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Photographer Yutao Chen first developed an interest in soccer during his childhood. As a lifelong follower of the sport, he seized the opportunity to cover the 2026 FIFA World Cup, traveling across the United States to document fan reactions throughout the tournament. He undertook the project independently, financing it himself rather than on assignment. Chen chose to work in film over digital, he…
If someone had told me that the vast, well-funded propaganda machine of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would finally be rendered powerless by a bunch of kids, I’d have laughed at the absurdity of it. Yet, here I am, witnessing a historic reckoning for the Indian government — and for Indian journalism — unfold before my eyes on Instagram Reels. While youth-led protests are not new to India —…
When the war began, I was in Cairo. Like thousands of other Palestinians from Gaza who happened to be outside the strip, I suddenly found myself unable to return home. Overnight, I went from reporting on Gaza as someone who knew its streets, rhythms, and people intimately to relying almost entirely on mediated forms of access: news reports, social media, and daily phone calls with my family. Those…
In the fall of 2012, just weeks into my Nieman Fellowship, our class went to see “Marie Antoinette” at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University. I struggled with the play, and I remember feeling like I couldn’t grasp what was happening on stage, that I was missing something everyone else understood. When our curator, Ann Marie Lipinski, asked me later what I thought, I admitted as…
At the age of 26, Iranian photojournalist Sajad Imanian has already covered several international sports events such as the Olympic Games and past World Cup soccer tournaments. He hardly expected his nationality would haunt him six years after leaving Iran to live in Australia, where he is working as a social media specialist with the Asian Football Confederation. An independent journalist,…
“The planet is overheating,” read a recent headline from Grist, the long-running environment-focused news organization. “Why is the news looking away?” Grist reported a 38% reduction in climate coverage by the media worldwide in 2025 since a high-water mark in 2021, using data from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Additionally, Media Matters for America has found a 35% decrease in…
One of the biggest and most wide-ranging recent news scoops in India, exposing alleged government misdeeds in the awarding of educational software contracts, was broken on social media by students with no journalism training. On May 22, three teenagers — Nisarg Adhikari, Vedant Srivastava, and Sarthak Sidhant, all in their final year of schooling — scooped education reporters across India by…
We need more journalists producing great social media videos. Good news: You only need your smartphone and to follow a few easy steps. I always thought I was too late for social media. I’m a science journalist by training, a news anchor, a documentary producer. For many years, I worked for the biggest public and private TV channels in Germany. But when I saw other people gaining huge audiences…
It was the largest immigration enforcement operation in U.S. history, according to government officials, with 3,000 federal agents flooding Minnesota. Starting in December 2025, for more than two months heavily armed agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spread out through the Twin Cities region — typically with masks covering their…
When Norwegian journalist Helle Lyng shouted a question at Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he was departing, without talking to reporters, from a joint press appearance with Norway’s Prime Minister in May, she did not expect a response, knowing the Indian leader had not held an open press conference during his 12-year tenure. Although Lyng did not get an answer from Modi in Oslo, she found herself…
