Journalism Program

Michelle Pera McGhee, a Senior Journalist Engineer for the “visual essay” website The Pudding, revealed her secrets about data visualization when she spoke to students in the Reinventing Journalism on the Local Level course.
 
McGhee, a Stanford grad in computer science who has co-taught Brandeis Journalism’s Storytelling with Data course, told students in Neil Swidey’s Reinventing course that they can tell great data stories if they follow three main steps.

• Start with a question – something you’ve found yourself wondering about, something that’s unique or at least unusual. Sometimes the data is easily available; other times, you have to dig and put it together yourself. “Create the data you want to see in the world,” she said. As an example, she mentioned that if you gather a group of 22 or more people, there’s a greater than 50 percent chance that at least two of those people will share the same birthday.

• Go beyond basic charts. McGhee attracts a wide audience by presenting information in a way that hasn’t been done before.  

• Go from small to big. To avoid overwhelming your audience, McGhee advises beginning with smaller, simpler graphics. Once readers have a better understanding of your research, you can move to more complex data visuals.

Some of the topics she explores in her work are quite serious while others are lighter. In the latter category, she recently produced a project on word choice in television and specifically how apologies are used on The Real Housewives.
 
At The Pudding, she said, “We are in the business of publishing things that are thorough, and we are proud of.” Her average project takes about four months from conception to being published – a schedule that Swidey joked “sounds like dropping a new album.”
 
-MEGAN MARGOLIS

Forty percent of U.S. adults under 30 regularly consume news from social media influencers, Adriana Lacy told students. She urged them to embrace the opportunities associated with this major shift in how digital natives prefer to engage with information, particularly through the use of short-form videos.

Professor Lacy is known to Brandeis Journalism students as the Assistant Director for Internships and Outreach as well as the Lecturer behind a number of popular courses, including Social Journalism, Sports Journalism, and the Journalism Program’s internship course. But in early April when she joined Professor Neil Swidey’s Reinventing Journalism on the Local Level course, she spoke to students from the perspective of running her own consulting firm. In that consulting capacity, she does cutting-edge work vetting and training news influencers in journalism and pairing them with legacy media organizations that are trying to reach new audiences.

 “Influencers have the audience’s trust and attention,” Lacy said, emphasizing that their personal voice makes news more relatable and engaging. 

Lacy also introduced her program called Influencer Directory, which educates influencers on sharing reliable news and sourcing information responsibly, bridging the gap between independent content creators and journalistic integrity. She shared samples of the short-form video work resulting from her work advising The Conversation, a nonprofit news outlet that translates academic expertise for mainstream audiences. 

Lacy urged students to focus on emotional storytelling that resonates deeply with audiences. “Strong emotions are twice as likely to be shared,” she noted. She emphasized optimizing content for digital platforms by storyboarding every scene of a video, using vertical formats tailored for mobile viewing, and captioning videos for accessibility. Prioritizing authenticity is equally important, as a visible human face builds trust and connection with viewers.  

“Influencer journalism doesn’t replace traditional media,” Lacy said. “It complements and evolves it.”  

-JOVINA YU

Satire is most powerful when it blurs the line between comedy and truth, a balance that Allison Silverman, former head writer and executive producer of The Colbert Report, perfected. During her visit to Professor Josh Wolk's Late Night News course on Feb. 13, Silverman told students how the show evolved, what challenges she faced writing for a satirical character, and how unpredictably audiences interpreted the show's humor.

“We had some confusion about what we were up to for a while,” Silverman said, recalling the show’s early struggles in defining Colbert’s character. Though the show soon found its rhythm, Silverman noted some viewers failed to grasp that Colbert was in character. “It felt like a mistake because we weren’t clear enough,” she said.

Silverman, who has also written for The Daily Show and Late Night with Conan O’Brien, spoke about the job’s intensity. “We often felt like The Daily Show’s little sibling,” she said, describing the occasional competition. While The Colbert Report thrived on parody, she emphasized that the team took their research seriously, grounding jokes in reality. Rather than viewing herself as a journalist, she saw her role as closer to that of an op-ed writer.

Silverman landed her first major writing job by cold-calling The Daily Show and seizing the moment when she reached the right person. Reflecting on her career, she said, “I felt at the end of my journey with each job,” underscoring that success in comedy writing isn’t about finding a permanent home but embracing unpredictability and adapting to new opportunities.

-ELLA CHASE

Beth Daley, the executive editor and general manager for The Conversation — a news organization that partners academics with journalists to translate research for the general public — advised Brandeis students to focus more on curiosity than certainty. “You need intellectual humility in journalism,” Daley told students in Neil Swidey’s Reinventing Journalism for the Local Level course during her Jan. 29 visit. 

Daley’s advice aligns with the course’s mission: to reimagine journalism with a focus on local reporting. Students in the class are spending this semester learning about innovative approaches to journalism and then putting that knowledge into practice, reporting and producing stories for publication in the independent digital nonprofit Brookline.News.

During her visit, Daley highlighted the severe financial strains facing local journalism, which has long played a critical role in our democracy by informing the public and fostering a sense of community connection. She discussed how The Conversation, supported by a grant from the Knight Foundation, is helping to fill local news deserts by tapping academics who have expertise on issues important to local communities. 

Before helming The Conversation, Daley worked for many years at The Boston Globe, and was an early reporter focusing on the climate change beat.  When asked about her favorite story, Daley cited her investigative project on the 45th parallel, the line halfway between the Equator and the North Pole. Her reporting took her to various points along the parallel, particularly in Maine, where she interviewed residents about the effects of climate change on their businesses and lives. This project underscored the important connection between global issues and local communities – and local news. 

-CAROL KORNWORCEL

Adam Chodikoff and Justin Melkmann, top producers of The Daily Show, discussed the intersection of comedy, journalism and fact-checking in their visit to Professor Josh Wolk’s Late Night News class earlier this semester. The two veterans of the groundbreaking Jon Stewart show told students that their work is far more than entertainment.

"We're not just trying to make jokes," Chodikoff said, "we're committed to getting the facts right."

The Daily Show’s commitment to accuracy runs deep, they said. There’s a team fact-checking every segment and ensuring they represent multiple perspectives fairly.

Melkmann also noted the challenges of remaining balanced in today’s contentious political climate. The show tries to remain open to “seeing the pitfalls” throughout the American political system. This perspective allows for a critical examination of political and social issues. 

The producers shared that they see their work as a form of accountability journalism. The show uses satirical humor to expose hypocrisy and make complex issues more accessible to a broader audience. First and foremost, their research is rigorous. This often includes deep dives into congressional records, historical resources and expert sources. 

"No joke is worth losing our credibility," Chodikoff noted.

–KIAH HOLMSTROM

In a Jan. 23 visit to Josh Wolk’s Opinion Writing class, Adam Sternbergh, Culture Editor at the New York Times’ Opinion section, explained to students how a column goes from an idea to finished piece. The process starts with either a writer’s pitch, or Sternbergh reaching out to writers with a specific areas of expertise to generate a fresh take on a timely issue. One of the challenges of opinion writing, he said, is creating an argument that comes to a conclusion. “If that’s the problem, what’s the solution?” is the question he often poses to writers. He likened the structure of a good opinion piece as akin to a doctor’s visit: observation of an issue, diagnosis of the issue, and finally a prescription. 

Noting the fast pace at which the opinions page is required to move, Sternbergh joked about wanting to start a news site “for great takes that came in a week too late." He also noted that even when he receives opinion submissions too late, he still keeps well-written pieces in a desktop folder.

Sternbergh also talked about the differences between personal essay and true opinion, using Chris Vognar’s piece on grief and ‘The Bear’ (which Sternbergh edited) as a prime example of an opinion piece that moves closely into the territory of personal essay. A good opinion, he said, should “stand on its own merits as an expression of an idea.” He encouraged prospective opinion writers to look for things in the world that expose them to new opinions, rather than try to use the opinion page as a means to validate their own worldviews.

--WILLOW BOSWORTH

Steven Kurutz, essayist and New York Times feature reporter, highlighted the importance of personalizing a story and writing about your particular interests during his Nov. 4 visit to Professor Josh Wolk’s Fundamentals of Journalism class. “You can make any story a home story because where you live takes up so much of your life,” Kurutz explained.  

Kurutz advised students to discover enterprise stories and craft articles they're excited about. “Coming up with your own stories gives you control” he said. He also encouraged students to keep their interests in mind while asking if the story "is also news-worthy and will interest readers?"

On selecting topics for his features, Kurutz recommended pursuing “something high-concept that you can reduce down to an elevator pitch.” He emphasized the importance of identifying the “illuminating details” in every story. These are details that help move the story forward and distinguish it from other articles.

-- HANNAH SHAPIRO

On Nov. 30, Alicia DeSantis, the Emmy Award-winning New York Times deputy editor for culture, visited Professor Josh Wolk's Fundamentals of Journalism class. She shared insights into her professional journey, editorial expertise, and notable achievements, answering students' questions along the way. DeSantis holds a Ph.D. in Literature from Columbia University.

DeSantis emphasized the importance of collaboration and teamwork. She explained that in journalism — as well as in editing, directing, designing and producing — it is nearly impossible to achieve success without the support and contributions of others. DeSantis likened her collaboration with coworkers to being part of a band, where everyone needs to know a little about everything to make the final product work seamlessly. "It helps to have once been part of the band itself, not just the band maker," she explained, emphasizing the importance of hands-on experience and shared effort.

Teamwork, she explained, is what ultimately creates greatness — a point she illustrated while discussing the process behind one of her pieces, “How Big Is Taylor Swift?” She described the challenges of gathering and analyzing data for the article and highlighted how crucial her collaboration with Joe Coscarelli, a culture reporter for The Times, was to bringing her vision to life.

DeSantis reinforced the idea that success is never achieved alone. As she put it, “It’s okay to be a jack of many trades, master of none,” because versatility and teamwork are key in journalism.

-- EMILY COELHO

Ian Coss, the host and audio journalist behind the GBH News podcast The Big Dig, said that the best stories are often the ones staring you in the face. “Sometimes the story that really needs to be told feels stupidly obvious,” Coss told students in Professor Neil Swidey’s Long-form Journalism course during his visit on Nov. 26. In those cases, he said, it’s less important to unearth new information than to put it all together in a fresh and revealing way. 

Coss’s well-regarded, nine-part podcast has a big sweep to it. It does more than just tell the story of Boston’s maligned, comically overbudget yet brilliant megaproject that removed the ugly elevated highway that had bisected the city and replaced it with tunnels and green space. By identifying The Big Dig as “the ultimate case study for understanding how things get built in the modern era,” the podcast poses a larger and more important question: How did the American public lose the will to tackle massive infrastructure projects, and how much responsibility do journalists hold for those diminished ambitions?

“Don’t worry about being the best qualified person to tell a story,” Coss told the students. He noted that he has never worked full time in a newsroom and comes to his work with an eclectic background. He is an audio storyteller, but he has a PhD in ethnomusicology, spent a year in Bali studying Indonesian traditional music, and performed with puppeteers in touring companies. “I’m not the best qualified person to tell the Big Dig story.” The key, he said, is to be relentlessly curious and committed to putting in the hard work to tell the story the right way.

Tonya Mosley, the Emmy Award-winning journalist and co-host of NPR’s Fresh Air, has made a career of capturing the power of other people’s stories. But with her much-lauded audio documentary/podcast She Has a Name, Mosley had to get over the initial discomfort of turning the microphone on herself. 

Part investigative journalism, part memoir, She Has a Name tells the story of the disappearance of the sister Mosley never knew she had. In her Nov. 19 visit to Professor Neil Swidey’s Long-form Journalism course, Mosley told students that the experience of reporting, producing and hosting this podcast gave her fresh insights into the subject of journalistic objectivity.  “Allowing your audience to understand the biases you hold … is important,” she said. It’s not as though journalists don’t have opinions and experiences that shaped their outlook. It’s about transparency. Because she was telling her family’s story, it was easier for all of that to be out in the open.

In response to a student’s question about the history of exploitation in many “true crime” podcasts, Mosley said, “I wanted to present a story where the people who are the most impacted had a say in the construction of it.” Mosley’s nephew Antonio — the son of her half-sister Anita, the subject of the podcast — served as its co-executive producer.

Mosley told students that the key to her interviews on Fresh Air is a blend of curiosity, preparation and flexibility. The curiosity comes from the fact that “there’s so much that we don’t know about each other,” she said. Proper preparation is extensive and expansive. “At Fresh Air, we’re like the secret service,” she quipped. Yet all that preparation should make interviewers more flexible rather than wedded to their questions. Mosley cited her fellow Fresh Air host, Terry Gross: “She’s done lots of research, but she is willing to throw that out.” That is a big reason that Fresh Air was able to become NPR’s flagship interview show. 

-- ISAAC BIRKENTAL

If many Americans were surprised to see the historic gains that Donald Trump made with Latino voters in this year’s presidential election, they clearly hadn’t been reading the work of New York Times Magazine staff writer Marcela Valdes.

Valdes, who covers Latino and Latin American politics and culture, spoke to Neil Swidey’s Longform Journalism course on Oct. 14. In preparation for her visit, students read several of Valdes’ magazine pieces, including her 2023 article “Why Can’t We Stop Unauthorized Immigration? Because It Works” and her 2020 article “The Fight to Win Latino Voters for the GOP.” After the election, several students in the class observed how much better prepared they were for the election results because they had closely read Valdes’ work.

Valdes stressed to students the importance of following their curiosity while keeping their personal opinions out of their reporting. “I pick the questions that I don’t know the answers to,” she said, adding, “Your job is to understand, not to believe.” 

Earlier in her career, when Valdes worked as a book critic, she discovered a mental trick to help her deliver honest appraisals without worrying about hurting the particular author’s feelings: “I had to pretend the author was dead,” she said.

In explaining the job of a longform journalist, Valdes quoted a fellow magazine writer who told her they must “write faster than anybody who writes better, and better than anybody who writes faster.”

--MINA ALKHAFAJI

In a visit to Professor Josh Wolk’s Arts Journalism, Pop Culture, and Digital Innovation class on Nov. 4, Jason Zinoman, critic-at-large for the New York Times, discussed how he applies rigorous journalistic practices to a decidedly less serious beat—comedy.

Zinoman suggested that comedy criticism has the unique advantage of allowing him to comment on timely social and political issues without needing to be as cut-and-dried as other types of journalism. Being a critic also means that his pieces are not subject to the same standards of objectivity as other forms of journalism. Yet Zinoman stressed that he keeps himself out of his stories and adheres to the same rigorous journalistic practices as a news writer. “My primary obligation is to my audience," he said. "You have an obligation to be respectful to people you write about, but that’s not my primary audience."

Zinoman said his experience as a "middle school gossip" and his work as a telemarketer in high school helped prepare him for his career. As a gossip, her learned the art of coaxing information out of someone by embracing vulnerability and sharing something about himself in return. And his telemarketing job taught him how to talk to different people and to take the “empathetic leap to imagine what it’s like to be someone very different from you.” This, he believes, is a critical component of being a good critic—and a good journalist.

-- HEDY YANG

Two AI experts recently brought their complementary perspectives to Professor Adriana Lacy’s Social Journalism course, offering students practical insights into the real-world applications of artificial intelligence in newsrooms. Joe Amditis and Nikita Roy shared their experiences working with publishers of different sizes, demonstrating how AI tools are reshaping journalism practices across the industry.

Roy, who is a journalist and computer scientist, highlighted AI's impact on larger news organizations, citing the success of Swedish publisher Aftonbladet's EU election chatbot, which has fielded more than 150,000 user questions. Her examples illustrated how established publishers are leveraging AI to scale their operations and enhance reader engagement. She also compared the AI-transition to that from print to digital, noting that both represent a "fundamental shift in how people get information."

Meanwhile, Amditis, who works with local news organizations on implementing technology like AI, focused on AI's role in smaller newsrooms, where the technology is streamlining tasks like social media management and copy editing. He explained that many smaller newsrooms feel an urge to implement AI because it's so new. "We're still in the shiny new toy phase," he said.

Both speakers emphasized the need for a balanced approach to AI adoption. While celebrating the technology's potential to improve efficiency and reach, they stressed the importance of maintaining vigilance and ethical considerations. Still, they both explained that too few people know how to use AI. "When you say AI, people don't know what you mean still," Roy said.

The pair offered a refreshing departure from typical AI discussions, replacing speculative hype and fear with grounded, practical insights from the field.

At the end of the session, both speakers shared tools they recommend for students who want to experiment more with AI:

Google Notebook LM is an AI-powered tool for research and collaborative note-taking, useful for journalists organizing stories and sources.

Claude is an advanced AI assistant for writing, analysis, and research tasks.

-- ADRIANA LACY

Susan Burton, writer, reporter, and podcast host and producer, spoke to Professor Neil Swidey’s Long-form Journalism class on Oct. 1, about the complexity and nuance of reporting on deeply emotional stories. Prior to her visit, students listened to The Retrievals, Burton's podcast about a scandal at a Yale fertility clinic involving a nurse who stole fentanyl from patients undergoing painful egg retrieval operations.

The Retrievals, which was published by the New York Times' Serial Productions, won a Peabody Award and was named one of the best podcasts of 2023 by numerous outlets. Burton is a longtime producer for This American Life. In addition to her podcasting work, Burton is the author of Empty, a memoir about her experience with binge-eating. 

Burton told the students she got the idea for the podcast after reading a short article in a local Connecticut newspaper about women suing a Yale fertility clinic. She quickly became invested. "Before I went to bed that night, I had downloaded almost all the court documents,” she said. "I felt enormous empathy for the patients," she said, "but I often feel empathy for my subjects." She stressed that, despite that empathy, journalists must be clear-eyed in reporting the truth.

Burton told students to not be afraid to take on hard stories.

-- AIKO NJUGUNA

Bill Schneider, Brandeis alum and former CNN senior political analyst, spoke with Journalism Professor Eileen McNamara at Brandeis' Alumni College on Sept. 27. They discussed the upcoming election and what sets it apart from previous ones as well as the state of democracy and what Schneider calls today's "Archie Bunker" Republican party.

Schneider explained to a crowd of students, alumni and families that the days of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats are over, comparing them to the extinct “dodo birds.” Today’s ideologically consistent but politically polarized parties are gridlocked in Congress, he said. 

Schneider also noted how abortion policies might affect former president Donald Trump’s campaign. “You cannot take away people’s rights,” he said, comparing the removal of Roe v. Wade to gun rights arguments. 

Wrapping up the discussion, Schneider expressed his concerns about the weakness of social media as a news source. 

-- ARIELLA SOLTREN

Anjali Huynh, political reporter at The Boston Globe and former fellow at The New York Times, stressed the importance of trust and accountability in journalism when she visited Professor Josh Wolk’s Fundamentals of Journalism class on Sept. 25. “Stories are only as good as the information that people are telling you,” she said, “and that information is not always information that politicians want out there.”

Prior to her visit, the students reviewed some of her recent work with the Globe, including a piece exploring how young voters are responding to Kamala Harris’s election and related social media trends such as “Project Coconut” and “Brat Summer.”

Huynh also reflected on the importance of remaining empathetic yet nonjudgmental when reporting and also including underrepresented communities in political coverage. “It’s essential to reach out to communities who haven’t seen as much coverage,” she said. “Their relationship with politics is often different.”

Huynh encouraged aspiring journalists to frame their narratives in ways that resonate with readers. One way to do that, she said, is to ask, “'How do I explain how these policies touch people in their everyday lives?'” Outlining this idea as “accountability journalism,” Huynh's commitment to truth and transparency is central to her work as she navigates the complexities of political narratives while fostering relationships with her sources.

-- ALANA BAPTISTE

Karen Valby, frequent contributing journalist to Vanity Fair, shared with Brandeis Journalism students what she has learned during her career as a freelance writer. On Sept. 18, she visited Professor Josh Wolk’s Arts Journalism, Pop Culture, and Digital Innovation class to discuss her work, including specific celebrity profiles on Chris Hemsworth, Jennifer Lawrence, and couple John Legend and Chrissy Teigen.

A graduate of Columbia Journalism School, Valby started her career working for Entertainment Weekly’s book department soon after graduation. She has been freelancing since then, calling it “very unpredictable but very rewarding.” Her career has also taken her all over the world. For her profile of Chris Hemsworth, she traveled to Australia to meet with him on his terrain.

Valby also emphasized the importance of getting it right when it comes to writing personal profiles. “It’s so vulnerable to be written about,” Valby noted.

When giving interview advice, Valby encouraged students to prepare questions but not rely on them exclusively. “It’s okay to have some energy and surprise in the conversation and to get off your list of questions,” she said.

-- ALEXIS DEMIRCAN

"A press that is not believed has no power to move people to take action," David McCraw, Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel for The New York Times, told an audience of students, faculty and alumni at Brandeis' Alumni College on Sept. 27. Sitting down with Professors Neil Swidey and Ann Silvio, McCraw discussed his experiences as the Times' top newsroom lawyer, overseeing security at foreign bureaus, negotiating the release of journalists taken hostage, and defending the paper in court. Prior to this public event, McCraw also spoke at an off-the-record discussion with journalism students in Swidey's Long-form Journalism class on Sept. 26.

McCraw began by discussing the challenges of fighting for press freedom in a world where public trust in the media has declined, something he outlined in his 2019 book, Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts. He acknowledged that the press is imperfect, but argued that the public should respond to its flaws by paying more attention and  encouraging it to do better, not by turning away. Comparing it to politics, McCraw said that everyone will one day wonder why their generation voted a certain way. "The reaction should not be, 'Well, let's take away the right to vote,'" he said. "Same way with the press." 

McCraw also spoke about handling cases where reporters obtain sensitive or controversial information from anonymous sources. If the information is newsworthy and its accuracy can be confirmed, it should be published, McCraw explained. He cited the leaks provided by WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden as examples of crucial information the public needed to know, despite the controversies surrounding their release. In contrast, McCraw notes that the Times has currently chosen not to publish information from an Iranian hack on the current Trump campaign because the newsroom found nothing newsworthy in the leak. 

McCraw has also played a pivotal role in dealings between the Times and the U.S. government. From 2020 to 2021, McCraw fought against government efforts to obtain information about Times journalists who reported on FBI investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The Times was ultimately successful in protecting its journalists, and, as a result, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued an important policy that the government could no longer seek reporters' help in criminal investigations, solidifying the independence of the press.

McCraw's responsibilities extend far beyond the courtroom. He is also responsible for the safety and security of Times reporters abroad. Reflecting on hostage situations, McCraw noted that prior to the rise of social media, reporters were valued in dangerous situations because they were the only vessels through which people could share their stories. Now, however, journalists are no longer valued in the same way because social media has allowed anyone to self-report. Nevertheless, McCraw insisted that “we still have to tell the story. We still have to be witness wherever we can be witness.” 

When asked about artificial intelligence, McCraw expressed concern over its rise. He acknowledged that AI may help reporters collect and synthesize information. However, he believes that human judgment is crucial to understanding the world. “AI is really good at reporting on the internet and reporters are good at reporting on the world,” he said. “That’s why [the reporters] are necessary.”

-- SAAYA DAGA 

Matt Bai, political columnist, acclaimed author of All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, and Hollywood screenwriter behind The Front Runner, noted the importance of medium when deciding how to tell a story. During his April 4 visit to Professor Neil Swidey's Reinventing Journalism class, Bai explained that storytelling is, at its core, a central question and a series of choices. Chief among them is: what is the best medium to capture and convey a particular story?

Bai highlighted a common pitfall in films based on true events: the tendency to treat dialogue as if characters were delivering a history lesson, relying heavily on quoted material. Advocating for a more authentic approach to screenwriting, Bai favors having “characters talk how they really talk,” even at the expense of journalistic standards of truthfulness. As scrupulous as he us about accuracy when doing his journalistic work, Bai says he has to let go of that compunction when he's doing screenwriting. He estimated that The Front Runner is about 65 percent true. In order to make a compelling, clear, and entertaining movie, he said, he and his cowriters rearranged some events and used a few composite characters.

Bai argues that even movies based on true events that are generally faithful to the facts should not be considered substitutes for books, documentaries, and other journalistic work. "You cannot get knowledge of history from art," he said.

