The explosions at the Boston Marathon made front-page news around the world, with Líberation in Paris, El País in Madrid, and The Jerusalem Post in Israel carrying coverage from 2013 Nieman Fellows Ludovic Blecher, Borja Echevarria, and Yaakov Katz, respectively. Read more
Anthony Lewis, a former New York Times reporter and columnist, author, and longtime advocate for free speech and justice, has died at the age of 85. A Nieman Fellow in the class of 1957, Lewis was a constitutional law expert whose groundbreaking coverage of the Supreme Court changed the way complex legal matters are reported in the United States. Read more
New York Times reporter Sam Dolnick has won the 2012 Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism for his three-part series Unlocked: Inside New Jersey’s Halfway Houses.
During an exhaustive 10-month investigation of New Jersey’s privately run halfway houses, Dolnick discovered a broken and horribly flawed correctional system in which gang activity, drug use, sexual assaults and other violent behavior were commonplace and where lax security led to hundreds of annual escapes. While at large, some fugitives committed violent crimes, including murder, yet the state failed to punish the halfway house operators responsible for the runaways. Read more
French documentary filmmakers Florence Martin-Kessler, NF ’11, and Anne Poiret have spent the last few years chronicling South Sudan’s rocky road to independence and the many challenges along the way. Catch a sneak preview of their feature-length documentary “State Builders” in the New York Times Op-Doc section and learn “How to Build a Country From Scratch.” State Builders will air later this year on the European cultural television channel ARTE. Read more
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Stanley Karnow, a 1958 Nieman Fellow known for his exhaustive and insightful coverage of Southeast Asia, has died at the age of 87. A 1947 graduate of Harvard University, Karnow began his career as a Paris correspondent for Time magazine in the 1950s, reporting on events in Western Europe and North Africa. Read more
Larry L. King, NF ’70, died on December 20 at the age of 83. A native of Texas and a prolific journalist and author, King was perhaps best known as playwright of “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” based on an article he wrote for Playboy magazine. Read more
James R. Whelan, the founding editor and publisher of The Washington Times, the newspaper established in 1982 by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his South Korea-based Unification Church, died on Saturday at his home in Miami. Mr. Whelan was ousted from the newspaper after just two years, saying it had become what its detractors had always said it was, “a Moonie newspaper.” He was a 1967 Nieman Fellow. Read more
Three current Nieman Fellows have won journalism awards this fall for work done online and on air. Homicide Watch D.C., co-founded by Nieman Fellow Laura Amico and her husband Chris, took home the Knight Award for Public Service at the Online News Association’s annual conference in San Francisco. The couple received a standing ovation when the award was announced, a hard-earned reward after running the website out of their home for two years and struggling for funding. Accepting the award, Laura said “We mark every death, we remember every victim and we follow every case.” Chris noted, “For everyone who is on their own, building a business from the ground up, this one’s for you.” Read more
How do you pay for important journalism in an era of diminishing funding and shrinking budgets? Ask 2013 Nieman-Berkman Fellow Laura Amico and her husband Chris, the founders of Homicide Watch D.C. who have successfully turned to Kickstarter to back their work. Read more
Mike McGrady, a prizewinning reporter for Newsday who to his chagrin was best known as the mastermind of one of the juiciest literary hoaxes in America died on May 13 at 78. He was a 1969 Nieman Fellow. Read more
