About me

As assistant director for programming and special projects at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, I oversee a regular series of seminars, conferences and training for Nieman Fellows and the larger Harvard and journalistic communities. I am also a contributing editor at Nieman Reports, and I run Nieman’s Trauma Journalism Program. This job grew out of my previous part-time position at Nieman as Special Projects Manager (July 2006- June 2012). Here are some of the things I’ve done or do at Nieman:

In collaboration with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, I develop projects such as an interdisciplinary conference on trauma, journalism and storytelling or a workshop for victim advocates and crime reporters. I teach media literacy for victim advocates at the Massachussetts Victim Assistance Academy and assist in the development of training materials, such as these tip sheets on covering domestic violence.

I’ve had the privilege to direct the Nieman Foundation’s efforts to strengthen and improve Global Health Reporting and to work with accomplished journalists focusing on poverty, development and health. This program for six years produced exemplary reporting on the subject, most lately in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and I continue to try and build community among those around the world who aim to tell these stories.

Other Nieman projects include conceiving and editing a cover package for Nieman Reports on Truth in the Age of Social Media; conferences on subjects such as Secrecy and Journalism in the New Media Age and Press Freedom in Latin America, or an online guide for journalists covering pandemic flu, coveringflu.org

I have also been a freelance correspondent and science writer for more than a decade. My articles have appeared in publications such as Time magazine (U.S.), Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany), and Folio/Neue Zuercher Zeitung (Switzerland), among others.

I had no idea I was an entrepreneurial journalist when, in 1998, I quit a high-paid job as news editor and editor of the Sunday Magazine at BZ, Berlin’s largest daily newspaper, to start my freelance career for German media from a small attic apartment in Cambridge, Mass.

Nor did I know that there was such a thing as a Nieman fellowship. I had the great privilege to become a fellow in the fall of 2000 (and to be granted temporary Madonna-status during a trip to Korea with my fellow journalists in 2001).

I live in Cambridge, Mass. with my husband and two children (5 and 8).