2014 Annual Report

The Nieman Fellows in 2014 participated in a heady mix of Harvard classes, Nieman seminars and shop talks with leading journalists and scholars, campus events, and writing and public speaking classes designed exclusively for them.

Nonfiction writing was taught in the spring by Paige Williams, NF ’97, and in the fall by Steve Almond. Fiction was taught by Anne Bernays. Holly Weeks, adjunct lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, taught public speaking.

The fellows moderated many of the official talks at Lippmann House and arranged more informal talks with visiting journalists and innovators. On campus and in the community, they shared their expertise in talks on a wide range of topics, in sessions with aspiring journalists at The Harvard Crimson, and with participants at the Georges Conference for student journalism.

In the fall, the Nieman Foundation hosted an “Ignite” event for other fellows of Harvard and MIT. Short presentations by representatives from each of the local fellowship programs were made in a quick round of talks designed to offer insight into the many ways fellows are taking advantage of their time on campus.

Also in the fall, 2014 Visiting Nieman Fellow David Smydra, a strategic partner manager for news at Google, hosted the Nieman class of 2015 at Google’s offices in Cambridge and invited a group from the class to give talks about their journalistic priorities.

The 2013 and 2014 fellows were involved in many different projects throughout the year, some of which you can learn about in The Year in Review. Included below is a small snapshot of some of those activities:

• 2014 Nieman-Berkman Fellow Jeffrey R. Young, an editor and writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, presented his Berkman project “Pop-Up Learning: The Future of MOOCs and Online Education” in April.
• 2014 Nieman-Berkman and former BBC news senior producer Hasit Shah presented his project “Cheap smartphones, digital news and the world’s biggest election” in May.
• NPR’s Alison MacAdam and Dina Temple-Raston, both 2014 fellows, participated in a National Public Radio Career Roundtable at Harvard’s Institute of Politics.
• 2014 Nieman Fellows Hasit Shah and Ravi Nessman, along with New Yorker editor Jonathan Shainin, discussed foreign correspondence in South Asia in April at Harvard’s South Asia Institute.
• In the spring, 2014 Reynold Community Journalism Fellow Issac Bailey, metro columnist and senior writer for The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and Nieman classmate Tammerlin Drummond, metro columnist for the Oakland Tribune/Bay Area News Group led a session for the class on covering race in America. Following events in Ferguson and in the no-indictment ruling in the chokehold death of Eric Garner in New York, the 2015 fellows also scheduled a session to discuss race and reporting in the fall.
• Nieman Lab staff writer Justin Ellis additionally wrote an opinion piece “Ferguson yet another example of how America fails minorities” for The Boston Globe and hosted a global discussion about Ferguson on the BBC World Service.
• 2014 fellow Cristian Lupsa, editor of the Romanian magazine Decât o Revista, was the driving force behind The Power of Storytelling, an international narrative conference held in Bucharest, Romania, in October 2014. Classmates Hasit Shah, Alison MacAdam and Wendell Steavenson attended, hosted by Cristian and affiliate Lavinia Gliga.
• Dina Temple-Raston, Wendell Steavenson and Sangar Rahimi spoke about “Covering Terrorism and Revolution, from Afghanistan to the Middle East to Washington” at the annual Harvard Club dinner in Boston, with Nieman deputy curator James Geary moderating.
• 2014 Reynold Business Journalism Fellow and Wall Street Journal reporter Rachel Emma Silverman spoke at the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas, in March on workplace design and reducing office distraction. She also presented her final design for a Harvard class on library design – a “toy library” for children. Rachel along with classmates Jeffrey R. Young, Susie Banikarim and Hasit Shah are already planning SXSW sessions for next spring.
• With feedback from his Nieman classmates, 2014 Nieman Fellow Tim Rogers launched a new version of his Nicaragua Dispatch site featuring curated news as well as a companion sandbox “community dispatch” site.
• 2014 fellow Leslie Hook of the Financial Times was chosen as a finalist (highly commended citation) for “Specialist Journalist of the Year” in The Press Awards in Britain.
• South African photographer and 2014 fellow Greg Marinovich and his wife Leonie arranged a photographic expedition of iconic Americana along Massachusetts’s Route 1 for 2014 classmates.
• 2014 Nieman Affiliate Leonie Marinovich also led a team of Nieman affiliates in making made a film about the life of affiliates, which was shown during the class of 2015 orientation.
• Nieman Affiliate Alexander Robinson developed a tutorial on software development and product design as a follow-up to the design thinking master class with Srikant Datar in the spring.
• Led by Cristian Lupsa, the 2014 fellows gathered at the end of their Nieman year to share their plans for the future and ways they could spur more innovation, introduce find new and better ways to tell stories and improve management structures in their newsrooms.
• 2014 fellow Laura-Julie Perreault prepared a web version of the story she wrote about her Nieman year and Harvard – “Une année à Harvard” – for her iPad-based newspaper La Presse in Montreal.

