Late in the afternoon or at the end of my workday, one of my favorite things to do is read the daily e-mail I get from the Nieman Journalism Lab with a daily digest of stories, including their own, that are often pertinent to The Journalism Salute podcast.
That sometimes includes the writing of this week's guest, Nieman staff writer Hanaa' Tameez, who along with her colleagues covers the future of journalism and (often) the people looking to make a better future of it.
Thanks for reading The Journalism Salute. This post is public so feel free to share it.
Hanaa' writes stories about innovations in international journalism, does Q&A's with authors, and explores bigger picture stories like what the changes to the National Labor Relations Board would mean for news unions, or exploring the aftermath of what happened in organizations that pledged to do better at connecting with their communities after George Floyd was murdered in 2020.
I write about also the future of news and journalism innovation, and also how journalism survives … interesting business models, interesting ways that newsrooms and individuals are trying to engage their audiences and reach people and get information to people who need it the most.
And also covering the changes that our industry goes through. So there is the labor movement of journalism and the changing notions of objectivity and the ideas around diversity, equity, inclusion, and how that fits into journalism, things like that.
As its editor-in-chief, Laura Hazard Owen, has said, Nieman is often trying to cover good people with good intentions who are trying to make the industry better.
But the reality of that means that sometimes things don't move as fast as you wish. Hanaa' articulated this for us.
The hardest part feels sort of like the helplessness of, I have all these skills to find all this information and how to figure out that there is a better way and here are all the ways, and yet things are not changing or things are still happening (the old) way …
There are tons of examples of that and tons of different issues. Sometimes writing the story doesn't feel like enough sometimes … I think it can be really hard when you are neck-deep in some of these issues. Clearly there is a better way and now we've spelled it out. So why is it not changing?
Hanaa' shared how her heritage impacted her journalism interests, walked us through some of the stories she's done, explained the importance of understanding the business of news, and offered advice to aspiring journalists.
Hope you'll listen!
We’ve done more than 200 interviews on The Journalism Salute. Looking for interviews with data journalists, click here. Looking for feature writers click here.
Or head to TheJournalismSalute.org to see all our episodes organized by category.