Despite our vague suggestions otherwise, journalists don’t usually welcome criticism. And we rarely accept it gracefully. So I was very impressed yesterday when I saw that Ben Wedeman, one of CNN’s Middle East Correspondents, posted a link on Twitter where people, especially Egyptians, could go to critique his and CNN’s coverage of recent events in… Read More Critiquing Journalism

I cannot stop looking at the photos from David Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim’s article about the Egyptian military killing pro-Morsi protesters. The pictures capture so much raw emotion. They tell a story all of their own. You don’t even need the text piece. Picture number ten is especially captivating. Everything about the picture draws me… Read More The power of photos

Anything can come up in budget. This morning we talked about supercritical toilets, pigs, the wheat harvest and adorable elderly couples. Stranger things have been brought up in previous budget meetings. But it just goes to show the nature of the job: as a journalist, you can end up writing about, quite literally, anything. 

I’ve been noticing more and more lately how different journalists I follow utilize Twitter. One of the reporters who I think has a great Twitter presence is David Kirkpatrick, Cairo Bureau Chief for The New York Times. One of the things that impresses me most is how responsive he is to tweets from his followers.… Read More Journalists and Twitter

The Missourian website layout gives me severe anxiety. I think it may be the juxtaposition of the stark blue background and the awkward white rectangle in the middle. Or maybe it’s because as soon as I open the page I think of stories I should be writing that I’m not. Either way, the website layout… Read More Missourian Website Layout

You feel the pressure to be accurate with every story. Even the shortest brief requires you to AC and cq. But never before have I felt more pressure to be accurate than when working on this story about Nelson Mandela. Maybe it is because almost every source I have interviewed has asked me to send… Read More Memorializing an icon

I once read that being a spy comprises mostly of travel and mind-numbing boredom broken by brief interludes of sheer terror. In my opinion, that sounds a lot like a GA shift. You go check the police blotters, maybe pick up some documents from the courthouse, drive to an accident scene…but most of the time… Read More It’s like being a spy

Moments like this, the ousting of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, make me remember how much I love journalism and why I chose to dedicate my life to it. Events like this are so important, not just for Egypt, but for the region and the world. There’s an immediate and lasting need for information when something… Read More Morsi is out

One of the many reasons I love journalism is the people it allows me to meet. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of interviewing John Fresen, a native South African who now teaches statistics at MU. I spoke with him about his memories of Nelson Mandela, whom he knew personally, but in the course of the… Read More Two degrees from Nelson Mandela