Specialized Fellowships

This year the Nieman Foundation offered fellowships in global health reporting, community journalism, business journalism and arts and culture reporting. 

Nieman specialized fellowships allow journalists to broaden their understanding of the subjects they cover, build relationships with leading scholars and researchers at Harvard and increase their knowledge and skills to enhance their post-Harvard reporting.

Fellows leave campus with a new level of expertise and authority, often becoming leaders in their fields after their fellowship year.

In the case of the Nieman Global Health Reporting Fellowships, the fellows also plan and carry out a four-month field project at the end of the academic year. These projects are supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which works collaboratively with the Nieman Foundation to bring in-depth international reporting to broad and diverse audiences.

The Nieman Fieldwork Model Gains Support

For the first time this year, the 2012 John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Latin American Nieman Fellows, Claudia Méndez Arriaza and Carlos Eduardo Huertas, will also conduct fieldwork projects at the end of their fellowship year. These two-month projects may involve in-depth coverage of a story, the creation of a new journalistic enterprise or research on policy and its impact.

Méndez Arriaza is an editor and staff writer for El Periódico and co-host of the television show “A las 8:45” at Canal Antigua in Guatemala. She has covered courts and worked as an investigative reporter, often focusing on
Claudia Méndez Arriaza


Carlos Eduardo Huertas
human rights crimes, the drug trade and state corruption stories. She received the National Prize of Journalism for her reports on the trial for the assassination of Monsignor Juan Gerardi. She also teaches at Universidad Rafael Landívar. At Harvard she is studying law and political science to understand the shape of the rule of law in emerging democracies as well as American literature and its links to Latin American culture.

Huertas, an investigations editor for Revista Semana and founder of Consejo de Redacción, a professional association that promotes investigative journalism in Colombia, is studying how to design a journalism center to produce transnational investigations about Latin America. Huertas has been with Semana for a decade and in that time, his team’s coverage of corruption, human rights violations and environmental issues has earned national and international awards. He was part of the team that won the King of Spain Award in 2008 and the Institute for Press and Society and Transparency International award for best investigative journalism in Latin America in 2007 and 2009.

Both Méndez Arriaza and Huertas participated in the November 2011 Nieman Conference Freedom of the Press in Latin America.

In announcing the grant that helped fund the new fieldwork projects, Knight Foundation journalism program associate Amy Starlight Lawrence said, “The new Knight Latin American Fellows will produce high-quality, relevant and credible journalism – the kind that is critical to sustaining democracy. We hope the field projects allow the fellows to put their learning into practice, giving them an opportunity for greater impact and engagement in their own communities.”

Learn about Nieman's other specialized fellowships: