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
Critical Condition: Why Professional Criticism Matters in the Winter 2013 issue of Nieman Reports, examines how professional criticism can not only survive but thrive in the age of user reviews. As Nieman deputy curator James Geary points out in his introduction, “criticism’s condition is critical—to informing and inspiring the public and to keeping our cultural conversations alive.” Read more
Beth Macy, NF ’10, has won a Society of American Business Editors and Writers award for her three-part Roanoke Times series Picking Up the Pieces. Her reports examine how globalization has ravaged manufacturing in parts of Virginia and what communities are doing to try to recover. In the town of Martinsville alone, unemployment is estimated to be as high as 35 percent. Read more
Souad Mekhennet, NF ’13, reports on the state of reform in Bahrain two years after the Arab Spring: “Western politicians, the public, and political organizations were quick to take the side of those who went on the street and protested. Some of them genuinely wanted democracy, but many were actually protesting against corruption or for more rights and resources. And, anyway, not everyone who claimed to be protesting for democracy was talking about rights and values but about voting systems.” Read more
Three Nieman alumni have won George Polk Awards in Journalism for their work in 2012: Holly Williams, NF ’08, Hannah Allam, NF ’09, and Michael Kirk, NF ’80. Read more
Peter Wolodarski, NF ’09, has been named as the new editor-in-chief of Sweden’s largest morning newspaper, Dagens Nyheter (DN). He will assume his new role on March 1. Wolodarski has been working as the paper’s editorial page editor. He will continue to write a Sunday column for DN. Read more
