Publications

Through its three publications — Nieman Lab, Nieman Reports and Nieman Storyboard — the Nieman Foundation reports regularly on the issues and developments most relevant to the global journalism community, from digital trends and social best practices to media partnerships and innovative storytelling.

The Nieman Foundation’s website additionally offers important information regarding Nieman Fellowships, foundation news and Nieman events including journalism conferences, seminars, shop talks and journalism award presentations.

Nieman Lab

Nieman Lab in 2016 continued to provide valuable and innovative coverage of the changing world of digital news to its audience around the globe. In the past 12 months, the Lab has published almost 800 articles by more than 120 writers.

Nieman Lab asked more than 100 of the smartest people in journalism and digital media for their 2017 predictions

Nieman Lab asked more than 100 of the smartest people in journalism and digital media for their 2017 predictions

The annual predictions package published last December was the biggest yet, bringing together a diverse group of more than 100 people to write about what the new year would bring. This year, the Lab is offering more media soothsaying with essays by journalists, technologists, academics, and publishers sharing ideas on everything from skepticism about data and the need for media gatekeepers to the reasons why U.S. reporters need to pay more attention to the flyover states.

The Lab covers a wide variety of topics, but a few themes arose this year — a number of them of great concern to the news business. The American newspaper industry’s decline appears to be accelerating, with print advertising declines reaching over 10 percent for the first time since 2010. Newspaper closings or consolidations in cities like Tampa, Pittsburgh, and San Jose seemed to portend further decline at metro papers. Digital natives like BuzzFeed and Fusion saw disappointing revenues and, in some cases, layoffs. Online, Facebook and Google grew ever more dominant, taking between 80 and 90 percent of all new digital advertising spending.

On more optimistic fronts, podcasting continued its remarkable growth, a trend the Lab covered both with its own stories and in the weekly podcasting column, Hot Pod, by Nicholas Quah. The shift from desktop to mobile has branched out in new directions, with wearable devices like the Apple Watch, audio-driven interfaces like the Amazon Echo, chat interfaces like Purple and Quartz’s iPhone app, and the year’s many virtual reality experiments. In a number of cities like Charlotte, Philadelphia, and Miami, new for-profit digital news models are finding their legs, if not quite replacing the work traditionally done by local dailies.

Other trends worth noting this year include the rise of disinformation; the accelerated decline of both print and local news, accompanied paradoxically by new local start-ups; the drive to develop post-mobile devices; early signs of broadcast disruption and growing emphasis on news video.

A graph that shows how the presidential election forecast model evolved between 5 p.m. and 11 p.m. on Nov. 8. 2016.

A graph that shows how the presidential election forecast model evolved between 5 p.m. and 11 p.m. on Nov. 8. 2016.

Of course, 2016 will be remembered most for the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president. The piece “The forces that drove this election’s media failure are likely to get worse,” published on the day after the election, critiquing both the mainstream media for the limits of coverage and Facebook for enabling the rise of fake news, became the third most popular story in Nieman Lab history.

The Nieman Lab team, led by director Joshua Benton, produces daily media coverage with deputy editor Laura Hazard Owen and staff writers Yossi Lichterman, and Shan Wang. Chicago-based writer Ricardo Bilton, also joined the Lab this past year from Digiday.

The Lab’s most important social outreach platform remains email, with the daily and weekly email newsletters reaching nearly 36,000 people. The Lab’s other social accounts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn continued to see steady growth in 2016, with the site’s articles and other work read more than 5 million times per year.

Nieman Reports

Highlights from Nieman Reports this year include two cover packages on campaign coverage, the first by Washington Post White House bureau chief Juliet Eilperin in the spring issue on how political reporters responded to the challenges of covering this year’s unprecedented presidential campaign and the second, a series of essays in the fall issue by journalists, historians, and academics, “Election ’16: Lessons for Journalism.” The articles explore the issues, challenges and opportunities created by the changed political climate — from newsroom diversity to fake news to community news outlets — and help point the way forward for journalism.

In the winter issue, our cover story examined how journalists are covering the transgender community in ways that are considerate of that community’s needs as well as those of readers, some of whom need basic concepts explained.

