Author: Milton Magazine

Cynthia Needham ’95 “There’s an old saying in newspapers, ‘Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,’” says Cynthia Needham, a news editor at the Boston Globe. “Our job as journalists is to chronicle what happened—good, bad or ugly—but also to expose what people aren’t seeing. It is our responsibility to hold people accountable, whether you’re covering a city council of five people in the middle of nowhere, or you’re in the White House press gaggle every day.” Cynthia focuses on the Globe’s digital product, helping direct the paper’s website and breaking news team. In the Globe newsroom, a live...

Fred Melo ’94 You’d never see this headline in the New York Times, or on the Huffington Post home page, or leading your six o’clock news: “Mid-sized city grapples with new waste-management program.” Sanitation, a critical government function—supported by a multibillion-dollar industry—directly affects the human and environmental health of a place. Nevertheless, covering the issue draws only local news consumers, even when something goes wrong. Residents of St. Paul, Minnesota, dealing with a confusing overhaul of their trash collection system, turned to the one place they knew they’d be heard: their local newspaper. “People are getting late bills after...

Neha Wadekar ’07 and Freddy Deknatel ’03 Yemen, Egypt, Kenya, Somalia, Syria: Distant places with complex problems that generate frequent headlines. Dedicated journalists on the ground in these countries know that their reporting is important. And although some news organizations have cut back or closed their foreign bureaus, today’s international journalists feed audiences information through alternative sources, such as streaming video services, websites and podcasts. News professionals are often necessarily both multimedia experts and entrepreneurs. “The industry has changed dramatically,” says Neha Wadekar ’07, a freelance journalist based in Kenya. “There are many unique online publications, although they don’t...