The Nieman Fellows participated in several specialized master classes in 2016. In digital storytelling, they learned about podcasting, social messaging apps and multimedia reporting with practitioners including Gabriel Dance, managing editor of The Marshall Project (now deputy investigations editor at The New York Times), Julie Shapiro, executive producer of the Radiotopia podcast network from PRX, and Stacy Martinet, chief marketing officer at Mashable. They also explored data visualization with Lee Glendinning, Jon Swaine and Oliver Laughland – the team behind the Guardian US’s The Counted project – and had a social media tune-up session with Sree Sreenivasan, the chief digital officer for New York City. 2016 Nieman Fellow Mónica Guzmán also shared tips on improving audience engagement, lessons learned from her own experience.

Brian Mandell, senior lecturer in public policy and director of the Harvard Kennedy School Negotiation Project, taught a negotiation workshop, and writer/photographer Neil Shea led an iPhone photography class. In December, Regina McCombs, senior editor for visual news at Minnesota Public Radio, led a video production workshop.

Fellows stay active both on and off campus during their Nieman year. Members of the class of 2016 traveled to New Hampshire to attend campaign rallies ahead of the N.H. primary in February. Much later in the year, fellows in the class of 2017 started a working group to discuss ways to fortify journalism following the U.S. presidential election in November. In between, along with classes, Nieman functions and soundings – private talks in which they explain why they do what they do in journalism – the fellows gave a number of lectures. A sampling:

• 2016 Nieman Fellow and photographer Andrea Bruce discussed her work in “Through the Lens: Iraq at War.”

• Bruce also spoke at the 2016 Power of Narrative Conference at Boston University, delivering a talk on “From Community Journalism to International Conflict: A Visual Perspective” and “The Creative Edge” with Nieman classmate Fungai Tichawangana and others. Tichawangana additionally spoke on the topic “The Power of Disruptive Narrative: A Close-Up Look.”

• 2016 Nieman Fellow Cansu Çamlibel, a Turkish journalist and political interviewer at Hürriyet, spoke about “The ‘New Turkey’ and Individual Freedoms: Is there Room for Coexistence?”

• 2016 Niemans Christa Case Bryant, former Jerusalem bureau chief for The Christian Science Monitor, and Naomi Darom, a writer at Musaf Haaretz, the weekend magazine for Haaretz newspaper in Israel, shared their perspectives on Israeli journalism on a panel that included Jodi Rudoren, deputy international editor and former Jerusalem Bureau Chief for The New York Times, and Liel Leibovitz, senior writer at Tablet Magazine

• 2016 Nieman Grzegorz Piechota, a former news editor of Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, published the INMA report “Evaluating Distributed Content in the News Media,” based on his Harvard research and inspired by his Nieman classmates’ questions on the future of news publishing and journalism in the era of digital platforms. He presented his findings at the INMA World News Media Congress in London and the Lviv Media Forum in Ukraine.

• Photographer and 2016 Nieman Fellow Anastasia Taylor-Lind and Alisa Sopova, Nieman’s first Ukrainian fellow from the class of 2017, discussed “Looking for Ladas in Ukraine: A Discussion on the Visual Representation of (the) Conflict” explaining their project to use postcards to humanize the victims of the Ukrainian conflict.

• The Harvard Ed Portal hosted “Refugee Crisis,” an exhibit of 2017 Nieman Fellow Maciek Nabrdalik’s photography. Maciek and his Nieman classmates Karin Pettersson, Georg Diez and Christian Feld participated in a panel discussion to open the show and discuss the many refugee issues in the news in Europe.

• 2017 Nieman Fellow Michelle Boorstein, a religion reporter for The Washington Post, spoke at two events at Harvard Divinity School in the fall semester: “A Reporter’s Dilemmas: What are the right words for a religiously changing world?” and the Symposium on Religious Literacy and Journalism, an event in which some of the nation’s leading journalists and scholars discussed the need for religious literacy in journalism in light of political and cultural upheavals. Also participating in the symposium were writer and journalism instructor Wendi C. Thomas, NF ’16, and journalist and poet Eliza Griswold, NF ’07.

• 2017 Nieman Fellow Robert Socha, deputy executive producer for two television programs at TVN, the leading broadcaster in Poland, spoke to students at Endicott College about his work.

Maya Baratz Jordan, most recently head of new products at Disney/ABC Television, experimented with new formats for nonfiction storytelling via text messaging and worked on plans to develop a product that offers an immersive experience and takes advantage of the strengths of the medium. Read her article The Medium is the (Text) Message in Nieman Reports.

David Barboza, a reporter for The New York Times who most recently served as Shanghai bureau chief, spent time developing new tools for investigative reporting in China, including a business and financial database of Chinese companies.

Bill Church, executive editor of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and southeast regional editor of GateHouse Media (now GateHouse’s senior vice president of news), explored the organizational behavior of small newsrooms and examined new models for adaptability and innovation. Read about his work to develop new ways to guide newsrooms toward reinvention.

Fatemah Farag, founder and CEO of Welad El Balad Media Services in Egypt, examined the relationship between community engagement and media production with the goal of defining models for business development and sustainability for alternative media in Egypt and the Middle East.

Walter Frick, a senior associate editor at Harvard Business Review, researched how machine learning can help news organizations better organize background information and archive material in order to provide context for journalists and readers whenever news breaks.

Paul McNally, a radio journalist for Wits Journalism and director of The Citizen Justice Network in South Africa, worked on developing an online tool to organize citizen journalism into a network for investigative reporting.

An Xiao Mina, director of product at Meedan, examined how language barriers affect global coverage. She conducted a case study around a specific news event to measure the impact of translations and annotations of social media on diversifying reportage. Read her predictions for Nieman Lab in “2017 is for the Attention Innovators.”

Tara Pixley, a freelance photojournalist, identified structural challenges to finding and accessing images from photojournalists outside the Western media network. She spent time creating a platform to showcase quality global photojournalism and provide news photo editors with diverse, fresh perspectives that depict non-Western people and places.

Stories from Nieman Fellows about why they do what they do, shared with their Nieman classmates:

• Democracy at the Dinner Table
  By Andrea Bruce, NF ’16I often feel my job is to trick people into paying attention to the world around them. Beauty, light, and composition are my tools to draw one’s eye into the events and issues many would rather avoid.Read more

• Make the News a Conversation
  By Mónica Guzmán, NF ’16The first time I invited my readers to meet up at a coffee shop, one person came. His name was Jimmy. He was a fan of my geeky news and conversation blog at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer…Read more

• An AP Correspondent Examines Why Foreign News Matters
  By Todd Pitman, NF ’16When Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest typhoons ever recorded, slammed into the Philippines in 2013, I rushed there from Bangkok to report on it with my colleagues from The Associated Press.Read more

• Using Network News to Tell Small Stories with Big Impacts
  By Wonbo Woo, NF ’16When I started out in network news, I was all about the big, lead story. There’s a sense in most newsrooms that those are the ones that are the most important, the most meaningful.Read more