Lisa Mullins ’10
Mullins was for 14 years the anchor for the nationally broadcast radio newsmagazine “The World.” She has interviewed international leaders and covered news around the globe
My life in radio started the same year I learned of the Nieman Foundation. I was 18 and Louis Lyons was 80. I was a Simmons College intern at WGBH Radio and Louis was a commentator with a cane and a pipe, which he emptied by clanging it against the mic stand. My job included editing out the pipe clangs. "Who is he?" I asked the news director. "Louis Lyons," she said with reverence, "the former curator of the Nieman Foundation." I nodded and thought, "What's a Nieman and why was he curating it?"
About 25 years later, I sat with my new Nieman classmates in the same room where the Louis Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism is now presented. It was orientation week and the self-imposed pressure to find every academic gem in Harvard’s jewel box was suffocating.
Fiction writing instructor Rose Moss spoke to us. She talked about her upbringing as a white girl in apartheid South Africa. She showed with a crouch the constant look of caution she saw in people who had been beaten down. She alluded to her own painful past. Then she told us that previous Fellows who had witnessed atrocities or had been, themselves, persecuted seldom devoted their Nieman year to studying war or genocide. They chose poetry, music, and painting. How brave, I thought. They sought expression and release and it didn’t matter if they were good at any of it. The next week, I swapped a course in conflict analysis for one in choreography.
At my first class, we improvised dance movements. I felt limber and liberated. My crimson sundress billowed. Then, one of my classmates in sweats did something that defied gravity, and I felt humbled. Soon, I started to eye the exit. The gazelles did backward flips. I twirled. "Be brave," I thought. I summoned what Rose said and did, and dared myself to stay. I finished the class with the others, straightened my skirt, and left feeling humiliated—wait, is that the word? Yup! But happy, too.
Thoughts of planting my feet outside my professional and personal comfort zone had always been aspirational and fleeting. My path had been clear since I was a college intern and met Louis Lyons. Now, with the field of journalism in flux, my job has changed and the only comfort left is in finding the story and telling it. The tools are different and so are the platforms, deadlines, and demands of social media. The Nieman classes and seminars equipped me for the change. But the Nieman moment Rose inspired prepared me for the challenge. I’m happy to be humbled. Call it my own version of the backward flip.