizes, two previous National Book Critics Circle Awards, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the National Book Award. Read more
The Chicago Tribune has won the Nieman Foundation’s 2012 Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers for “Playing with Fire.” The six-part series revealed how the chemical and tobacco industries for years misled the public with deceptive campaigns that promoted the use of toxic flame-retardant chemicals that don’t work and pose serious health risks to consumers. Read more