-- CINDY NIE

Amid exhausting news cycles, increasing news avoidance, and loss of trust by the public, Jaisal Noor, of the Solutions Journalism Network, is building affinity for the industry by reporting on the good and the bad. Encouraging readership “requires not only reporting on the problems but also reporting on what’s working to fix those problems,” he said.

Noor spoke to Professor James Geary’s Media and Public Policy class on March 19.

"By being so negative, it doesn’t accurately depict the world that we all live in,” Noor said. “Good things happen, too. People want a more accurate view of their reality, and they don’t want news that’s overwhelmingly negative.”

Solutions Journalism centralizes four pillars in rigorous reporting – response, insight, evidence, and limitations. These maintain journalistic integrity while remaining relevant, ensuring credibility, exemplifying honesty, illustrating possibilities, and inspiring others to try solutions, too. “Solutions Journalism doesn’t take any new skills,” Noor said. “What it does require, though, is sort of rethinking what your role is as a journalist.”

While some may consider Solutions Journalism to be advocacy, Noor stressed that, if done right, it does not idolize figures or movements, nor does it promote one solution. Instead, reporters uphold accountability and critically examine the presented solutions. “The best way to counter the critics is to show them the real examples of newsrooms doing this and the incredible response they’re getting from their communities,” Noor said. He stressed that Solutions Journalism can be a pathway to building new audiences, gaining subscribers, and translating deeper engagement into stronger revenue streams for revitalizing the industry.

--CAMERON SAMUELS

Emily Atkin, founder and editor-in-chief of Heated, “a newsletter for people who are pissed off about the climate crisis”, wants to hold power to account and expose inaction. She also wants people to get angry. Quoting Jack Newfield, she writes, “Anger improves lucidity, persistence, audacity, and memory.” Atkin spoke to Professor James Geary’s Media and Public Policy class on Feb. 29.

Heated, which has almost 90,000 subscribers, was founded in 2019. Before then, Atkin worked at The New Republic, Sinclair Broadcasting, and ThinkProgress, where she covered climate news. She believes it's an overlooked beat. “I often found that climate change was relegated to the sidelines as a story,” Atkin said, recounting her fight to make coverage more visible. 

Through Heated, Atkin wants to promote trust with her audience. “I don’t think you can reach people as a journalist if they don’t think you can care about the story,” Atkin said. Heated’s relatively small circulation also helps her make personal connections to her readers. “People will get information from people they trust over institutions they trust.”

Atkin also gave the students advice on what it’s like to be a journalist, especially a journalist running their own publication. “In order to have a successful independent publication,” she said, “you need to hold yourself to the same standards as big publications.”

--RACHEL ROSENFIELD

Maggie Vanoni, the UConn women’s basketball beat reporter for Hearst Connecticut Media Group, discovered her passion for sports coverage when she enrolled in a journalism class during her sophomore year at the University of Oregon. “When I stepped foot into the journalism department, I just knew this was where I was meant to be,” Vanoni said during her March 6 visit to Professor Adriana Lacy’s Sports Journalism and Innovation course.

Now, as a beat reporter, she explained, “you put a lot of yourself into your writing” but “it’s hard work you can see pay off.” Offering advice to the students as they began work on an athlete profile assignment, Vanoni stressed the importance of note-taking and, especially, utilizing social media to find outside sources. “We’re journalists. We’re technically professional stalkers!”

She added that although it is good to build trustworthy relationships with the athletes you cover, you also need to write the truth. “You are supposed to be friendly with these people, but they are not your friends,” she said.

--MEGAN MARGOLIS

“Why can’t journalism be entertaining?” Matt Shearer asked a crowd of journalism students during his March visit to campus, as part of Professor Neil Swidey's Reinventing Journalism course. Through a presentation of some of his most popular TikToks for WBZ News Radio, Shearer showed students that the news doesn't always have to be depressing. 

Shearer, who got his start hosting two radio shows in college, has “carved out a nice little niche” for himself in the newsroom as “TikTok Guy.” Shearer earned this title through his entertaining person-on-the-street interviews in which he asks people in Greater Boston questions about their lives and community. After a lot of trial and error, he found an interviewing and editing style that best suited TikTok and attracted a younger demographic to WBZ’s reports. “It was rewarding that once I started being myself on social media, people started following,” he said. 

Because of the ephemeral nature of social media, Shearer said, sustaining an audience's attention for an extended period on TikTok is challenging. “Asking someone to watch a minute-long TikTok is like asking someone to watch Titanic twice,” he joked. Nonetheless, Shearer manages to keep his audience engaged through captivating interviews. He explained to students that he would rather interview a hundred people waiting for one amazing quote than just use the first three interviews he conducted.

“Occasionally, a post will take on a life of its own,” Shearer said. Audience members will latch onto a particular character in a video, creating an opportunity for that person to become a recurring subject in Shearer’s TikToks. Commenters playfully refer to these characters as part of the “Matt Shearer Cinematic Universe.” 

In Shearer’s own words, he “gets to have fun for a living.” Journalism, like other means of storytelling, is an art form. Shearer explained that when stories are fun, content can be lighthearted. 

--ANIKA JAIN

Emmanuel Morgan, a sports reporter for The New York Times, stressed the power of open-mindedness and relevance. During his Feb. 29 visit to Professor Adriana Lacy’s Sports Journalism and Innovation class, he told the students, “You don’t have to be covering a game to deliver an interesting and relevant sports story.”

Morgan shared insight about his time reporting at his alma mater, Elon University. “It is so important to build a strong portfolio and gain experience within your school’s newspaper,” Morgan said. He now has experience covering sports in three major cities: Atlanta, Los Angeles, and New York.

Many of Morgan’s stories cover the intersection of popular culture and sports. Blending his passion for music and fashion with his love of sports has helped Morgan understand that “looking into the bigger picture about what is going on around a game can draw other readers in.”

Morgan encouraged students to think about the bigger picture surrounding sports journalism.

-- ROEE MAOR

The Chuck Stuart case sat closed for 35 years. That was until Boston Globe associate editor and columnist Adrian Walker and investigative reporter Evan Allen reopened it. The pair spoke to Brandeis Journalism students and other members of the campus community during a March 7 forum, as part of Professor Neil Swidey’s Reinventing Journalism class. Walker, Allen, and a team of colleagues produced a nine-part written narrative series and ten-episode podcast. Allen was the lead writer for the narrative, and Walker narrated the podcast. Their reporting exposed where the press went wrong and how the media landscape has changed.

In 1989, Chuck Stuart and his pregnant wife, Carol DiMaiti Stuart, were driving home from a birthing class when they were shot in their car. Carol would later succumb to her wounds, as would their child. When Chuck told the police that a Black man shot them, Boston Police unleashed a torrent of racial profiling and violent raids throughout Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood. Eventually, Chuck’s younger brother Matthew, whose help Chuck had enlisted, went to the police to report that Chuck had orchestrated the hit on his wife. Walker, Allen,and their colleagues discovered that more than 30 people knew of Chuck’s involvement shortly after the shooting, but they had all stayed quiet.

Walker and Allen rigorously reported the story, knocking on doors throughout Mission Hill and working for several years on interviews with law enforcement officials. The final project, Allen said, contained only about 5 percent of the material they had amassed during their reporting. The Globe team’s work also led to a three-part HBO documentary called Murder in Boston. Allen and Walker discussed with the students the challenges of cross-organization news collaborations. Notably, the HBO filmmaker paid fees to one key source who appeared in the documentary, even though the Globe newsroom has a policy against paying sources for their participation in journalistic work. The Globe podcast was transparent about this ethical issue.

With the podcast, especially, the Globe team hoped to give the people of Mission Hill a voice. “Mission Hill was a missing piece,” Walker said, “a neglected piece that we really focused on talking about.”

--LULU OHM

Emmy-nominated and Edward R. Murrow Award winning multimedia journalist Lauren Feeney shared insights from her wide-ranging career during her March 12 visit to Neil Swidey’s Reinventing Journalism course.

Feeney's work has been featured on PBS, The New York Times, and The Atlantic, and she served as director of video production for the nonprofit investigative news outlet The Intercept. She now serves as the executive director of The Lexington Observer and executive video producer for a startup called Proof News.

Feeney outlined her transition from national news outlets to overseeing coverage of the nonprofit local news startup in her town of Lexington, Mass. She said that local news is “having a moment” in terms of attention and support from foundations and philanthropists, but she cautioned news organizations against relying on single big funders. If a billionaire funder loses interest, the whole enterprise could be imperiled. She is hopeful that independent, nonprofit local news outlets like the one she runs in Lexington can be part of the solution, especially if they establish a track record for reliable coverage and build broad-based support within their communities.

In terms of her specialty in video, Feeney emphasized that while video journalism can be equally effective on national and local levels, distribution of it on the local level may be more difficult. Video journalism is expensive and relies on social media for distribution, but local news outlets tend to have a harder time building audiences on social. "When you think about who you follow on Twitter, it's big news organizations and your relatives––not necessarily your neighbors,” she said. “They're your community in real life, but not necessarily online."

Feeney said the Observer has come up with other ways of drawing traffic, notably its newsletter, which has an impressive 80 percent open rate. She said one of the biggest differences of running journalism on the local level is your readers stop you in the supermarket to comment on your stories which, she joked, “can be both good and bad.”

–– BENIE COHEN

Former New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg came to Brandeis on Feb. 15 to discuss his experience two decades earlier investigating Jayson Blair, his colleague at the time who unleashed a massive plagiarism scandal.

In the early 2000s, Blair was a rising star at the paper until his journalistic malfeasance came to light. After the Washington Post exposed one instance of Blair’s plagiarism, seven Times journalists – Steinberg, four fellow Times reporters, and two editors – were assigned the task of turning “the machinery” of the paper of record on itself. Meticulously re-reporting Blair’s body of work, the team documented how Blair had included plagiarized or fabricated passages in at least three dozen of the more than 70 of his Times articles he had been assigned between fall 2001 and spring 2002.

Speaking to the students in Neil Swidey’s Ethics course, Steinberg said he never imagined having to investigate the work of his colleagues, not just Blair but also the newsroom’s top editors. “I can’t convey to you how alien this task was,” he said, comparing the work to that of a cop in Internal Affairs.

Published in the Sunday Times, the team’s investigative narrative stretched to nearly 14,000 words, spilling over four full broadsheet pages.

Steinberg left the Times in 2013, after covering both the higher education and media beats. The author of three books, including The Gatekeepers, about a best seller that chronicled the year he spent as an observer in the college admissions office at Wesleyan University, he later did served as an executive of a nonprofit that work seeks to boost college access. More recently he has worked as an independent consultant advising universities and nonprofits on communications. and started a consulting firm to advise universities. Asked by one student to compare the Blair scandal to the 2019 “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal, Steinberg said the similarities were striking. “People with ill intent found the weak spots” -- athletics in the case of admissions, and a newsroom culture built on trust in the case of Blair.

As awful as the Blair scandal was for the Times, Steinberg said, the newsroom’s response helped restore the faith of readers. He and his colleagues leaned into full transparency and the newspaper’s standard of covering the news "without fear or favor.”

–– JILLIAN BROSOFSKY

Washington Post investigative reporter Nicole Dungca has always enjoyed diving into meaty projects that shine a light on under-covered issues. During her Nov. 30 visit to Neil Swidey’s Long-form Journalism course, she discussed what she learned while producing an investigative project that did all of that, but in podcast, rather than written, form.

She and her colleague Jenn Abelson co-reported and co-hosted the podcast Broken Doors, about no-knock warrants. The six-episode podcast was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in audio storytelling.

Dungca explained that the ability to listen to the subject of a piece in their own voice is imperative to effective audio. “Voice is a very specific thing,” she said. “It’s obviously personal, but it also helps convey emotion in a way that is not possible in a traditional written story.” Finding a specific audio clip can be a time-consuming ordeal, she said, but it’s worth it.

Previously a reporter for The Boston Globe and The Oregonian, Dungca is president of the Asian American Journalists Association. She said she’s been in love with journalism ever since she was 15 and talked her way into an internship with Filipinas Magazine. She also discussed her recent investigation into the shadowy history of how the Smithsonian built its brain collection. She stressed the importance in all good journalism of weaving in historical context while still keeping the heart of the story front and center.

