The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard is pleased to announce Pulitzer-winning journalist Jacqui Banaszynski as the new editor of Nieman Storyboard, the foundation’s online publication that promotes and highlights exceptional narrative journalism and explores the craft of nonfiction storytelling. She will begin on June 1, 2018.
Banaszynski is a faculty fellow at The Poynter Institute and a Knight Chair professor emerita at the Missouri School of Journalism. Her newspaper career has taken her to all seven continents, including three reporting trips to Antarctica. She has written about corruption and crime, beauty pageants and popes, AIDS and the Olympics, dogsled expeditions and refugee camps, labor strikes and political strife, traffic fatalities and family tragedies.
Commenting on her plans for Storyboard, Banaszynski said, “Nieman has been a touchstone for my work as a reporter, writer, editor and teacher. I look forward to hosting Storyboard, and building on its tradition as a creative and practical gathering place for today’s nonfiction storytellers. I hope to continue to expand its reach across subjects, platforms and voices, and to support an engaged community that teaches and learns from one another.”
Nieman Foundation curator Ann Marie Lipinski added, “We’re excited to welcome Jacqui to Nieman Storyboard and to benefit from all she has learned during a distinguished career as a writer and teacher of narrative journalism. She has the ability to both produce high-quality narrative work and show others how it is done, qualities at the core of Storyboard that will well serve our audience.”
While a reporter at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Banaszynski won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for an intimate series on a gay farm couple dying of AIDS, and was a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for her eyewitness account of the famine crisis in sub-Saharan Africa. In 1991, she covered the Kurdish refugees who fled Iraq after the first Gulf War. She won the Associated Press Sports Editors’ deadline award for coverage of Greco-Roman wrestling at the 1988 Olympics. Projects she has edited have won ASNE Best Newspaper Writing, Ernie Pyle Human Interest Writing and national business, social issues and investigative prizes.
Banaszynski now coaches reporters, writers and editors around the world. In 2008, she was named to the Society of Features Journalism Hall of Fame.
During the past two years, Storyboard editor Kari Howard expanded the site’s scope and reach, inviting new voices to contribute and introducing new features such as One Great Sentence and a weekly narrative news roundup. Howard recently joined the Reuters global enterprise team as storytelling editor in London.
Along with Nieman Storyboard’s regular sections such as Annotation Tuesday! and Notable Narratives, the site offers interviews with writers, coverage of literary conferences and events and articles on narrative technique from veteran storytellers.
The Nieman Foundation has a long history of supporting narrative journalism and published the popular Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide, which features more than 90 essays and short pieces from some of America’s top nonfiction writers and editors — including Banaszynski.
The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard educates leaders in journalism and elevates the standards of the profession through special programs that convene scholars and experts in all fields. More than 1,500 journalists from 97 countries have been awarded Nieman Fellowships since 1938. In addition to Nieman Storyboard, the foundation’s other initiatives include Nieman Reports, a website and quarterly print magazine that covers thought leadership in journalism, and Nieman Lab, a website that reports on the future of news, innovation and best practices in the digital media age.
