Nieman Foundation at Harvard
The Nieman Journalism Lab is an attempt to help journalism figure out its future in an Internet age.
The Internet has brought forth an unprecedented flowering of news and information. But it has also destabilized the old business models that have supported quality journalism for decades. Good journalists across the country are losing their jobs or adjusting to a radically new news environment online. We want to highlight attempts at innovation and figure out what makes them succeed or fail. We want to find good ideas for others to steal. We want to help reporters and editors adjust to their online labors; we want to help traditional news organizations find a way to survive; we want to help the new crop of startups that will complement — or supplant — them.
We are fundamentally optimistic.
We don’t pretend to have even five percent of all the answers, but we do know a lot of smart people. Primary among them are our readers; we hope your contributions will make the Lab a collaborative exchange of ideas. Tell us what’s happening around you, or what should be.
We hope you enjoy the work we do, and that you’ll join the conversation as it evolves.
Laura Hazard Owen is editor of Nieman Lab and was previously its deputy editor. Before that, she was the managing editor of the tech website Gigaom and reported on the book publishing industry for seven years.
Joshua Benton founded Nieman Lab in 2008 and was its director for 12 years before returning to reporting as senior writer in 2020. Before spending a year at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow, he spent 10 years in newspapers, mostly at The Dallas Morning News. His reports there on cheating on standardized tests in the Texas public schools led to the permanent shutdown of a school district and won the Philip Meyer Journalism Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. He has reported from a dozen foreign countries, been a Pew Fellow in International Journalism, and three times been a finalist for the Livingston Award for International Reporting. He was once a rock critic for The Toledo Blade. He’s a proud Cajun from small-town south Louisiana who wrote his first HTML in 1994.
Sarah Scire is deputy editor of Nieman Lab. Previously, she worked at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and The New York Times.
Hanaa’ Tameez is a staff writer at the Lab. She previously worked at WhereBy.Us as newsletters editor and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram as its diversity reporter. She had internships at The Wall Street Journal and the Council on Foreign Relations, among others, and she is a graduate of Stony Brook University and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
Sophie Culpepper is a staff writer at Nieman Lab. She previously co-founded the hyperlocal Lexington Observer, where she reported on public schools, local government, economic development, and public safety among other topics as the digital news nonprofit’s only full-time journalist for two years. She graduated from Brown University in 2021 and was a managing editor on The Brown Daily Herald’s editorial board.
Established in 1938, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard administers the oldest fellowship program for journalists in the world. More than 1,300 journalists of accomplishment from 88 countries have received Nieman Fellowships and benefited from a year of study and exploration at Harvard University. The annual deadline to apply for a fellowship is December 15 for international journalists and January 31 for Americans.
The Nieman Foundation also publishes the quarterly magazine Nieman Reports, the nation’s oldest magazine devoted to a critical examination of the practice of journalism. Additionally, the foundation is home to the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism and the Nieman Watchdog Journalism Project, which encourages reporters and editors to monitor and hold accountable those who exert power in all aspects of public life.
Unless otherwise noted, all content on this site is © the President and Fellows of Harvard College or the content’s original author.
Also unless otherwise noted, all content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
That means you are free to translate, transform, reprint, or otherwise reuse our content, as long as (a) you are not using it for commercial purposes and (b) you attribute it to the Nieman Journalism Lab and/or the work’s author, preferably with a link back to the original content, and (c) you release any work you build on top of our work under a similar license. For instance, under this license, you could:
— translate the entire site into Portuguese
— redistribute some of our posts to students in a college course
— use our Twitter feed as lyrics in some awful techno song you’ve written
Of course, we’d love to hear of any interesting uses to which you’re putting our work.
If you would like to use our work for any other use, feel free to get in touch.
