Introductions

Yup, that’s me, in the center, in a newspaper hat. I want to be a journalist.

I’ll be blogging the Nieman Conference along with Ernie—borrowed pink Flip Cam in hand.

As a college senior, I have some obvious preoccupations, including: “Will I ever be gainfully employed?” and “If so, how?”

But I’m also excited about this weekend’s conference because it will give me a chance to discuss more abstract questions—about the responsibilities of a narrative journalist towards her sources, about how to report stories across the growing income gap, and, pretty crucially for me right now, how to explain what narrative journalism is and why it might be worthwhile.



Please come up and talk to me during the conference, or feel free to comment on the blog or shoot me an e-mail at lbeckett@fas.harvard.edu. Let me know if you think I missed a great quote or if you disagree with my analysis. I’ll also be Twittering the conference (loisbeckett) if tweets are your style.

Of course, we’re not quite there yet. Over the next few days, I’ll be formulating the questions I want to bring to the conference, as well as psyching myself up by posting about some of my favorite narrative journalists and their work. I’m looking for some classic video and audio narrative clips—let me know if you have recommendations.


I’m a senior at Harvard majoring in Social Studies, which is an eclectic mix of history, politics, and philosophy. Over the past three years, I’ve written for The Harvard Crimson, the Reading Eagle, and, thanks to Harvard fellowship money, the Accra Daily Mail newspaper in Ghana’s capital, and Grazia Magazine, a fashion monthly affiliated with The Times of India. I’m currently interning for GlobalPost in Boston.

This fall, I started responding to whatcha-gonna-do-with-your-life, with “I want to write long form narrative journalism.”

I'm not sure how realistic this is. Crazy, or just crazy like saying, "Mom, I'm, uh, going to be an artist--"