Nieman Reports

Awards season is well under way, and while the big-name prizes get all the attention, there are plenty of lesser-known and regional honors as well. Dig further still and maybe you’ll find the Womble Award, which 1980 Nieman Fellow Paul Lieberman received from a reader, Fred Womble, whose news tip he had investigated. In our Spring 1982 issue, he reminisced about the heart-shaped plaque he received, and decided that it “had only a positive effect, and that effect was one too rarely noted in the competitive process: the potential of an award to flatly humble the recipient.”

The full text of the essay is available as a PDF.

We e-mailed Lieberman to find out if he still has the award and if there was any follow-up with Fred, and he send this reply:

“I probably do have the Womble Award—or the “Womele” Award—in a file cabinet somewhere, but I’m not sure. What I DO still have, and on display, framed, is the State of Georgia hunting permit Fred got for me. Without asking, he applied for three of us—the other was his cousin Chas—to participate in a hunt of wild boar, notoriously dangerous animals that come charging out of the brush to gore you. Well, Fred called up excitedly to report that he sent my name in, along with the wonderful news, “Paul, you’ve won!” There was only one catch. I’d won the right to join the Chickasawhatchee game management area’s two day “primitive” hunt, meaning your only defense against the charging wild boars was … bows and arrows!”

Click for PDF.

“Entering the city in the afterglow of their revolution is like stepping into a time warp—some cross between Philadelphia, 1789 and Woodstock, 1969 …”

So begins 1981 Nieman Fellow Doug Marlette’s “Prague Sketchbook,” a trippy illustrated account of the four-day East-West Journalism Conference in Prague, co-sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, during the summer of 1990.

Our magazine turns 65 this month so we turn back to our very first issue, published in February 1947. If you wonder whether the state of journalism was any less dire in those days, look no farther than our Page One headline: “What’s Wrong With the Newspaper Reader.” In the piece, Newsweek reporter William J. Miller, NF ’41, opens with an image of navel-gazing newsmen that still rings true today:

“Whenever two or more newspapermen get together the talk sooner or later turns to the sad state of the nation’s press, and what should be done about it.”

The full text of the article is available as a pdf.

Ombudsmen have been scorned and mocked in recent weeks. The Washington Post’s Patrick B. Pexton suggested that the Post might be “innovating too fast” and The New York Times’s Arthur S. Brisbane questioned whether or not the Times should be a “truth vigilante.” They might take comfort in the words of Post ombudsman Sam Zagoria, writing in Nieman Reports in 1986: “Ombudsmen are not meant to be loved.”

The full text of the article is available as a pdf.

It won’t be surprising if cables news sticks with flashy gimmicks in covering the 2012 presidential campaign, employing more holograms, bigger touchscreens, and other techno-visual wonders, but it’s important to look back to the 1960 campaign.

In that fraught contest between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, television was the defining medium. As 1961 Nieman Fellow Robert C. Smith, associate editor of the Virginian-Pilot, wrote in Nieman Reports, one had to actually see the “The Great Debates” in order to understand them:

“The texts and even the accompanying stories could not begin to ‘tell’ how Vice President Nixon looked on that first debate. You had to be ‘shown’ on television to believe it. And that chill, toothy guffaw Senator Kennedy registered in Great Debate III when Mr. Nixon invited him to cut his own political throat does not translate to print.”

But if the debates and campaigns were required viewing, election night itself was less compelling. NBC’s John Chancellor called it “the floating indoor one-shot,” and Smith writes that “it was a good newspaper format: reasonably objective, comprehensive, coherent. But in one man’s opinion it was also a little dull. … At best, the tallying of figures on a television blackboard is but a fancifying of radio.”

Obviously television has embraced the idea of making its coverage visually exciting. Less clear is whether that means better journalism. But as Smith himself prognosticated, substance may be best left to the newspapers: “If television ever discovers its full potential as a ‘visual’ art, the press may exploit fully the intellectual sphere in which it can operate to elaborate, comment upon, explain—in short, make sense out of the elections.”

The full text of the article is available as a pdf.

