The Nieman Foundation for Journalism

During the first Trump administration, one law arguably played an outsized role in fueling accountability reporting on the federal government. The Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, has long been a cornerstone of investigative journalism in the U.S. Documents obtained through FOIA requests underpinned countless marquee investigative stories during Trump’s first term. As bleak forecasts…

Toronto-based local news site The Green Line doesn’t just want to inform its audience; it aspires to improve their lives. The Green Line describes its mission as investigating “the way Torontonians live to report on solutions, actions, and resources that help you become happier in our city.” Launched in April 2022 and named for a…

The majority of Latinos in the United States (81%) have said that climate change is one of their top concerns and the issue disproportionately affects their communities. But local Spanish-language newspapers in the United States aren’t localizing climate change stories for Spanish-language audiences, according to a new study. In a paper published in the Environmental…

In September, I went through all the proposals from Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint for a second Trump term — that would have a direct impact on the media. At the time, of course, candidate Donald Trump took pains to say that he wasn’t behind Project 2025, that he barely knew anyone…

There’s always Monday morning quarterbacking after an election and, in the past two weeks, an incredible number of takes have invoked a podcaster by the name of Joe Rogan. A new Pew Research Center report focuses on news influencers on social media — including Rogan — and the Americans who say they regularly get their…

Maybe it’s not such an odd pairing? After all, The Onion and Infowars both publish a lot of fake information. Both are known for their coverage of national tragedies. They both reach audiences who want to have a laugh at a world being presented to them through a very particular lens. Both have been the…

Even before the U.S. election sped up an exodus from the Elon Musk-owned site, X had reportedly lost one-fifth of its active users in the U.S. and one-third in the U.K.. Bluesky seems to have the juice to win over some of those fleeing users — especially journalists and others interested in news and current…

The Guardian said Wednesday that it will no longer post on X, saying it is “a toxic media platform” and “its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.” The news organization does not, however, appear to be deleting or locking its accounts there. Instead, The Guardian’s X accounts…

Most people agree that actual facts matter — in such activities as debate, discussion, and reporting. Once facts are gathered, verified, and distributed, informed decision-making can proceed in such important exercises as voting. But what happens when important, verified facts are published and broadcast widely, yet the resulting impact proves underwhelming — or even meaningless?…

For a union considering a strike, the phrase “maximum leverage” is always top of mind. If the goal is to push management into action, the withdrawal of labor should be designed to maximize its impact on operations. If you represent longshoremen, you time a strike (and its potential economy-wide impact) to the weeks before a…

Around 1 a.m. on July 27, 2017, I woke up, opened my politics Twitter list, and lay in the dark watching (via tweets) the Senate’s failed vote to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act. Around 1:30 a.m., Arizona Senator John McCain cast the deciding vote to save the ACA. For the next hour and…

A few years back, my local mom Facebook group started a weekly thread to share the best deals on groceries around town. We tried to look through supermarkets’ circulars to pull out the best deals we saw. Someone started a spreadsheet comparing prices at Costco versus non-warehouse stores. The effort fizzled quickly. Why? Not because…

Where did you turn for election night news? The platform formerly known as Twitter? Bluesky? The Meta-owned Threads? Those who chose the latter hoping for timely updates about the presidential election being closely watched in the U.S. and around the world on Tuesday were disappointed. Threads users were confronted with a non-chronological feed that made…

Google Search may not get a lot of love these days, but a niche Chrome extension launched in March — Google Scholar PDF Reader — counts 500,000 users who leave largely positive reviews : “A revolutionary game changer. Considering naming my first-born child after this chrome extension.” Google’s promise with the launch of the extension was…

Ask journalists about the core professional values that define good journalism, and the answers have been pretty consistent across the decades and even, to a large extent, around much of the world: factuality, impartiality, public service, autonomy, and ethics. These values are settled and foundational enough to constitute what Dutch media scholar Mark Deuze once called “the occupational…

Ten years ago, when the Associated Press declared the winners of the 2014 midterm elections, the alerts it sent out were little more than headlines: So-and-so won such-and-such election in this or that state. The updates were short and to the point — no more than 120 characters, usually — and the AP didn’t see…

“Is wearing Taylor Swift merch or a trash bag considering electioneering in Kansas? What if you dress your kid up as Donald Trump or Kamala Harris?” “A used car dealership owner in Texas told his employees he’d reimburse anyone who votes $20 worth of food at one of several local restaurants. Is that illegal?” “Should…

The 2024 election is all hands on deck for American newsrooms. And student reporters are helping supply critical local news to communities across the country. The Center for Community News at the University of Vermont is leading what it calls “the first nationally coordinated effort to strengthen university-led election coverage.” Around 145 colleges across 46…

I can’t remember the last time I was as shocked by a news-industry number as I was by 200,000. Specifically, the 200,000 Washington Post subscribers who NPR’s David Folkenflik reported cancelled their subscriptions in the days after the paper announced it wouldn’t be endorsing in the 2024 presidential race. (Not long after, the number grew…

