1/ To celebrate @niemanfdn’s 80th anniversary year, we asked our alumni for examples of journalism that influenced them, their beat, their country or their culture. We’ll soon be publishing 80 answers @NiemanReports. And they’re spectacular.
#journalismthatchangedme
#journalismthatchangedme
2/ Among the joys of reading the accounts are vivid descriptions of where journalists were when they discovered the work that changed them. So much media is disposable, designed to last until the next breaking news alert. But these encounters had a rare indelible quality.
3/ @ajmacadam was 23, driving, when “The Vietnam Tapes of Lance Corporal Michael A. Baronowski” came on the radio. “I still remember where I was when I heard this story. It was night. I was driving alone—the best time to listen to the radio....This piece had it all.”
4/ @GeorgDiez1: “I was sitting in a smelly hotel room somewhere in Vietnam, it was the early 90s...I was lonely, I wasn’t happy. And I read Michael Herr’s Dispatches...What remained with me was the sense that you could build whole worlds from paper and words.”
5/ @NinaBernstein1 on @Roy_Gutman’s bombshell report of Serbian-run concentration camps. “I was a reporter for New York Newsday, and I remember striding across Midtown Manhattan to the newsroom clutching the paper, galvanized by the explosive headline—The Death Camps of Bosnia.”
6/ @ChristophWeyant: “I was a teenager prowling around the back of a dusty used bookstore searching for cartoons. Sandwiched in the art section were 2 small shelves...I stumbled upon a small collection of Oliphant’s work covering the Reagan administration. I fell in love.”
7/ @PulitzerPrizes winner Alex S. Jones on hearing Tom Wolfe: “I was in college and a guy I had never heard of..was coming to speak. I was mildly interested...and almost without thinking I showed up to hear what he had to say. And my life as a journalist has never been the same.”
8/ Some stories speak to total transformation, as if by reading a book or viewing a documentary a threshold was crossed from one life into another. Anita Harris after seeing Edward Murrow’s legendary documentary Harvest of Shame: “That night, I resolved to become a journalist.”
9/ “Growing up in Nepal under the autocratic monarchy I did not know that journalists could tell stories about underdogs,” writes @ShresthaSubina. Then, while studying in India, she reads Palagummi Sainath’s “Everybody Loves a Good Drought” and her world shifts...
10/ “I had never seen a journalist with such passion for finding stories of the people who had been systematically silenced. I had never seen such stories reported from Nepal. I realized that I did not even know my country.”
11/ For pioneering editor Tim Giago, reading books by Cahuilla Indian writer Rupert Costo “made me understand more deeply that we, the Indian People, had to write our own books about ourselves & cultures in order to bring out those parts of American history that were suppressed.”
12/ As a guide to navigating her own journalism in that city, @lollybowean returns “over and over” to a @nytimes story by @Isabelwilkerson on a boy from the South Side of Chicago. It was headlined “First Born, Fast Grown: The Manful Life of Nicholas, 10”...
13/ “I read and reread Wilkerson’s profile repeatedly not only because it is a great blueprint. It reminds me why I do this work: to amplify the voices of the unheard and to help communities better understand each other.”
14/ If you know @SincerelyJenee, you love that she doesn’t ask for permission, but in a way that’s what @dreamhampton gave her as a young writer. “I can’t remember the very first article I read of hers. But she’s among the journalists who kicked in the door for the rest of us...”
16/ @nwquah read “What a Fraternity Hazing Death Revealed About the Painful Search for an Asian-American Identity” in the NYT and said it “broke me wide open...The article gave voice to an American narrative that I, for the very first time, identified with.”
17/ @TheMaryMeehan was 13 when Seattle Slew won the Kentucky Derby & “inhaled” coverage “as a rare celebration of my community.” “Then, as now, national coverage of Kentucky centered on hillbillies & Colonel Sanders..(This) inspired me to a career of capturing moments of my own.”
18/ There’s so much more here and I look forward to @NiemanReports posting the complete story. Small jewels like @mboorstein recalling David Finkel’s line from Next of Kin: “Her hair was brushed. Her hands were fists. She wore a dress.”
19/ Or @JassimA’s meditation on “Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness,” VR that centers on John Hull’s audio diaries as he recounts his gradual loss of sight. “Its emphasis on the spoken word reminded me what role our imagination plays in evocative storytelling.”
20/ Or two reactions to reading Joan Didion for the first time. @comradewong on her essays: “They changed the way I thought about journalism.”
Jo Thomas on Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “A door opened for me.”
Jo Thomas on Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “A door opened for me.”
21/ It’s been a hard year for journalism and you don’t need me to recount the reasons why. But reading these origin stories is a reminder that excellence is a catalytic force for good. Keep on, journalists. Somewhere, future journalists are watching.
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