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  The 2014 fellows participated in a photography workshop taught by 2010 Nieman Gary Knight, co-founder of the VII Photo Agency. The 2014 and 2015 fellows took part in intensive video training workshops with Regina McCombs, senior editor for visual news at Minnesota Public Radio and adjunct faculty at The Poynter Institute.

• In early September, 2015 Nieman Fellow Maggie Koerth-Baker, columnist or the New York Times Magazine and science editor at BoingBoing, interviewed Harvard School of Public Health Dean Julio Frenk in a ceremony announcing a $350 million gift to the school, the largest in Harvard’s history.
• Maggie Koerth-Baker also was a panelist discussing “Ebola: An Interdisciplinary Perspective,” organized by the Committee on African Studies, and hosted a “Reporting on Ebola” session at Lippmann House with 2011 Nieman Global Health Fellow Helen Branswell, a medical reporter for The Canadian Press .
• In September 2015 Nieman-Berkman Fellow Miguel Paz participated in a “Hangout” with Giannina Segnini, NF ’02, and other journalists discussing the networks of power and influence in Colombia (in Spanish). Miguel also spoke on an ONA conference panel about “Structured Journalism” with Politifact’s Bill Adair, 2013 Nieman-Berkman Fellow Laura Amico, now with The Boston Globe, and Reg Chua of Reuters/Connected China. Also participating at ONA 2014 in Chicago were Nieman Lab writer Justin Ellis (moderator: Digital Diversity: Successes, Failures and Why It Matters) and incoming Visiting Nieman Fellow Melody Joy Kramer, a digital strategist and editor at NPR (Read This First: Using Analytics to Improve Readership).
• Nieman curator Ann Marie Lipinski moderated an ONA keynote discussion on The New York Times Innovation Report, spoke at the “Lady Leadership Lightning Talks” panel and hosted a gathering of  Nieman Fellows from eight different classes who were attending the ONA conference.

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  2015 Niemans Alicia Stewart, Wahyu Dhyatmika, Miguel Paz and Gabe Bullard presented talks at the Google Media Summit in Boston in October, along with Nieman alumni Joshua Benton, David Skok and David Abel.

• In November, Alicia Stewart and her 2015 Nieman classmates Dawn Turner Trice and Gabe Bullard addressed Roxbury Community College’s journalism program, discussing “Behind The Lens: Who Does The News Speak For?”
• 2015 fellow Laurie Penny discussed her new book “Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution” at a reading at the Harvard Bookstore. Laurie was also named one of the winners of Red magazine’s Women of the Year Awards, which recognize “The women shaping your world.”
• 2015 Fellows Gabe Bullard, Alicia Stewart, Wahyu Dhyatmika, Celeste LeCompte and Luo Jieqi mentored high school students interested in journalism at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School.

Fellows spent time teaching new skills to classmates, including these sessions:

• Master class on independent digital journalism taught by 2014 Nieman Fellows Tim Rogers, founder of the Nicaragua Dispatch, and Nini Cabrero, new media editor of the Sun.Star group of community newspapers in the Philippines, along with Joshua Benton, NF ’08, and director of the Nieman Journalism Lab
• Master class in audio storytelling taught by 2014 Nieman Fellows Alison MacAdam, senior editor of NPR’s All Thing Considered, Dina Temple-Raston, NPR counterterrorism correspondent, and NPR reporter Chris Arnold, NF ’13, who covers the economy and housing (spring semester).

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  Chris Arnold participated in a second audio master class in the fall with 2015 fellows Gabe Bullard, director of news and editorial strategy at the public radio station WFPL News in Louisville, Kentucky, and Kitty Eisele, supervising senior editor at NPR’s Morning Edition.

• 2015 fellow Nabil Wakim, digital editor-in-chief and online managing editor of Le Monde in Paris, and Nieman-Berkman Fellow Miguel Paz, founder and CEO of Poderopedia.org, hosted a brainstorming session around revitalizing newsrooms in a changing digital landscape.