When Hoke Norris, a 1951 Nieman Fellow and books editor for the Chicago Sun Times, made his declaration that “Most Books Aren’t Worth Reading” in the June 1965 issue of Nieman Reports, American publishers were putting out an average of 20,000 books a year. In 2010, publishers released an average of 24,000 books every month. With that greater volume, it’s harder than ever to decide to what should be reviewed in the newspaper, much less which books actually are worth reading. Fortunately, Norris writes, “most of the books simply eliminate themselves.” Which ones?

• “At the head of this class—instantly and automatically—stand all books published by the vanity presses.”
• “… the how-to book, whether its pretenses are material or spiritual.”
• “… the autobiographies of movie stars, athletes and other such public personages, as told to someone else.”
• “… the quick superficial book written to exploit a current event or issue.”
• “… the sort of documentary non-fiction book that fancies that it uses the techniques of fiction.”

But along those same lines, some books have to be reviewed for one reason or another, leading to the ultimate conundrum: “We have eliminated many books, but we have a accepted a large number too. Not much space remains. In this space we must crowd somehow the worthy book that is not about a current controversy of compelling interest, that is not by an author who is local or eminent (or both), and that is not affected by other considerations that may make a review necessary. This is where the sweating starts.”

As our Winter 2011 issue—“Writing the Book”—makes clear, journalists and authors are going to continue putting out more and more books, on every conceivable subject, through countless new platforms. The anguish of the book editor continues.

The full text of the article is available as a PDF.

Nearly 60 years ago, political columnist Doris Fleeson delivered these “Ten Commandments of Journalism” at the University of Nebraska’s School of Journalism. It was a different time—Eisenhower was president, there was no Internet or Twitter, and Fleeson was one of the few women covering politics—but we guarantee that journalists at every level can find something to take away from her list.

From the practical (“1. Look at what you see.”) to the humorous (“8. Damn the clichés. Full verbs ahead.”) and from the progressive (“6. Women are people. There is no such thing as the women’s angle and don’t let any editor tell you different.”) to the long view (“10. We are told that journalism is ephemeral. Don’t you believe it for it is just not so.”), good advice stands the test of time.

Click to enlarge.

In honor of Columbia Journalism Review’s 50th anniversary, we turn back to 1961, when Nieman Reports welcomed CJR to the scene and congratulated it on its first issue—calling it a “handsome professional publication.” In their opening essay, CJR’s editors also gave a nod to the work done by Nieman Reports and other publications and promised to “acknowledge their work in the Review’s pages.”

For what it’s worth, we still think it’s a “handsome professional publication.”

Click to enlarge.

These house ads from the 1960’s carry a politely insistent plea for subscriptions and renewals.

The first issue of Nieman Reports was printed on butcher’s paper and had only 20 pages. Over the last 60-odd years we’ve increased the size of the magazine, advanced to high-quality offset printing, moved to a new office, and established a Web presence that brings our words to every corner of the globe. And though the price of a print subscription has gone up to $25 a year, we think it’s still a bargain.

Legendary Mississippi reporter Wilson F. “Bill” Minor was kind enough to reflect on his career in the pages of the current issue of Nieman Reports. But that’s not the first time that experiences from his six decades of vigilant journalism in Mississippi have appeared in the magazine. For our Winter 1978 issue, Louisiana State University professor James S. Featherston took a trip to Jackson to interview Minor at the burned and boarded-up office—the windows had been smashed three times in the past year and a burning cross set alight outside—of his Capital Reporter newspaper.

Featherston describes the small community paper, which Minor says comes out “weekly but never weakly,” as being:

“A gaudy newspaper typographically, it features big, bold headlines and generous splashes of often lurid color. Usually the contents are just as sensational. … Wrong-doing ‘sacred cows’ go through the wringer that is Minor’s typewriter and come out looking like hamburger meat. Corrupt politicians, indiscreet businessmen, Ku Kluxers, underworld figures and assorted other miscreants are similarly treated.”

But his newspaper is in bad financial shape when Featherstone visits. Major advertisers have stopped buying space after he’d published information about illegalities or revealed embarrassing details about business practices in the paper. Still, Minor is optimistic about his situation, telling Featherston that “There is nothing to compare with the satisfaction of writing a story that has an impact on society and results in changes being made.”

Also included is Minor’s October 6, 1977 “Eyes on Mississippi” column, about the governor refusing to fire a tax assessor who had been caught with more than $20,000 missing from his account.

The full text of the article is available as a PDF.