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The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University is the primary journalism institution at
Harvard. It was founded in February 1938 as the result of a $1.4 million bequest by Agnes Wahl Nieman, the widow of
Lucius W. Nieman, founder of ''
The Milwaukee Journal
The ''Milwaukee Journal Sentinel'' is a daily morning broadsheet printed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where it is the primary newspaper. It is also the largest newspaper in the state of Wisconsin, where it is widely distributed. It is currently o ...
''. Scholarships were established for journalists with at least three years' experience to go back to college to advance their work. She stated the goal was "to promote and elevate the standards of journalism in the United States and educate persons deemed specially qualified for journalism." It is based at
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 – December 14, 1974) was an American writer, reporter and political commentator. With a career spanning 60 years, he is famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War, coining the t ...
House in
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Greater Boston, Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 United States Census, 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most ...
.
Programs
The Nieman Foundation is best known as home to the
Nieman Fellows, a group of journalists from around the world who come to Harvard for a year of study. Many noted journalists, and from 1959, also photojournalists, have been Nieman Fellows, including
John Carroll,
Dexter Filkins
Dexter Price Filkins (born May 24, 1961) is an American journalist known primarily for his coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for '' The New York Times''. He was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for his dispatches from Afghanis ...
,
Susan Orlean,
Robert Caro
Robert Allan Caro (born October 30, 1935) is an American journalist and author known for his biographies of United States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson.
After working for many years as a reporter, Caro wrote '' The Power ...
,
Hodding Carter
William Hodding Carter, II (February 3, 1907 – April 4, 1972), was a Southern U.S. progressive journalist and author. Among other distinctions in his career, Carter was a Nieman Fellow and Pulitzer Prize winner. He died in Greenville, Mississ ...
,
Michael Kirk,
Alex Jones
Alexander Emerick Jones (born February 11, 1974) is an American far-right and alt-right radio show host and prominent conspiracy theorist. He hosts ''The Alex Jones Show'' from Austin, Texas, which the Genesis Communications Network broadcast ...
,
Anthony Lewis,
Robert Maynard
Robert Maynard (19 September 1684 – 4 January 1751) was a British lieutenant, and later captain, in the Royal Navy. Little is known about Maynard's early life, other than he was born in England in 1684 and then later joined the English Navy ...
,
Allister Sparks,
Stanley Forman,
Hedrick Smith,
Lucia Annunziata
Lucia Annunziata (Sarno, 8 August 1950) is an Italian journalist.
Career
Born in Sarno (in the Salerno province), at the age of 13 she moved to Salerno, where she attended high school and university, obtaining a degree in History and Philosoph ...
,
Jonathan Yardley
Jonathan Yardley (born October 27, 1939) was the book critic at ''The Washington Post'' from 1981 to December 2014, and held the same post from 1978 to 1981 at the ''Washington Star''. In 1981, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Back ...
,
Philip Meyer,
Howard Sochurek
Howard Sochurek (27 November 1924 – 25 April 1994) was an American photojournalist.
Life and career
Howard J. Sochurek was born in 1924 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He graduated from Princeton University in 1942 then enlisted on 1 December that ye ...
and
Huy Duc. It is considered the most prestigious fellowship program for journalists; Nieman Fellows have collectively won 101
Pulitzer Prizes
The Pulitzer Prize () is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature, and musical composition within the United States. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made ...
.
The foundation is also the home of ''Nieman Reports'', a quarterly journal on journalism issues. The journal has been in publication for more than 60 years. For several years, ending in 2009, the foundation sponsored the annual Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, the largest conference of its kind, which attracted hundreds of writers, filmmakers, and broadcasters to Boston. The narrative program now consists of a writing seminar for Fellows, and a public website, Nieman Storyboard, which covers storytelling across media. In 2004, the Foundation launched Nieman Watchdog, a website intended to encourage more aggressive questioning of the powerful by news organizations. In 2008, the foundation created the Nieman Journalism Lab, an effort to investigate future models that could support quality journalism.
Awards
Several prestigious literary or journalism awards are based at the Nieman Foundation. They include three given in connection with the
Columbia University School of Journalism
The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is located in Pulitzer Hall on the university's Morningside Heights campus in New York City.
Founded in 1912 by Joseph Pulitzer, Columbia Journalism School is one of the oldest journalism sc ...
:
* The
J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize ($10,000, "recognizes superb examples of nonfiction writing that exemplify literary grace, a commitment to serious research and social concern")
* The
Mark Lynton History Prize ($10,000, awarded to the "book-length work of history, on any subject, that best combines intellectual or scholarly distinction with felicity of expression")
* The
J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award ($30,000, "given annually to aid in the completion of a significant work of nonfiction")
Other awards based at Nieman include:
* The
Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Reporting
The Worth Bingham Prize, also referred to as the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Reporting, is an annual journalism award which honors: "newspaper or magazine investigative reporting of stories of national significance where the public inter ...
($20,000, "honors investigative reporting of stories of national significance where the public interest is being ill-served")
* The
I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence ("to a journalist whose work captures the spirit of independence, integrity, courage, and indefatigability that characterized ''
I. F. Stone's Weekly''")
* The
Louis Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism ("recognizes displays of conscience and integrity by individuals, groups or institutions in communications")
* The
Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers ($10,000, "recognizes fairness in newspaper reporting")
Curators
The leader of the Nieman Foundation is known as its "curator" — a holdover from a brief moment after Agnes Wahl Nieman's death when her gift was to be used to build a
microfilm
Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the original document size. F ...
library of quality journalism. The foundation has appointed eight curators:
*
Archibald MacLeish, 1938–1939
*
Louis M. Lyons
Louis Martin Lyons (September 1, 1897 – April 11, 1982) was an American journalist in Massachusetts and curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Biography
Lyons was born in Boston in 1897 and was a graduate of Mass ...
(
Nieman Fellow class of 1939), 1939–1964
*
Dwight E. Sargent (
Nieman Fellow class of 1951), 1964–1972
*
James C. Thomson Jr.
James Claude "Jim" Thomson Jr. (b. Princeton, New Jersey, September 14, 1931 d. August 11, 2002) was an American historian and journalist who served in the government, taught at Harvard and Boston Universities, served as curator of the Neiman Fo ...
, 1972–1984
*
Howard Simons (
Nieman Fellow class of 1959), 1984–1989
*
Bill Kovach (
Nieman Fellow class of 1989), 1989–2000
*
Robert H. Giles (
Nieman Fellow class of 1966), 2000 – June 2011
*
Ann Marie Lipinski
Ann Marie Lipinski (born January 1956) is a journalist and the curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. She is the former editor of the '' Chicago Tribune'' and Vice President for Civic Engagement at the University of Chicago.
...
(
Nieman Fellow class of 1990), 2011 –
References
External links
Nieman FoundationNieman Journalism Lab''Nieman Reports''Nieman Watchdog
{{Authority control
Harvard University
1938 establishments in Massachusetts
Educational foundations in the United States
American journalism organizations
Organizations established in 1938