– MALIA PERRY

Acclaimed Washington Post writer and sports columnist Sally Jenkins was born into the business. Her father was Hall of Fame Sports Illustrated writer Dan Jenkins and, as she puts it, “I got into sports the way Austrians get into skiing.” Early on, her father implanted in her a question: “What motivates the athletic heart – what makes ordinary people do extraordinary things?” In her Nov. 21 visit to Neil Swidey’s Long-form Journalism course, Jenkins said that question has fueled her career.

In his introduction of Jenkins, a 1982 graduate of Stanford University and 2020 Pulitzer finalist, Swidey said he thought her recent 10,000-word feature on the complicated bonds between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova was the finest work of her decades-long career. Jenkins said she agreed. Headlined “Bitter Rivals. Beloved Friends. Survivors,” the piece takes readers on a surprising, moving ride through a tight focus on the entwined careers of two of tennis’s alltime greats.

At the end of reporting an in-depth story, Jenkins said, “You end up feeling like a cat in yarn, thinking, ‘God, I can’t get out of this.’” She advised students to organize their material by taking inventory of the gems they uncovered and getting clear on their chronology. She tells “Bitter Rivals” not entirely in chronological order, though. She emphasized the role of both practical and emotional sequencing: “[It’s] like a bunch of people crowding the door . . . You have to choose who gets to go first.” Proper sequencing of information allows for emotional payoff.

While she once asked subjects overly polite questions, she learned that straightforward questions work better. In her words, “sincere curiosity is disarming.” However, she stressed that journalists should give their subjects agency in deciding how much detail they want to go into when discussing very private matters. At its essence, she said, “journalism is about explanation.”

Jenkins concluded her visit with this piece of advice: “If you find something you love to do, that you find yourself thinking about even when you don’t have to, choose that. If you love a craft, it will love you back.”

-- ZOE ZACHARY

Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom – writer, sociologist, University of North Carolina professor, and opinion columnist for The New York Times – told Brandeis journalism students that the public benefits when there are fewer walls separating journalism from the academy. “We really do need each other,” Cottom said during her Oct. 26 visit to Adriana Lacy’s Social Journalism course. 

Prior to her Cottom’s visit, students read her recent Times column,  “Ozempic Can’t Fix What Our Culture Has Broken” and watched her appearance on The Daily Show across from then-host Trevor Noah. Cottom, author of the bestselling book Thick, was on campus to receive the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize.

When asked why she went into journalism despite the field’s tension with sociology, Cottom argued that silos between the two camps are artificial and do a disservice to the public that both professions serve. “I’m always trying to use my sociological training and imagination to get the public to see the world as sociologists,” she said. There is no point in conducting  social research to improve society, she said, if people can’t  understand or apply that information. “Journalism,” Cotton said, “is a route to democratize all that knowledge."

Touching on the fading power of X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Cottom said, “I’m not sure social media is sustainable.” Because of its algorithmic power to distort perceptions, compromise privacy and reward heat rather than light, Cotton predicted that social media may be something that ultimately flames out after people have had enough. In its place, she suspects, we may revive more intimate spaces similar to the chat rooms of the late 1990s and early 2000s. 

--TIBRIA BROWN

If you’re a student who doesn’t know what you want to do in your career, Kelsey Desiderio can relate. Late into her time as an undergrad at New York University, she still wasn’t sure about her future. Then she joined the NBC Page Program. Her last stop of that rotational learning initiative landed her at The Rachel Maddow Show at MSNBC. She instantly found her home and has been there ever since, climbing the ranks from production assistant to producer of the show. And when Maddow reduced her nighttime hosting schedule to once a week so she could tackle deeper projects through podcasts, Desiderio joined her, most recently serving as producer and writer for Maddow’s blockbuster podcast Ultra. 

During her Oct. 10 visit to Neil Swidey’s course Longform Journalism: Storytelling for Magazines and Podcasts, Desiderio shared insights about the creative and logistical challenges of reporting in-depth stories. She also explained how moving from cable TV to the podcast format required her to work entirely new muscles. She described the extensive research efforts that she and her colleagues undertook for Ultra, which excavated a little-remembered chapter in 1940s America when extremists attempted to infiltrate the government. Her research included reading a ton of books, consulting numerous historians, and spending hour after hour in library archives hunting for written and audio documentary evidence. She also spent untold hours searching for just the right background music. She enjoyed working as both a producer and a writer, saying, "I like to have my feet in both water.”

Desiderio encouraged the students to embrace journalism as a way to help make sense of a confusing and sometimes depressing world. "There are so many stories waiting to be told," she said. She also stressed the larger importance of the field. "Being a journalist is a public service,” she said, “because informing the public is truly important."

--SCARLETT REN

In her October visit to the Brandeis campus, broadcast journalist Judy Woodruff reflected on the hyperpolarization affecting American politics and the growing fear among younger generations to share their opinions. Woodruff, who is best known as the long-time host of PBS NewsHour, shared her views in a wide-ranging Q&A moderated by Professors Neil Swidey and Ann Silvio that was part of Brandeis’ 75th Anniversary weekend. She also received the BNC Sachar Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement in education. 

When Woodruff first started as a reporter in the 1970s during the era of broadcast legends like Walter Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley, her first producer said to her, “Just remember, Judy, nobody gives a damn what Judy Woodruff thinks.” His message to her was to always dig deep for information and cover the news straightforwardly without embellishing the piece with her own opinion. 

“That was drilled into me,” Woodruff recalled before a crowd of Brandeis journalism students as well as parents and alumni. The approach, she said, was “just get the facts, get them straight, spend your time worrying about whether you got it accurate or not – and if you don’t have all the story yet, make that clear.” She added: “Frankly, there’s never a time when we have all the final facts in a story. We need to be much more humble about that.”

During the earlier stages of her career, Woodruff faced a significant amount of sexism in the workplace, but she ultimately made a name for herself in broadcast journalism, interviewing the last nine presidents and countless other influential politicians.

Woodruff estimated that the culture of bipartisanship first began to break in America during the Nixon administration and continued to fragment throughout the Clinton and Bush administrations: “What we’re seeing today, you can point to former President Trump, you can point to others,” she said. “But this does have its roots in decades past.”

She also highlighted how the blurring of lines between cultural issues and political realms affect people’s attitudes toward political discourse. “Today, what’s cultural is what’s political,” she said. “All the forces in American politics today are driving us apart rather than together.” Consequently, younger generations are more afraid to speak in defense of their beliefs. 

In context to the ongoing war in Gaza, Woodruff emphasized how everyone’s personal connection to the conflict makes it even more different to report than other political conflicts. “We are mourning the terrible loss of life — the atrocities we’ve seen — and trying to understand: Where does it go from here?”

She urged students in the audience to pursue journalism and bring people together one person at a time. “There couldn’t be a more important profession to go into [...] What matters most in life is are you making a difference? Are you feeling like you’re making a contribution? Are you touching people’s lives?” To Woodruff, that relentless gathering of information and devotion to her audience is where the excitement of journalism lies.”

--ANIKA JAIN

Hollywood screenwriter Jim Burnstein, whose credits include Renaissance Man; D3: The Mighty Ducks; and Love and Honor, discussed with Brandeis journalism students what they can learn about storytelling from screenwriters.

Above all, the stories “must be character driven,” Burnstein told a group of about 75 Journalism and American Studies students during a Oct. 5 visit to campus organized by Professor Ann Silvio. Writers must answer the question, “Whose story is this?” since that character’s emotional journey will propel the narrative.

In preparation for his talk, students read four news articles. One featured Army Special Forces Capt. Jeffrey “Toz” Toczylowski, who died in Iraq. Toz left behind $100,000 and an email detailing plans for a blowout party in Las Vegas celebrating his life. Burnstein initially thought he would pitch Toz's story as a film told through the lens of Toz. But after meeting Toz's mother, Peggy, Burnstein chose to build the story around her. He realized that Toz had planned his party not only to divert her from the pain of losing a son, but also so she could establish an emotional connection with the Green Berets, whom Burnstein likened to "surrogate sons." Burnstein explained how the three-act structure allows the writer to delve into a character's motivations, grasp their obstacles, and heighten the stakes throughout the narrative.

Burnstein is a professor at the University of Michigan, where he built and continues to run a powerhouse screenwriting program. Although he cautioned that screenwriters, unlike journalists, are allowed to make up stuff, he said his best work for the screen has been the result of rigorous, journalism-style research. He recounted being confronted by Danny DeVito on the set of Renaissance Man, when it became clear that Burnstein’s script included a sloppy error about the distance between Arlington, VA, and Washington, D.C. Encouraging journalism students to embrace the research process, he said, “You will be behind curtains and worlds you would have never imagined.”

-- LIN LIN HUTCHINSON

As someone who earned her PhD in genetics from Stanford, Alex Dainis has gotten used to getting questions about why she spends so much of her day on TikTok. But the geneticist, who earned her Bachelor’s degree from Brandeis in 2011, has come to see how hobbled science is unless it is communicated clearly – and meets people where they are.

In her April 4th visit to Neil Swidey’s Science Journalism course, Dainis discussed her unusual path and the emerging group of her fellow scientists who are fighting misinformation on social media. “Science communication is broader than journalism with no rules or professional training yet,” she said. She is working to help put those standards in place.

Course assistant Jack Yuanwei Cheng, who profiled Dainis when he was a student in last year’s Science Journalism class, organized her visit to class this semester.

Dainis shared with the students, many of whom are STEM and public health majors, her unlikely journey into science comms. In 2012, she posted to YouTube a mashup video of herself lip-syncing to the pop song “Aaron’s Party (Come Get It)” in different settings over the course of six years. That video went viral to the point where HuffPost covered it. After she received hundreds of thousands of views, she decided to leverage that clout for good. Following the adage of “write about what you know,” she focused on science communications.

Dainis advised the students to, “Ask good questions and know how to create a story behind it.” The field of science communication is young, she said, but it’s clear that reaching the public with sound science, in accessible ways, can benefit the public good. She discussed the profound impact that Angelina Jolie had in persuading millions of people to get genetic testing for diseases such as cancer, after the actress went public with her medical situation. If scientists “do not know how to communicate,” she said, “people will not trust them and public understanding can affect willingness to participate in research.”

—FARISHTA ALI

Filmmaker Dan Chen visited Neil Swidey’s Ethics in Journalism course on Tuesday, April 4, to discuss ethics in journalistic filmmaking, with a specific focus on his documentary Accepted. That highly regarded doc was an official selection at the 2021 Tribeca Festival. 

Chen’s interest in documentary filmmaking began in Kansas at age 14. “We didn’t have lights or equipment, but we had reality,” he said. His goal was always to tell empathetic stories. When he came across the story of a startup school in rural Louisana called T.M. Landry, he knew he had found his next project. The school had become well known for its record of sending lots of low-income students to the nation’s most elite colleges. It had gained a robust presence on social media through its viral videos of students checking their admissions portals and being cheered by throngs of classmates and teachers around them once they received good news. “Our intention was to see the school year through the students’ eyes,” he said. 

Chen discussed the guardrails he and his colleagues put up because they were profiling minors. “We wanted to push for answers and clarity, but we didn’t want to push past where the students wanted to go,” he said. “There would be months where students were not interested in filming, so we would film B-roll in the swamp.”

The story took an unexpected turn when the New York Times published an investigation of about how the school’s cofounders, husband and wife team Mike and Tracey Landry, had engaged in highly questionable behavior to push their students and make the school seem more successful than it was. The critical coverage intially upended Chen’s documentary project. At one point, Mike Landry told Chen he would no longer cooperate, and Chen thought he would have to scrap the film altogether. Ultimately, they continued the project, meeting with the main student subjects outside of school.

In one potent scene, filmed before the Landrys stopped cooperating, Chen and his colleagues captured “Mr. Mike” separating the students and loudly berating them. Chen described that day of shooting as one that began lackadaisically before suddenly turning dramatic and disturbing. “After that scene was filmed, my producer Jesse and I had a disagreement.” They wrestled with whether or not it was right to continue recording or intervene while students’ reacted emotionally to the verbal abuse. They decided to press on. It wasn’t clear that intervening would have actually benefited the students, and documenting the treatment would be for the greater good. “I wanted to capture what it was like to be a student there,” he said. 

“Ultimately, it is still a story about what are the lengths you will go to in order to get an education,” he said. By the end of filming, Chen felt like his story preserved the redemptive quality of a coming-of-age story. “Being a witness is a service if you bring the whole story home.” 