To celebrate the centennial of the Pulitzer Prize, the summer issue focused on the theme of the marquee event Nieman organized, “Power: Accountability and Abuse.” Julia Keller, NF ’98, penned the essay “A Century of Pulitzer Journalism Speaking Truth to Power,” while Michael Fitzgerald, NF ’11, highlighted forgotten Pulitzer winners worth remembering. Excerpts from the Pulitzer-winning works of Nieman Fellows were also featured.

Our stories were honored with several awards:

The Spanish Association of Science Communication translated our article “What Every Journalist Should Know About Science” into Spanish; the same article was also translated into Arabic by Alfaisal Scientific Magazine in Saudi Arabia. Nieman Reports also has an ongoing agreement with Al Jazeera to translate select articles into Arabic, for publication in Al Jazeera Journalism Review, which is distributed in newsrooms throughout the Middle East. (In other translation news, the Nieman nonfiction narrative guide, “Telling True Stories,” was published in simplified Chinese last year and is forthcoming in complex Chinese and Korean.)

pulitzer-thumbNieman Reports continues to gain new followers in the social sphere. A spike in Twitter traffic coincided with Nieman’s celebration of Nieman’s Pulitzer Prize centennial celebration on September 10-11, while engagement levels rose in January and November — for Twitter, especially — around the publication of election-related content.

The staff that produced Nieman Reports in 2016 were editor James Geary, deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation; senior editor Jan Gardner; researcher/reporter Jonathan Seitz; editorial assistant Eryn Carlson; and publisher Ann Marie Lipinski, curator of the Nieman Foundation.

Nieman Storyboard

Highlights from Nieman Storyboard this year include articles spotlighting great writing by Pulitzer winners, from Katherine Boo to Anthony Shadid to the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team, published in the run-up to Nieman’s marquee Pulitzer centennial event. Storyboard posted video from the celebration, including Robert Caro’s talk on covering power through the lens of the powerless, and on the Monday after the Pulitzer weekend, Storyboard editor Kari Howard hosted a gathering at Lippmann House where Pulitzer-winning Niemans talked about the reporting and writing involved in their honored work, including a “live” annotation of the lede of Madeleine Blais’ 1980 feature writing winner, “Zepp’s Last Stand.”

Photographer René Koster’s tall ship in Antarctica

Photographer René Koster’s tall ship in Antarctica

The way journalists tell stories is changing, and Storyboard is part of that new thinking. While the site remains committed to championing long-form narrative, it is also actively exploring emerging forms, including shorter features, ambitious documentariesimage-based storytellingvirtual reality and the new wave of Instagram and Twitter narratives. Storyboard is also covering narrative nonfiction as it seeks to address national issues, like the story about covering Black Lives Matter protests in Charlotte.

A new series is “Tomorrow’s Journalists Exploring the Masters of Today,” in which students at the Missouri School of Journalism talked to their journalism heroes about stories that moved them. Storyboard is actively looking to connect with the next generation of storytellers, and collaborations with j-schools, writing programs and universities are an effective way to reach this important demographic.

As 2017 draws near, Storyboard is gearing up to launch a new feature — “One Great Sentence,” which will spotlight a single beautifully crafted sentence from classics of narrative nonfiction and other genres — as well as a weekly newsletter, part of Storyboard’s ongoing effort to expand its readership and impact.

Author Susan Orlean,, right, in conversation with Kim Tingley.

Author Susan Orlean,, right, in conversation with Kim Tingley.

Going forward, the Storyboard plans to post more videos — such as the Nieman shop talk with author and staff writer for the New Yorker Susan Orlean, NF ’04 — as part of an ongoing effort to share Nieman content and events with wider audiences.

Storyboard is now publishing under capable and creative new leadership this year. Editor Kari Howard joined Nieman from the Los Angeles Times, where she had worked since 1992, serving for the past four years as editor of the Times’ signature narrative journalism feature Column One. Howard raised Column One’s profile online, where it was rechristened Great Reads, and wrote the weekly Great Reads newsletter, which reached 45,000 subscribers.

She helped to shape a portfolio of exceptional narrative journalism at the Times, including Pulitzer-winning stories such as Diana Marcum’s Los Angeles Times series on the California drought, which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing.

Prior to taking over Column One, Howard served for 15 years as the Times’ assistant foreign editor, assigning and editing stories from nearly 30 correspondents at the foreign staff’s peak. In her first years at the paper, she was a copy editor on the foreign desk and weekend foreign backfield/line editor. She additionally contributed a series of travel stories and has mentored young writers.