The headline: “A Woman Died After Being Told It Would Be a ‘Crime’ to Intervene in Her Miscarriage at a Texas Hospital.” Nieman Lab spent the last week reporting on crime news now. Of course, we could not cover the entire landscape of news about crime, but we delved into podcasts, TikTok creators, digital news…

At the end of summer, the leaders of the nearly 250 public radio stations in the United States received a memo from NPR headquarters in Washington — “the mother ship,” as many station employees call it — about coverage plans for the coming months. Each station has its own hosts, reporters, and management, but memos like this have a tremendous bearing on those stations, because NPR shows like “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” are the tentpoles of the broadcast day. And for the last few years, those tentpoles had been sinking. Ratings at stations across the country dropped an […]

The election of Donald Trump to a new term as president has underscored how politically divided Americans remain – possibly more than at any other time in the last 50 years, with a majority of both Republicans and Democrats viewing the opposing side as the biggest threat to democracy, various studies show. The polarization has undermined faith in traditional news media, in political conciliation and cooperation, and in the U.S. electoral system itself. Archon Fung, the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, spoke to this year’s Nieman Fellows and to […]

Each year on Nov. 1 and 2, millions of people across Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America celebrate Día de los Muertos or Day of the Dead. This annual holiday involves family reunions, parades, costumes, and face-painting to honor deceased family, friends, and ancestors.  Nieman Reports spoke to photographer Greta Rico on traveling to Atlixco, a town in the Mexican state of Puebla, to photograph the annual harvest of cempasúchil flowers, a type of marigold. These flowers traditionally grace altars, shrines, and gravesites throughout the country, as their sweet aroma is believed to help the spirits of loved ones return […]

For more than 175 years, The Associated Press has provided a critical service by calling U.S. presidential elections. What began in the 1800’s with Pony Express riders collecting results on horseback, has grown into a network of thousands of stringers, researchers, reporters, analysts, editors, data journalists and race callers compiling voting results for races all across the country.  In November, the race calling team will be responsible for calling election contests in every city and township across the United States. A consortium of media outlets rely on The AP each election cycle for their election calling services.  Sally Buzbee, former executive […]

“I want to become a journalist because I think it’s a job that makes the world aware of humanity’s serious problems,” I wrote in careful cursive letters for a middle school essay that my parents have kept to this day. “I could fight injustice in this world in my own way.”  Beyond the naïve and presumptuous writing style I used at the time, I had a sense that the best way to make sense of the complexities of the world — and of my own upbringing — might be through journalism.  We had recently moved to Paris after six years […]

“The Brazil Chronicles” (forthcoming from University of Missouri Press on Nov. 18, 2024) is a mix of memoir and reportage by Stephen G. Bloom, which recounts Rio de Janeiro’s vibrant history as a base for American expat reporters. Fed up with the political and economic turbulence of the 1970s, Bloom, like hundreds of contemporaries, relocated to Brazil, which “held the promise of a new beginning, a place to live out [his] dreams of becoming a newspaper reporter.” What Bloom discovered was a landscape filled with “fellow journalists … who would make their marks on history; others were deadbeats, ne’er-do-wells, grifters, drug […]

The story of the Pullman porters is a gift that is still giving. The Black men who worked on George Pullman’s elegant sleeping cars for the century after the Civil War first shared their inspiring narratives about rising from the rails to reshape their world. After I wrote a book about them, they said I had to write another about their favorite athlete, Satchel Paige, and I had a grand time doing that. But, the story they wanted told most was of their three best-loved passengers and friends: Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, and William “Count” Basie.  So here we are with […]

Fresh from a reporting trip to Moscow, just days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Masha Gessen took a seat at a board meeting of PEN America in New York City. A few nights earlier, Gessen had been in the Moscow studios of TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV channel, when the government blocked the channel’s internet feed. Phone calls to the station warned of an imminent raid by security forces. Everyone in the studio, including Gessen, fled, leaving behind jackets, broadcast equipment, and personal computers. Most began searching for airline seats to Yerevan, Tbilisi, or other […]

Playing sports isn’t considered part of a woman’s life in traditional Maya culture. But Las Amazonas of Yaxunah, an Indigenous women’s softball team based in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, is challenging those boundaries.  The team, which was formed in 2019 and has players between the ages of 13 and 62, has become famous in Mexico for playing barefoot and wearing traditional Mayan dresses known as huipiles. Founding members of Las Amazonas told me the idea first came about around 2018, when government health officials launched a series of free aerobic exercise programs in Yucatán to combat rising rates of obesity and […]

Until Feb. 24, 2022, The Village Ukraine was known as a city guide for Kyiv, the country’s capital. It published a mix of cultural reviews, lifestyle articles, fashion news, and updates about events around the city.   But after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, music, art, and dining stories had to give way to coverage about the war and its impact. Today, the website mixes guides of recently opened restaurants with documentation of alleged war crimes. Advice on cosmetics is juxtaposed with interviews of residents who, after the conflict began, decided to remove or change tattoos inked in Russian.  In an […]