—AUTUMN BELLAN

As the Director of Communications for Greentown Labs, the nation’s largest climate tech startup incubator, Reena Karasin leans into her experience in journalism more than science. “You don’t have to be an expert, you just have to know the right questions to ask,” Karasin said during her March 23 visit to Neil Swidey’s Science Journalism course.

Karasin, who previously worked at the Boston Globe and Scout Cambridge magazine, began her journalism career working for the campus daily at Tufts, where she graduated in 2017 with a degree in English and Mass Communication & Media Studies. At Greentown, she writes features about member startups, helping founders translate their work for broad audiences. She often finds herself reminding them to use accessible language rather than falling back on scientific jargon.  

Based in Somerville, Greentown saw its profile increase dramatically during the recent visit to its headquarters by the Prince and Princess of Wales. William and Kate were in Boston to award their Earthshot Prize for environmental innovators.

Karasin said she loves the fact that Greentown is populated by ambitious, creative people who are working hard to bring solutions to the climate crisis, rather than wallowing in despair. Since she joined the company, she noted with a smile, her own climate anxiety has decreased markedly.

—MAYA LEVISOHN

Elizabeth Kolbert — a The New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author, most recently of Under a White Sky — approaches writing about climate change as a science communicator. “I see myself as a translator of science to the general public,” she told Neil Swidey’s Science Journalism course during her March 9 visit.

A former political reporter for the New York Times, Kolbert transitioned to environmental reporting when she moved to The New Yorker. There she talked with climate experts and learned more about the reality of global warming. Without a background in science -- she majored in literature at Yale -- Kolbert gauges the accessibility of her work by asking, “Do I get it?” If the answer is no, then her readers probably won’t either. So she returns to the keyboard. 

 Kolbert received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for her nonfiction book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. For her, writing in an accessible, accurate and rigorously reported way for general audiences is especially important in our fractured political landscape. “Both sides are guilty of cutting corners in terms of laying things out and not trusting their readers,” she explained. They're worried about backlash from their audience.

There’s also a personal side to her writing. She described her “guilty conscience” when discussing her sustainability practices. “In some ways, my work is like therapy,” she told the students. It allows her to go through her day with a certain amount of hope for the future. That, and holding companies accountable for performative or even false claims of eco-friendliness. Holding up a napkin from Delta Air Lines detailing that they’re “Carbon neutral since March 2020,” Kolbert stressed, “It’s beyond green-washing here!”

As a science journalist and person, Kolbert described the huge changes needed to create a sustainable future. It will require massive effort and radical changes from both individuals and groups. “I don’t see it as a hard-and-fast line," she said, "between where individual action ends and collective action begins.”

—JILLIAN BROSOFSKY

Read the recap landing page about Baron's visit and watch his interview with Journalism Professors Neil Swidey and Ann Silvio.

How have shame and secrecy affected conversations about abortion? Why is humanizing an issue so important when it comes to sensitive topics? Prominent journalists Margaret Talbot and Joshua Prager tackled these and other pressing questions during a “Brandeis Journalism Presents” forum on Nov. 16 in Schwartz Hall. Engaging with an auditorium full of wide-eyed Brandeis students, the two speakers spent the evening scrutinizing – through a journalistic lens – the country’s most polarizing issue of abortion.

Talbot, an award-winning staff writer for The New Yorker who has written extensively on reproductive rights, began the forum by weighing in on the role that abortion played in the midterm elections. “Abortion did turn out to be an issue that was voted on,” she said, “and journalism had a large effect on that.”

In his Pulitzer Prize-finalist book, The Family Roe, Prager detailed the complex stories of the people at the center of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. For a long time, Prager said, pro-life politicians have been able to appeal to their base knowing that Roe was unlikely to be overturned. The midterm elections, he said, showed how much the political landscape has shifted since the high court overturned Roe in June. Many politicians, he said, “take the positions popular with voters, and then realize that they actually have to follow through.”

Fielding thoughtful questions from Brandeis students as well as moderators Ann Silvio and Neil Swidey – both Brandeis journalism professors - Talbot and Prager stressed the importance of telling the human stories at the center of the abortion issue. “One in four women will have an abortion,” Talbot said. “It is so common and so safe yet is still so stigmatized. It is treated, not as private, but as a secret.” She explained that privacy is more of a personal choice, while secrecy tends to hold more of a negative connotation. Because abortion stories tend to be “shrouded in secrecy,” she said, the public often doesn’t get the full picture.

Prager built off her idea, saying, “If you know someone who has had an abortion, you are more likely to be sympathetic towards someone else in their situation.”

In the decade he spent researching his book, Prager said, he uncovered questionable behavior in both the prolife and prochoice movements. Although he acknowledged that he is personally prochoice, he said it was important for him to share those unflattering aspects to both sides of the debate.

The overturning of Roe, Prager said, “has made people engaged, and that is a good thing. We should all be engaged and pay attention.” He once again addressed the future journalists in the room. “It is amazing to say, but it's true, you can help influence the national conversation, and together, we can make it a more honest one.”

—Brooke Reed

Dan Taberski, creator of acclaimed podcasts 9/12, The Line, and Missing Richard Simmons, encouraged Brandeis students to appreciate the journey of a longform story as much as the destination. In his Nov. 10 visit to Neil Swidey’s Long-form Journalism course, Taberski said he seldom listens to his podcasts after he finishes them, but he thinks often about what he learned during his reporting.

In preparation for his visit, the students had listened to the full 9/12 podcast and came prepared with detailed questions about his process. Asked how to handle an interview with a subject who turns out to be lackluster, Taberski advised moving on to someone else. “There’s always someone who can tell the story,” he said. For 9/12, he interviewed more than 75 people, but ended up featuring “tape” from only a fraction of them in the final podcast.

Taberski began his career working as a White House economics aide and served as a producer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Even when his work focuses on serious subjects like our “War on Terror” in the post-9/11 world, Taberski said, he tries to find lighter moments. “The reason humor works for me is that’s how I see the world,” he said. “A joke is just a surprise” Taberski said. All of his stories have some sort of surprise in them.

He encouraged students to prepare extensively for interviews, doing lots of research and crafting questions that have a narrative arc built into them. “Then,” he said, “put your questions away.” Instead of reading from a list of questions, students should focus on engaging in real conversation with their subject.

—RIVER SIMARD

Foreign correspondent and best selling author Blaine Harden has been in the field for a long time, learning what it means to be a journalist. “To begin with, you should be humble, empathetic, and incredibly hard working,” he said during his visit to Ann Silvio’s Truth, Fact, and Research in Journalism class on Oct. 26.

In 2012, Harden received great acclaim for his book Escape from Camp 14, which told the story of Shin Dong-hyuk’s childhood in a North Korean camp and subsequent escape. While Shin did, in fact, escape, he lied quite a bit when telling his story. “With every trauma victim story, there will probably be something not true, so you have to make readers aware, but give them context for where they existed,” Harden told the class. "These are the stories that percolate into the human heart." Through this process, he learned how to interview people who are victims of trauma.

Harden also gave insight on his most recent book Murder at The Mission, which discusses ongoing lies of the Pacific Northwest and how it was taken from Native American tribes. “I think because Americans think so much of themselves, they are more vulnerable to self-congratulatory lies.” Harden said. He said he wrote this book so Americans could learn the truth about their history. “Explaining lies is more interesting than echoing them, not just as a reporter but as a citizen.”

While Harden now spends most of his time freelancing and writing books, he spent 28 years as a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, a job that took him all over the world. He was also a national correspondent for The New York Times and a writer for The Economist and Times Magazine. As he spoke via Zoom to a classroom of eager future journalists, he advised, “if you’re interested in journalism, it is by far the most exciting, most fun, and most challenging way to make a living. You constantly have to read, pay attention, and sometimes acknowledge that you don’t know what you are doing.”

—RACHEL ROSENFIELD

After the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the period of racial reckoning that followed it, journalist Collier Meyerson decided to go deep into the past to try to make more sense of the present. The result was her powerful podcast Love Thy Neighbor: Four Days in Crown Heights That Changed New York. The podcast revisits what came to be known as the 1991 Crown Heights Riot, and it explores the complex roots of unrest between the Black and Jewish communities in that Brooklyn neighborhood.

In her Oct. 25 visit to Neil Swidey’s Long-form Journalism course, Meyerson said the story was deeply personal to her. “I am Black and Jewish,” she said, but stressed that “the story could stand on its own.” Meyerson served as the creator, host and narrator for the podcast, which has received wide acclaim. She has previously written for The Nation and New York Magazine and served as an Emmy Award-winning producer for MSNBC.

Meyerson encouraged Brandeis students to trust their instincts when working on a story that intersects with their background, even if that sometimes means resisting efforts by producers and editors. “You have to do what feels good for you and push back” against ideas that don’t “push the story forward.”

Still, she said, podcasting is a more personal medium than other formats so journalists need to establish “why they are the best person to tell this story.”

—SAM NEWMAN

Angel Mendoza, Reddit editor at The Washington Post, visited Adriana Lacy’s “Art of Engaging Audiences” class via Zoom on Oct. 31. Although he majored in journalism and communications at Arizona State University, he realized he didn't want to become a reporter and decided to pursue social media editing full-time. He first ran the Arizona Republic’s Twitter and Facebook and slowly became interested in Reddit. 

“Reddit is such a wild platform and moderators are always gatekeeping,” he said, itching to write a story about the community. He met and interviewed moderators on Reddit, and though his story never fully developed he built great relationships with them. 

Fast forward to 2021, Mendoza began his work with The Washington Post as a social editor working on the “core team” with Twitter and Facebook. After a while, he began to move solely into Reddit. When asked about his favorite part of Reddit, he explained that the platform is very community-based. “Twitter is a follower-based platform but Reddit is oriented toward topics, locations, and more niche communities, which allows for more meaningful, productive conversations,” he said. Mendoza explained that he tries to be intentional about audience engagement, always thinking of ways to give longer excerpts of stories usually hidden behind a paywall. His goal is to allow people to discuss and engage in stories that fit the platform.

To future journalists, Mendoza advises avoiding overthinking. “Things matter a lot less at the moment than you think they do,” he said.“It is really easy to put a lot of pressure on yourself.” He also explained how he tries to combat imposter syndrome. “When you go into your first newsroom and interact with other journalists, you realize that everyone is trying to figure out their life,” he said. “No matter what title they have or how much clout they have, they are just like you. We are all constantly learning.”

—MIRABELL ROWLAND

Matthew Shaer, writer for the New York Times Magazine and co-founder of Campside Media, joined Brandeis long-form journalism students on Oct. 11 with Texas Monthly writer Eric Benson. They discussed their co-production of the Suspect podcast and shared expertise on fact-checking and interviewing styles, trauma-informed reporting, and comparing the effectiveness of various components in written and audio form.

“I really like working on podcasts,” Benson said. “Sound elements and bringing in things like music and ambient sound – it felt sort of like halfway between writing a magazine article and making a movie.”

Creativity and collaboration are a leading reason they love creating podcasts. Having grown up in Boston, Shaer first showed interest in long-form journalism during college and began producing podcasts when he considered it still a “burgeoning medium.” Benson expressed a similar interest in high school when reading long-form magazines, and the two became friends at New York Magazine.

As JOUR 113a students begin their midterm podcast production, after studying “Suspect,” Shaer and Benson gave advice on good practices for building narrative podcasts. “They need to be really rigorously reported and detail-oriented,” Shaer said. “You have to be working on the macro and micro levels at once.”

“The more we can make it a kind of conversation, where there are people who are participants in the conversation and not people who are just answering questions that journalists are barking at them, I think that's the way to go,” Benson said.

—CAMERON SAMUELS

Susan Dominus — New York Times Magazine staff writer, Pulitzer Prize winner, and Yale professor — favors a three-step process when interviewing subjects for her long-form journalism. In her visit to Neil Swidey’s Long-form Journalism class on Oct. 4, Dominus said her initial interviews typically focus on chit-chat and basic timelines, but the best material tends to emerge in her second and third meetings with subjects. By returning for a second interview, the reporter is “demonstrating prolonged commitment,” she said, which helps create a safe environment for the subjects.

