Joseph Mohbat, an Associated Press reporter turned lawyer and activist, died on August 10 of cancer at age 73. During the 60s, Mohbat covered national politics for the AP, including Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, and was a member of the team that won the 1968 Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism for a series on ways the federal government wasted taxpayer money. He was a 1967 Nieman Fellow. Read more
Cynthia Tucker, one of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s highest-profile columnists for more than 20 years, is leaving the AJC to become a visiting professor at the University of Georgia’s journalism school. Tucker, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007, is a 1989 Nieman Fellow. Read more
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
A.C. Thompson, a staff reporter for ProPublica whose work frequently exposes social injustice and the abuse of power, is winner of the 2011 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence. The Nieman Foundation will present the award at Boston University on October 4, 2011, during a ceremony co-hosted by BU’s College of Communication. Read more
Alabama author and prize-winning journalist Wayne Greenhaw, a 1973 Nieman Fellow, died May 30 following complications from open-heart surgery. Mr. Greenhaw wrote 22 books. His latest, "Fighting the Devil in Dixie," deals with civil rights activists confronting the Ku Klux Klan from the 1950s through the mid-1980s and was published in early January. He was 72. Read more
