Nieman Reports

The opening sentence of my first message to Christine Mungai ended with the words: “fellow continent person.” It was August 2017, and we were the two Africans in that year’s cohort of Nieman journalism fellows at Harvard University. Although our home countries were about 4,000 kilometers (approximately 2,500 miles) apart in Africa, being from here means sharing a shorthand understanding of the world with your fellow Africans. That shorthand doesn’t have many structures to support it, however.

Haiti supporters celebrate before their team's World Cup match against Brazil on June 19 in Philadelphia. Photographer Yutao Chen said, "My image of them sums up the whole experience for me: an overload of all the senses, crowded and loud." Yutao Chen Photographer Yutao Chen first developed an interest in soccer during his childhood.

If someone had told me that the vast, well-funded propaganda machine of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would finally be rendered powerless by a bunch of kids, I’d have laughed at the absurdity of it. Yet, here I am, witnessing a historic reckoning for the Indian government — and for Indian journalism — unfold before my eyes on Instagram Reels.

When the war began, I was in Cairo. Like thousands of other Palestinians from Gaza who happened to be outside the strip, I suddenly found myself unable to return home. Overnight, I went from reporting on Gaza as someone who knew its streets, rhythms, and people intimately to relying almost entirely on mediated forms of access: news reports, social media, and daily phone calls with my family. Those calls were never just conversations.

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.