When Dominus sits in front of her computer to write, she said, she looks for ways to step out of the story so she can craft phrasing and imagery that will stick with readers. “So much of writing is conjuring,” she said.

Dominus discussed her unforgettable New York Times Magazine piece “The Mixed-Up Brothers of Bogotá,” which the students read in preparation for the discussion. She advised students to pay close attention and press for even the tiniest details, even at the risk of annoying subjects. “The conventions of normal conversations don’t apply,” she said.

When asked how she knows when to end a story, Dominus said she often finds herself witnessing a natural ending. There’s a reason, she said, that so many books and movies build to a climax around a wedding, birth or funeral. Other endings require more patience, she said. “Sometimes, reporting is just waiting around for something to happen.”

—Isabel Roseth

Mike Deehan and Steph Solis write a daily newsletter for the digital news outlet AXIOS BOSTON. Deehan brings his experience as a political reporter while Solis brings her community reporting background. They joined Adriana Lacy’s Social Journalism class on Sept. 19 to discuss building rapport, audience engagement, and finding stories that matter.

Founded as a national news outlet in 2017, AXIOS introduced a Boston-based newsletter earlier this year. AXIOS is anything but traditional journalism, producing news in small, digestible bites for people who do not have time to consume news. In Latin, their name means “worthy of” which is what they strive to do: make news worthy of your time.

Deehan offered advice on working on a newsletter, saying at the heart of any news is the community. Engaging an audience is extremely important, and having good copy that is well written, accurate and concise is the first step. He also suggested students ask themselves the question “what do we want to say that hasn’t already been said?”

Solis, who has built a reputation for covering stories involving immigration as well as business and technology, advised students to “carve your own image”. She commented on finding niche stories, referencinga story she wrote on Allston Christmas. “Sometimes you have to make a case for a story,” she said. Not all stories have to be political or big headlines to prove it is worth publishing.

As Solis spoke to the class, she sat in a coffee shop in East Boston, writing a story about a new ferry that brings people from East Boston to downtown. According to her, journalists should aspire to go out into the community and learn to ensure the news they create reflects the diversity of the area.

—Mina Rowland

Daniel Estrin, NPR’s international correspondent in Jerusalem, stresses the importance of complexity and progression in storytelling. “You want to ask yourself as a journalist – is this a topic or a story?" he said during his Zoom visit on Sept. 20 to Neil Swidey’s Long-Form Journalism course. "A topic is a phenomenon, but a story is a journey.”

Estrin, a 2006 graduate of Brandeis, has received wide praise for bringing humanity to heart-wrenching stories, from civilian deaths in Syria to the unsolved theft of ancient Torahs. He also co-hosted the "Hotel Corona" episode of the NPR podcast Rough Translation and this year has guest-hosted All Things Considered. His work across platforms, from broadcast radio to podcast to written features, made him a natural fit for Swidey's journalism course, which focuses on storytelling for magazines and podcasts.

Among the many questions he fielded from students who had closely studied his work was how he handles the challenge of interviewing people who have suffered. “I realize I’m perhaps doing nothing to ease them of their pain," Estrin said, "but getting these stories out there is a public service." To all of his assignments, he tries to bring an open mind and empathy, even when interviewing people who would appear to be unsympathetic. “I find that I fall in love with everyone I meet," he said, "because they’re human.”

Estrin's journalistic career began during his senior year at Brandeis, when he interned at Boston NPR affiliate WBUR. He urged any student interested in journalism to focus on the joy of the work and roll with the rejection that comes with a competitive field. “Honoring the stories of others is the privilege of being a journalist."

—Lea Zaharoni 

Lauren Katz is the Manager of Audio Operations at Vox.com, the digital news site specializing in explanatory journalism. That position did not exist until she pitched it, and Vox itself did not exist when Katz graduated from Brandeis in 2013.

In her visit to Neil Swidey’s Reinventing Journalism course on March 29, she told students the jobs they will hold – and the companies they end up working for – may also not exist yet. That’s why it is so essential to learn how to adapt to change.

Before persuading her bosses to create her new job, Katz told the students, she first asked herself what she most liked doing – and how that could align with her employer’s priorities. She enjoyed working in audience engagement and saw the need for a position that promoted Vox’s podcasts and served as a middle person between the editorial/audio teams and the marketing/business side. “Your work has to be a mix of something you’re generally interested in doing and what the company needs you to do,” she said. After all, journalism “is a business at the end of the day.” She stressed that journalism is a rapidly changing field, specifically in the face of evolving technologies. Early on in her career, she said, she leaned heavily on the skills she learned working as a copy editor for The Justice and taking Brandeis journalism courses.

Katz has worked in different roles at Vox for seven years. She told the students that before she got her first job there, she was crushed when she didn’t get what she thought was her dream job, at another news organization. “I don't think we talk about rejection enough,” she said. A month after that coveted job didn’t come through, she found a better one at Vox.

She urged students to form relationships with others in their industry, but she urged them to avoid making these relationships purely transactional. Take a genuine interest in these mentors’ lives, and don’t check in with them only when you’re job-hunting. “Network with people when you do not need anything from them,” she said. 

Katz has remained at Vox for this long in part because her views align well with the company’s. She strongly supports Vox’s decision to avoid paywalls and make its journalism open to all, on the belief “everyone deserves to be informed in a smart, not-talking-down-to-you way.”

—Leah Breakstone

Alvin Chang, data and visuals lead and senior reporter for The Guardian, explained the importance and responsibility of data journalism by saying, “It sounds easy to collect data accurately, but it requires a huge amount of leadership and a huge amount of organization.” Chang spoke to Neil Swidey’s Reinventing Journalism for the 21st Century course on March 17.

Chang went through many jobs in the journalism field before he ended up at The Guardian. He started by covering hockey for ESPN, and his lack of knowledge of the sport prompted him to use data to find interesting ways to tell stories from his beat. He worked in a number of other newsrooms, including the Boston Globe, Vox, and The Wall Street Journal. The throughline in all his work, he told the students, was his desire to learn new skills as well as his willingness to "hit a wall" and fail before figuring his way out of a jam.

Chang leads a team of journalists who use data, visuals and design -- as well as lots of shoe-leather reporting -- to present packages that make the story come alive. He has produced innovative coverage of climate change and the pandemic in addition to many other pressing issues. Chang encouraged students to work hard and take risks. “If you want to build something or you want to learn something," he said, "just do it.” More info: https://alvinschang.com/

—Rachel Rosenfield

Veteran journalist Anthony Flint is used to covering big stories, but that didn’t prepare him when he became part of the biggest story of the day. Flint, a former Boston Globe staff writer turned senior fellow for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, told students the story-behind-the-story of his Boston Globe Magazine piece headlined “I Got a Rare Condition after the Johnson & Johnson Shot. I Still Think Everyone Needs to be Vaccinated.”

After receiving the Johnson & Johnson shot last year, Flint developed Guillain-Barré Syndrome, or GBS, an autoimmune disorder in which the body attacks the protective covering of our neurons. Explaining why he decided to write about his painful ordeal, he told students in Neil Swidey’s Science Journalism class, “It was fascinating to me and I really wanted to share it.” Still, he was worried that, if he wasn’t careful, his story would fuel vaccine hesitancy.

Monitoring reactions to the article after it was published, Flint was relieved to find that it generated lots of interest without fueling controversy or circulating in anti-vaccine circles. “The disinformation, anti-vaccine maelstrom never really materialized around GBS,” he said.

Flint urged journalists and scientists to not be shy about communicating the pros and cons of the vaccines, as long as they offer proper statistics and context. Transparency about the vaccines, he said, will help build public trust. If we don’t talk publicly about side effects, he said, that kind of news can fester underground.

Flint is one of about 250 people who developed the GBS side effect, out of 13 million J&J shots. His recovery has been extremely challenging and taxing, he said, but things are moving in the right direction. He shared with students the encouraging news that he had just jogged on a treadmill for the first time since the onset of his condition.

—Adam Steinberg

Jon Wertheim, the executive editor at Sports Illustrated and contributor to 60 Minutes, shared his insights in a visit to Jacob Feldman’s Sports Journalism and Innovation class on March 24.

Before speaking with Wertheim, the class watched his recent 60 Minutes piece on WNBA Star Sue Bird. Wertheim explained some of the differences of storytelling for TV versus in longform writing.

When Wertheim was just getting started in sports media there were clearly defined roles such as writer or TV personality. Now, as long as you are telling interesting stories, you can really fill any role. “All the rules are off,” Wertheim said.

Wertheim offered a warning about social media. “You want to differentiate yourself but the risk/reward of social media is perilous,” he said. “I know a lot more people who have hurt their careers than helped it.”
Wertheim’s parting advice to aspiring journalists was: “Differentiate yourself. Look for ways to say things that aren’t obvious.”

—Ariel Schultz

“If you can’t talk to people, you’re gone,” said Gina McCarthy, the federal government’s top national climate official, during a March 8 Brandeis Journalism webinar. The fate of climate change policy, if not our planet, she suggested, will rely heavily on our ability to communicate with one another.

The event featured McCarthy, the nation’s first National Climate Advisor, in a wide-ranging, spirited, hour-long conversation with Neil Swidey, the director of the Brandeis Journalism Program. Swidey drew from the hundreds of questions that Brandeis students and other webinar attendees had submitted.

After a welcome from Brandeis President Ron Liebowitz, Swidey kicked things off by asking McCarthy how she can possibly maintain her optimistic attitude even though climate change is such a bleak issue and existential threat. She cited her Irish heritage and her knowledge of what works from her many decades in public service. Using the metaphor of a Boston Marathon runner, McCarthy criticized the many climate change activists who greet signs of progress by lamenting how much more there is left to do. “Well, for Christ’s sake, don’t remind me of that when I’m going up Heartbreak Hill,” she said. “Celebrate every damn step!”

Before serving as President Biden’s chief climate advisor, McCarthy ran the EPA for President Obama. She stressed that her job isn’t to make people understand climate change – or even to care about the climate. “The goal is to get them to act in a way that’s consistent with what climate tells us,” she said.

McCarthy cautioned people not to talk down to those who disagree with them about climate change – or to try to prove how wrong they are. Instead, she suggested focusing on solutions where there can be common ground, like the shift to clean energy. “I need people’s spirits lifted right now,” she said. “I need them to be hopeful.” In the end, she said, hope – not fear – is going to drive change.

—Nashvin Kaur

Adriana Lacy, the digital and audience engagement editor at the Nieman Foundation for journalism at Harvard University, urged Brandeis journalism students to challenge the traditional metrics of success in the field.

“How can we redefine what engagement means?” Lacy asked during her visit in February to Neil Swidey’s Reinventing Journalism for the 21st Century course. “Like, maybe it wasn't the most read story, but maybe we got the highest community response for it. Or maybe we wrote about an issue that hasn't been covered and that organization got more funding. That's a success.” By avoiding the trap of solely chasing eyeballs, she said, journalists can determine how to best serve the public and uplift marginalized voices. Lacy also stressed the importance of meeting people where they are, and reaching out in meaningful ways to underserved communities.

Though still in her twenties, Lacy has already had impressive experience at a host of top news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Guardian and Axios. Committed to helping those coming up behind her, she is also the founder of Journalism Mentors, a nonprofit site that connects young journalists with mentors in the industry.

—Lesedi Lerato Mataboge

Ann Scales, Director of Media Relations for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, stressed the vital importance of clarity in both journalism and health communications when she spoke in February to Neil Swidey’s Science Journalism, the Pandemic and Disinformation course. Earlier in her career, Scales worked in a variety of high profile editing and reporting jobs, including serving as a White House Correspondent for the Boston Globe.

In her Brandeis talk, Scales told students how she pushes for transparent, accurate data, particularly on the health department website.

Discussing the trends of public trust in science journalism, a prevalent theme in the class, Scales lamented how politicized the pandemic and other public health matters have become, an occupational hazard for both science journalists and science communicators. But she celebrated the growth in student interest in both fields. “They want to be a part of what we know,'' she said. She also stressed the importance of being able to pivot during a pandemic when knowledge changes rapidly. “It's not that somebody was wrong,” she said, “it's that facts change so we must adapt to that.”

Her role makes her a critical bridge between scientists and the public, and she works hard to make sure the experts speak in clear, comprehensible language, rather than falling back on scientific jargon. “If I don't understand it,” she said, “I can't communicate it.”

