Nieman Reports

In the fall of 2012, just weeks into my Nieman Fellowship, our class went to see “Marie Antoinette” at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University. I struggled with the play, and I remember feeling like I couldn’t grasp what was happening on stage, that I was missing something everyone else understood. When our curator, Ann Marie Lipinski, asked me later what I thought, I admitted as much.

At the age of 26, Iranian photojournalist Sajad Imanian has already covered several international sports events such as the Olympic Games and past World Cup soccer tournaments. He hardly expected his nationality would haunt him six years after leaving Iran to live in Australia, where he is working as a social media specialist with the Asian Football Confederation.

“The planet is overheating,” read a recent headline from Grist, the long-running environment-focused news organization. “Why is the news looking away?” Grist reported a 38% reduction in climate coverage by the media worldwide in 2025 since a high-water mark in 2021, using data from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Additionally, Media Matters for America has found a 35% decrease in climate-related airtime on U.S. broadcast channels CBS, ABC, and NBC since 2024.

One of the biggest and most wide-ranging recent news scoops in India, exposing alleged government misdeeds in the awarding of educational software contracts, was broken on social media by students with no journalism training.

We need more journalists producing great social media videos. Good news: You only need your smartphone and to follow a few easy steps. I always thought I was too late for social media. I’m a science journalist by training, a news anchor, a documentary producer. For many years, I worked for the biggest public and private TV channels in Germany.

It was the largest immigration enforcement operation in U.S. history, according to government officials, with 3,000 federal agents flooding Minnesota.

When Norwegian journalist Helle Lyng shouted a question at Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he was departing, without talking to reporters, from a joint press appearance with Norway’s Prime Minister in May, she did not expect a response, knowing the Indian leader had not held an open press conference during his 12-year tenure. Although Lyng did not get an answer from Modi in Oslo, she found herself the target of an online mob led by India’s legions of right-wing internet trolls.

After CBS News fired the leadership and several correspondents of the flagship U.S. news program “60 Minutes,” I co-wrote an open letter to David Ellison, CEO of CBS' parent company Paramount-Skydance, arguing that "the wholesale dismissal of editorial management, without a public pledge to maintain the values, standards, and traditions of this program, puts the legacy of ‘60 Minutes’ in jeopardy." The letter was signed by several dozen former network producers, as well as former “60 Minutes”...

In early April, I wrote a story for The Free Press about the frail state of the relationship between the Vatican and the Trump administration. My reporting was meant to provide some insight into what was rapidly turning into a public fallout. Several conflicting positions on crucial issues — from immigration policy to the military interventions in Venezuela and Iran — had already been building up over months.

A Reddit user recently boasted they had built an AI tool to scrape local news and “generate full-length podcast audio.” Several commenters celebrated his work, suggesting they were building something similar. Conspicuously absent from the thread were any concerns about what these tools could mean for the future of journalism and its business models.