An interesting Glenn Beckian tidbit from the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank: “One day, he rhetorically asked his Fox News viewers: “Why did we buy Alaska in the 1950s?” As Milbank says, “a good question” seeing as how “we”, the U.S. of A., bought it from the Russians in 1867. It was known as Seward’s Folly [...]

This column first appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of Nieman Reports. The e-mail message from Hollman Morris was unexpected. It was “urgent,” he said. “Please call im- mediately on Skype.” I reached him and his brother, Juan Pablo, in Bogota. His image on the computer screen revealed a stricken man at pains to say [...]

Let’s state the obvious at the outset: The Internet is a miraculous medium that makes it possible for people to communicate with each other from almost anywhere in the world, and it makes it possible for news organizations to report the latest news virtually as it happens to anyone who has a computer and Internet [...]

(Written with Herb Strentz) The Des Moines Register in 1991 won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for exemplary coverage of a rape, coverage that set a high standard for sensitivity and responsibility. On June 16 of this year the Register once more gave noteworthy coverage to a young woman raped multiple times that again [...]

For the past nine years, the Nieman Foundation has honored journalistic fairness with the Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers. Our goal is to encourage fairness and ethical practices in enterprising news coverage by drawing public attention to exemplary work. The award is given in the name of the Taylor family whose stewardship of [...]

Full disclosure up front. I have been a Helen Thomas friend ever since we stood on a tarmac, interviewing Jackie Kennedy through a crack in the window as The First Lady sat in a limo, waiting for her infant son, John, and three-year-old Caroline, to arrive in a plane and commence life in the White [...]

A bit of magic happened at the Philadelphia Theater the other night that has a lot to do with American journalism. The whiskey voice of Molly Ivins – the satirist of all things worth assaulting in Texas and most of America – came alive again in the whiskey voice of actress Kathleen Turner. Molly’s voice [...]

Thanksgiving Day stuffing is a tradition in journalism, celebrated on front doorsteps across the nation as subscribers pick up their newspaper. With all the advertisements and inserts, the stuffed Thanksgiving Day paper could be the size of a small turkey. It’s the biggest newspaper of the year, has been so for 80 or more years. [...]

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I’m delighted to announce that starting later this month, I’ll be taking on the duties of Washington Bureau Chief and Blogger for The Huffington Post. This is a wonderful opportunity for me. It’s a marvelous platform — Arianna Huffington has built a large and thriving community of readers by adhering to the best principles of [...]