—Srishti ​​Nautiyal

Betsy West, one of the filmmakers behind RBG and My Name is Pauli Murray, visited Brandeis on March 7 to discuss her acclaimed documentary films and answer questions about finding stories, getting funding, and responding to criticism. “The thing about going into documentaries is that it’s not really a business, it’s a calling,” she told Ann Silvio’s Documentary Journalism class about going into documentary-making. But she’s not disillusioned by this calling of hers. She and Julie Cohen, her co-creator, are committed to objectivity and accuracy. After all, she's “not an activist.”

Mainly asked about RBG and My Name is Pauli Murray, West explained her process of telling the stories of these extremely accomplished people. Finding the narrative for both Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Pauli Murray meant deciding what to leave in and what to take out. “There was just too much,” West explained about Pauli, who was a non-binary civil rights pioneer, Brandeis professor, lawyer, and reverend. Similarly, in making RBG, West and Cohen “found that the arc of the story was women’s rights,” leaving out information about the justice’s work in procedural law.

As a professor at Columbia Journalism School, West is passionate about helping young people find their calling, be it in documentary-making or something else. “Try to work with people from whom you can learn,” she explained about taking advantage of the wealth of knowledge available in newsrooms and production companies. For those not sure about a career in journalism, her advice was to try it out. “Just go do it.”

—Jillian Brosofsky

The Brandeis Journalism Program hosted the “Quick Strike” team behind the Boston Globe’s series “Blind Spot” on Nov. 15. The reporting team won the 2021 Investigative Reporting Pulitzer Prize for uncovering systemic government failures that led to fatal consequences for drivers. They spoke to the Brandeis community along with the video producer and audience director who helped make the reader experience as complex and all-encompassing as the investigation itself. They discussed the importance of multimedia journalism and how investigative news can influence public opinion and government action.

“The form of journalism is different [than activism]. I am not yelling at people to be outraged, you're showing people the facts,” explained reporter Evan Allen. “Ultimately, people do not like to be told what to do. It doesn't move people when you tell them what to think or how to feel or how to act. But when you present them with the facts that they need to draw their own conclusions, that’s when you can move the dial a little bit. That’s why I like journalism — the facts are loud and they hurt and they should.”

—Anna Nappi

View the full recording of their panel discussion here under the “Featured Events” section. (Check out recordings of other recents talks on that same page.)

The first time Iris Adler’s boss at WBUR told her to go make a podcast, she replied simply – “what’s a podcast?” In the decade since, Adler has mastered the craft. Adler, the former executive director for programming, podcasts and special projects at Boston NPR powerhouse WBUR, led the station’s podcast division with distinction. In that capacity, she oversaw a number of acclaimed journalistic shows including Endless Thread (in collaboration with Reddit), and Modern Love (in collaboration with the New York Times). She spoke on Nov. 4 to Neil Swidey’s Longform Journalism: Storytelling for Magazines and Podcasts course, emphasizing the creativity and awareness that helped her team make its mark in the podcast world. 

Adler admitted that the initial transition from radio to podcast was tentative. Her earliest productions were essentially regular public radio stories. Before long, though, she and her team began to explore and embrace the freedom of the new format. “The engineers became sound designers – that creative space previously didn’t exist,” she said. “They made it sound brilliant.” Podcasts also pioneered a more natural, human narration style – “the insertion of self to serve the point.” Eventually, the techniques her team helped popularize became common on traditional public radio as well.

Though the journalism industry has struggled in recent years, Adler is bullish on the role that podcasts will increasingly play. “They’re here to stay,” she said. “It’s a wonderful platform.” Last year, NPR’s podcast division for the first time brought in more revenue than its broadcast shows, providing crucial funding to support the news organization’s overall journalism. NPR podcasts are also attracting a much more diverse audience than its over-the-air shows. “The smart money is on NPR,” she said, to lead the charge as podcasts help shape the future of journalism.

-Ellis Zehnder 

Catherine Elton, the senior editor for Boston Magazine and a former longtime foreign correspondent in Latin America, compared life as a freelance journalist to being an actress. “You go on an audition every day,” she said, “and you have to accept a lot of rejection.”

During her visit to Neil Swidey’s Long-form Journalism course on Nov. 16, Elton spoke about the joys and challenges of covering other nations. She spent many years living in, and reporting from, Peru and Guatemala. She encouraged students interested in global affairs to consider moving to a new country and seeing it as a journalist, rather than as a tourist. But she also cautioned them against seeing only the negatives.

At Boston Magazine, Elton edits and writes long-form journalism on a wide range of subjects. She encouraged students to do their reporting in person whenever possible. If they can’t do that, she advised them to pick up the phone and call rather than emailing or texting. “Use the ‘phone function’ on your phone.”

Elton will be joining the Brandeis Journalism team this spring, teaching JOUR 132B Covering the World: International Reporting and Global Affairs. She will be team-teaching this course (which is cross-listed with IGS) with Romesh Ratnesar, who has reported extensively from Asia, Europe and the Middle East. A member of the editorial board of Bloomberg Opinion, he is also a former senior editor at Time magazine and State Department official during the Obama administration.

Astead Herdon, national political reporter for the New York Times and fill-in host for the Times’ popular podcast The Daily, urged students interested in political reporting to write for real people, not insiders. In his visit to Neil Swidey’s Long-form Journalism course on Oct. 19, Herndon said, “The reason I work at a newspaper, and not some bougie-ass magazine, is I want to write for everyone.“ He stressed that this approach is so much more meaningful than “assuming that 30 people in DC are the only ones who matter.”

Before moving to the Times, Herndon started his career in Boston, as an intern with the Boston Globe. From there, he immediately transitioned to a full-time job on the Globe’s Metro staff, covering cops and courts and a wide range of daily stories such as county fairs. Herndon credits his rapid rise in journalism both to saying yes to new opportunities and knowing when to stick around. He described how important it is in internships to know — and do — what you were hired for, rather than getting starry-eyed — but also to make time to pursue more ambitious projects that demonstrate your full talent. For him, this meant sticking to the beats he was assigned to at the Globe — crime stories and then the Boston City Council — but also volunteering on weekends for the beats he was more passionate about and paying attention at opportune moments. His career took off after Donald Trump’s surprise win in 2016, when he was sent to the Globe’s DC bureau to report on the transition. Herndon, who is also an analyst for CNN, moved to the New York Times in 2018 and has been covering politics nationally since then.

—Gavi Klein

Lovia Gyarkye may be Arts and Culture critic at the Hollywood Reporter, but she approaches her job like a reporter. When visiting Josh Wolk’s “Arts Journalism, Pop Culture, and Digital Innovation” class on Oct. 26, Gyarkye spoke about how her time as a reporter and fact-checker for the New Republic made her extremely conscious of learning everything about her subject before evaluating it. “A good review takes a lot of reporting and research,” she explained, noting thorough background research helps make a critique “rock solid.”

Like a growing vine, Gyarkye said she still continues to collect knowledge and grow as a critic, while exploring spaces that women of color have not always been welcome into. “As a dark skinned woman, I’ll be ripped apart for any criticism I make,” she said, adding that the prejudice that critics, who are women of color, receive is a symptom of a larger systemic issue. And that finding support systems to commiserate with is vital.

For aspiring critics, Gyarkye advised: Reading is fundamental -- and those interested in the field should read as much as possible from all forms of writing (non-fiction, fiction, poetry) to learn the different ways language can be molded to create a robust and vivid idea of the media being reviewed. She also believes the best criticism is very specific about the reasons they loved or hated what they reviewed.

“Criticism takes time, practice, and consideration,” Gyarkye said. And in the age of social media and the internet, where everyone's a critic, she added, “Now is the time, more than ever, for good critics.”

—Tibria Brown

Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalists, urged students interested in journalism to “go there” and get started.

In a visit to Fred Barbash's journalism internship course on Nov. 17, the married couple discussed their varied careers, from local reporting to foreign correspondent postings in Mexico City, Tokyo and London. “Figure out a place in the world that you’re interested in, hopefully one that isn’t flooded with a million other journalists,” Sullivan said.

Although the couple has reported from around the world, Jordan encouraged students to consider working as a journalist to fill a need in one of this nation’s many “news deserts” that lack quality outlets. There’s lots of opportunity, she said, adding, “I’m excited for you.”

Her husband echoed that. “This is still an incredibly interesting way to make a living,” Sullivan said. “People who say journalism is dead are idiots.”

Alumnus and associate producer of PRI's Living on Earth Jay Feinstein '17 spoke with journalism students at the Meet the Minor event on Sept. 30. Feinstein discussed his roots in environmental advocacy during his years at Brandeis — he was the founder of the campus rooftop garden — and how that translated to his career as a journalist. While activism and journalism have a storied history of contention, Feinstein stressed that students could ethically forge this path. "It's a tricky line between activism and journalism," he said. "But at Living On Earth, we don't do activism. We tell the truth about climate change."

Feinstein said audio journalism is enjoying “a renaissance” in part because "it's personal. You're talking right into somebody's ear." He urged students to engage with the medium, producing their own audio work. As a Brandeis undergrad, Feinstein was a Living on Earth intern. After graduating, he went to graduate school in business and started a corporate career but shifted gears to try to find more meaning in his life. He was able to become a producer for Living on Earth because of the professional connections he had developed and nurtured. He encouraged students to prioritize relationship-building as they move through their careers.

Veronica Chao, the Boston Globe's deputy managing editor, offered this advice to students hoping to pitch a story idea and get the green light to write it as a freelancer. "Ask yourself: Will readers care about this?" said Chao, who oversees Living Arts coverage as well as the Sunday Magazine. During her visit to Neil Swidey's Long-form Journalism class on Sept. 30, Chao said she did not always know she would work in media. After editorial roles with D.C. and Boston-based publications, the Globe recruited Chao, where she edited City Weekly before joining the Boston Globe Magazine.

She emphasized the importance of good timing and skill — two factors young reporters should leverage as they break into the industry. Pitching, Chao said, relies on timing. "It can be an exciting idea, but not timely," she said, describing why an editor might say no to an otherwise good pitch. "Being a journalist at this time, there is an unprecedented amount of news." Pitching is the chance to show you have the voice to tell a story distinctively, Chao said. "We get a sense of your style."

—Autumn Bellan

"Every section needs to end with a disclosure or a new piece of information," Matthew Shaer told students during Neil Swidey's Long-form Journalism class on Oct. 7. Shaer, a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine, explained that, for a long-form magazine story to engage the reader, each part "needs something that leaves people wanting to know what happens next." Or as he puts it: "It's all about buying yourself space to jam broccoli down someone's throat."

In contrast, Shaer, who is also the co-founder of podcast studio Campside Media, said that, with audio journalism, it's the delivery that makes the difference. "It does not matter what someone says, it matters how they say it," he explained. "That's the opposite of the truth for magazine writing." Currently, Shaer — who was an English Literature major at the University of Maine, discovering journalism as "a way into fiction writing" — is exploring a different form of storytelling. He’s writing a book based on his 2019 New York Times Magazine story about the criminalization of poverty.

—Elliot Bachrach

Dave Jorgenson, better known by millions as The Washington Post's "TikTok guy," gave Brandeis journalism students a glimpse of his approach to the wildly popular platform that makes news accessible to a younger audience -- and how he does that while working for one of the nation's most established news organizations. Speaking via Zoom to Fred Barbash's Contemporary Media course on Oct. 6, Jorgenson said he was producing "goofy" videos for the Post's official YouTube channel in the spring of 2019 when he convinced his managers to let him launch a stand-alone TikTok account. He focuses on a single, discrete element of a Post news story and brings it alive through the use of fast-paced comic skits, like dressing up as a cicada, to explain otherwise complicated concepts, like the cicada's life cycle. He attributes the popularity of his TikTok (which has more than 1 million followers) in part to his team's ability to keep up with TikTok trends such as viral sounds and hashtags. It also helps, he joked, that he was "so cool." After answering student questions, Jorgenson offered the advice to be a team player in any journalism newsroom setting because when people understand your capabilities, they trust you with creating the "next big thing."

—Noah Zeitlin

Journalists and married couple Taffy and Claude Brodesser-Akner visited via Zoom on Sept. 27 to share their wisdom with the students in Josh Wolk's Arts Journalism course. Taffy is an award-winning journalist and author, who has worked for GQ and The New York Times and is known for her celebrity profiles. Her husband, Claude, is a multimedia journalist, who has experience as a podcaster and politics writer.

They advised journalism students to prioritize listening during interviews, especially when asking tough questions. Sitting in silence and waiting for your interviewee to respond might feel awkward, they said, but it's worth it in the end. Taffy is known for maintaining a strong voice in her writing, but she noted the importance of restraint and not being gratuitous when showing personality in your prose. They both agreed that journalism is not a place for ego.

—Anna Nappi

“Try to figure out why you’re doing what you’re doing,” Swati Sharma told the students in Neil Swidey’s Reinventing Journalism for the 21st Century course on March 16. “If you figure that out, it’ll guide you in all of the hurdles and decisions you have to make.” This was the life-changing career advice that Sharma, the new editor-in-chief of Vox, discovered for herself years ago. That advice has shaped her career ever since. Sharma began her journey studying politics, not intending to go into journalism at all. But a couple of college internships changed that, she began to pursue work as a journalist in full force. She quickly climbed the ladder, moving from The Boston Globe to The Washington Post to The Atlantic, where she served as managing editor, before being named editor-in-chief of Vox, a leading network of explanatory journalism. Sharma described her “why” as the belief that ignorance is the cause for most of society’s evils. Her work in journalism, accordingly, aims to shed light on issues many are ignorant of and thus reach a wide range of people in a powerful, lasting way.

—Gavi Klein

Dr. Allissa Richardson — author of Bearing Witness While Black: Smartphones, African Americans, and the New Protest #Journalism —gave her advice for forging a successful but balanced journalism career. During her talk with students in the Reinventing Journalism course on April 8, Richardson advised students to find purpose in their writing, and to lean into it even in the face of racial violence and other trauma. “Never stop writing,” she said. It can be extremely therapeutic. “If you write it down,” she said, “you only have to say it once.” She also recommended checking in “on your strong friends.” Even if they appear to be doing fine, they may well be hurting and in need of support. She said the burdens of trauma can be especially heavy for journalists of color, and she encouraged journalists to pay attention to their own mental health. Richardson, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, is writing a new book called, Canceled: How Smartphones and Social Media Democratized Public Shaming.

—Noah Zeitlin

“I was really interested in helping communicate how really complicated things work” Alvin Chang, The Guardian’s senior data reporter, told students in the Reinventing Journalism course. Chang found his speciality in data visualization through a long, winding path in journalism, beginning with a job writing about hockey for ESPN. Although he didn’t come into the job knowing much about hockey, he learned how to use data to distinguish his work. Through his stints in various newsrooms, a passion emerged: communicating complicated ideas simply. Chang, who previously worked at Vox producing viral explainer videos, constructs his work by imagining his audience. “I often think about my mom … what can I do to get her to understand things that are relatively complex?” Chang said. He said he wants to make information accessible, and he knows it can be.

—Dara Goldfein

Growing up, Akilah Johnson thought she wanted to study STEM but discovered relatively late her aptitude for writing. While her journey to becoming a respected journalist might seem natural, she explained to Professor Neil Swidey’s Science Journalism and the Pandemic course, she has actually traveled a nonlinear path. Johnson is now a national reporter at The Washington Post, covering health disparities at the intersection of race, medicine, politics and immigration. Johnson said she hopes readers walk away from her articles feeling challenged and having learned something new. She advises future journalists to know their “superpower,” and she recounted how she used her knowledge of hip-hop music and the Miami club scene to make herself invaluable to more experienced colleagues in her first newsroom job as a low-ranking editorial assistant. She encouraged students to avoid limiting themselves to one specific beat or title, urging them to explore diverse topics and uncover truths about under-explored issues. “Everyone should feel comfortable making a left turn in their path,” she said, “because they will end up at the right place eventually.”

—Nicolas St Cloud

For a group of journalism students, Lisa Tuite offers the ultimate insight into finding the facts that blossom into important news stories. Tuite worked at The Boston Globe library for nearly four decades, heading the department for 25 of those years. In her talk with Brandeis students in both of Neil Swidey’s courses on Feb. 23, Tuite discussed the importance of research in journalism and how to implement different research tools. While a Google search may be a great jumping-off point to a story, Tuite recommends premium databases like Nexis Uni, which Brandeis students have free access to. She walked students through the process of conducting productive database searches, and she reminded them that, even in our digital age, there is still great value in real-world archives. She put her research prowess to work on many of the Globe’s highest-profile projects over the years, most notably the Spotlight investigation into clergy sex abuse. And she discussed the surreal nature of seeing an actress play her in the Academy Award-winning movie Spotlight.

—Claire Kiewra

In life and in the field of journalism, listening is essential to learning, Ann Scales told Brandeis journalism students in the Science Journalism and the Pandemic course on Feb. 18. Scales is a former Boston Globe editor and Washington correspondent who is now the Director of Media Relations for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. She has served as the director for several years, but her role shifted tremendously in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic as the messages she gave the public became more urgent than ever. Scales told students, whether you are a journalist or a scientist, you must make things comprehensible, and you must be interested in what people have to say. In all aspects of life, you will benefit from caring about other human beings and the stories they have to tell you. “You listen,” she said, “and you tell the truth.”

—Emerson White

More than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, countries around the world have implemented different measures to combat the spread of the virus. Swedish journalist Amina Manzoor spoke to students in the Science Journalism and the Pandemic class about Sweden’s seemingly more relaxed response to the pandemic, referred to as “the Swedish Experiment.” Manzoor discussed both the fallout from Sweden’s approach and the distorted reporting about it. Mostly lost in the coverage, she pointed out, was the fact that Swedish public health authorities worked to protect older, more vulnerable residents. If the government’s main goal truly had been to achieve herd immunity, she said, they wouldn’t have enacted protections for the elderly. She also discussed how the spread of disinformation through a private Swedish Facebook group called the Mewas decreased public confidence in the government’s public health advice. From her experience in science reporting and her expertise on pandemics, Manzoor stressed that “in every story, [one] has to explain what is uncertain...People want information.” Manzoor, who is now a medical columnist for the Swedish newspaper Expressen, is working on a book that synthesizes her insights about the pandemic.

—Roshni Ray

Whether working in old media or new media, Anne Korblut told students, let curiosity be your guide. Kornblut, the Vice President of Global Curation for Facebook, spoke to Neil Swidey’s Reinventing Journalism class on March 23. After getting to know the students a bit and polling them about their media consumption, Kornblut described her journey, from a breaking news reporter at the New York Daily News covering tragedy and mayhem, to the deputy national editor for The Washington Post working on high-profile investigations, to her current position at Facebook. She emphasized the importance of local news as the lifeblood of communities, and she described her work at Facebook to help support small news outlets. She also discussed the challenges of trying to root out misinformation. Kornblut advised students interested in journalism to familiarize themselves with the business and technological sides of the profession. They don’t have to become expert coders, she said, but they should try to learn enough about coding so they can talk intelligently with the techies they’ll be working with. Because the media world is changing so rapidly, it will be essential for journalists to have the multifaceted skills to adapt.

—Maddy DuLong

“Look for the gaps. Find the things your friends don’t want you to talk about – then write about that.” That was the advice of sports journalist, longform newsletter editor and podcaster Jacob Feldman, who spoke in April to the Reinventing Journalism class. Feldman began his journalism career as a fact-checker at Sports Illustrated, though he quickly moved into a full writing role. Then, when the magazine started a weekly NFL newsletter, Feldman leveraged his experience running newsletters in college into taking charge. Feldman, who covers the intersection of sports, tech and media for Sportico, says he’s still a passionate sports fan. It’s just that now it’s mostly for sports he doesn’t cover – for example, he recently fell deep into the world of curling. Much of the talk focused on Feldman’s other role as editor and cofounder of the weekly newsletter the Sunday Long Read. That all came about when he was still a senior in college and connected with noted journalist Don Van Natta Jr. over Twitter, answering Van Natta’s call for someone who had experience producing newsletters. Since then, the Sunday Long Read has become an important aggregator and curator of long-form journalism, but Feldman says that persuading people to want to read long form isn’t his goal. Instead, he said he focuses on helping those who already want to read long pieces but are blocked by the barrier to entry. “The internet’s a big place” he said, “you don’t need to convince a million people.” In the Sunday Long Read, he helped Van Natta find a gap and they filled it, and turned that into success. He encouraged students to find their own niche. “What do you wish you could read more of?” he asked. That’s where you should start.

—Ellis Zehnder

Patricia Wen, editor for the Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team, joined Neil Swidey’s Science Journalism and the Pandemic class in April to discuss how to cover complex medical stories with care, rigor and humanity. “You don’t just write a story because it’s titillating or fascinating or whatever, it’s for the public good,” Wen told the class. She and Swidey discussed a series they wrote together about what can happen when doctors working at the frontier of medicine disagree about a diagnosis. The story, about a teenager named Justina Pelletier, revealed how dramatically these medical disagreements can escalate, in this case leading to a custody battle pitting the girl’s parents against Boston Children’s Hospital and the state child welfare system. As an editor for the Spotlight Team, Wen offered much of her advice to students from the vantage point of investigative journalism. And yet, she said, “The truth is all journalists are investigative reporters.” She stressed the importance of balancing aggressive curiosity with the forethought to check one’s own biases. “At the end of the day, your goal is to tell the truth as best you can see it.”

—Addison Antanoff

“My best advice to you is delete all your tweets,” Kate Nocera, news desk editor for Axios and former Washington Bureau chief for Buzzfeed News, told students in the Reinventing Journalism course on April 1. Asked whether social media has had a positive or negative impact on journalism, Nocera said that while she initially thought that social media had a positive impact, years of working in the field convinced her of the latter. “Normally humans make mistakes, and if you make a mistake on the internet, it’s forever and people won’t let you forget,” Nocera said. When Nocera spoke about journalism trends, she mentioned the power of the Trump phenomenon in attracting attention for journalists. With Trump gone, she said, journalism sites are seeing a dramatic decrease in traffic. “Journalists were riding high for four years,” Nocera said. “That’s not a joke when Donald Trump said ‘I’m really good for you.’ It was true; he was good for a lot of individual journalists, and he was good for the industry.” But, she said, that's not the same as being good for our democracy.

—Jolie Newman

Science isn’t absolute, but that doesn’t mean it’s untrustworthy. Dr. Richard Young discussed the challenges underlying such uncertainty with the Science Journalism and the Pandemic class on April 22. Young is a noted geneticist, a professor of biology at MIT, and a member of the Whitehead Institute. He has served as an advisor to the World Health Organization and National Institutes of Health. Young said that questions in science are continually being reframed to produce more complex answers, which has taught him to be wary of making definitive statements prematurely. He said there is often a “neglected point of view” or alternative hypothesis that can call previous conclusions into question. “One of the things you discover as you get older and more experienced is that things you passionately believed were true are called into question with more data -- more often than you wish,” he said. This dynamism excites Young; it shows the scientific method at work.

—Nikki Dagen

Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to the President, stressed that knowledgeable reporting allows people to “self-correct” when they are going down the “wrong path,” as it gives readers a new way of seeing the truth. He was joined by Dr. Atul Gawande and Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal for a Brandeis virtual discussion in March moderated by the journalism program director, Neil Swidey. Dr. Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer, spoke about all the good that science journalism has done during the pandemic but said he regretted that the field had been largely “impotent” in stopping the spread of misinformation and disinformation. He shared with the audience a multi-part test for how news consumers can detect pseudoscience. Dr. Rosenthal, the editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, described the dangers to the pandemic response (and our democracy) posed by news deserts — vast swaths of the country that now lack reputable local news outlets. She said Kaiser Health News is working to help bolster local news through its pandemic coverage partnerships. Dr. Fauci emotionally described the sting of seeing anti-science advocates use the government’s shift in guidance on face masks as a way to discredit public guidance overall — he called it “one of the most painful things that I have gone through this past year.” Fauci described the battle between science and anti-science this way: “It’s kind of like a tug of war. Who’s going to win that tug of war?” In addition to drawing a record audience, the webinar attracted a good deal of media coverage. For the full recording of the webinar, go to the Brandeis Journalism events page. For a sampling of media coverage see the Boston Globe as well as Brandeis Now and the Justice.

—Anna Nappi