Agriculture’s Role in an Age of Abundance
By Chris Adams Sonny Ramaswamy is optimistic that society has the technological capability to produce enough food to feed the world. Whether it can get that food where it needs to be will take more effort. In a session on the future of food and farming with fellows of the National Press Foundation, the director of the National Institute of…
Advice for Covering Political Conventions
By Sandy K. Johnson If either Philadelphia or Cleveland will be your first rodeo as a political convention reporter, it can be an overwhelming experience. Tens of thousands of journalists, elected officials, political hacks, delegates, vendors and hangers-on throng the convention cities. The National Press Foundation brought together three reporters who were newbies in 2012 to offer their guidance and…
Do New Overtime Rules Affect Your Staff?
By Kevin M. Goldberg It’s official! (or at least very, very close): The Department of Labor has announced that new rules affecting eligibility to be paid the federally mandated minimum wage and for overtime pay for work in excess of 40 hours per week take effect on Dec. 1, 2016. Though the changes were originally proposed in July 2015, I…
What to Do When Terrorists Attack Your City
By Sandy K. Johnson When terrorists attack, the first responders include journalists who rush to the scene. In a NPF webinar, three journalists who covered recent terror attacks offered tips and suggestions based on their experiences. And the first is the simplest: Get someone to the scene quickly. “Get to the area so you’re inside the zone, not outside the…
*Jerry W. Friedheim
Delegate Rules and Covering Conventions
By Sandy K. Johnson It’s been four decades since the last contested presidential nominating convention. Will the Republican National Convention in Cleveland really become a brawl over delegates and rules? “This could be the most remarkable political event of our lives,” said Stephen Ohlemacher, veteran delegate counter for The Associated Press. Ohlemacher and several other journalists offered tips, resources and…
Myths about Obesity
By Chris Adams As Americans struggle to control their weight, they’re likely to sign on to some commonly held beliefs – many of them with little or even contradictory evidence. Andrew Brown, a researcher with the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, discussed the myths and presumptions about obesity that are part of the national…
The Story Behind the Mattingly Award
There's a story behind the National Press Foundation's new journalism award, the Carolyn C. Mattingly Award for Mental Health Reporting. It's told here by John Kelly, a Washington Post columnist who writes about "Washington's less famous side." The window to apply for the $10,000 prize is open through March 15. -- The joke Rich Mattingly used to tell was that he…
Gregory D. Johnsen, John Stanton, Kate Nocera
Gregory D. Johnsen Gregory D. Johnsen is a writer-at-large for BuzzFeed News. In 2013, Johnsen was named as BuzzFeed News’ first Michael Hastings Security Fellow. Johnsen is the author of The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia. He has been a Peace Corps volunteer in Jordan, a Fulbright Fellow in Yemen, and a Fulbright-Hays Fellow in Egypt.…
2016 Awards Dinner
2015 Awards Dinner
The National Press Foundation and more than 950 of our friends celebrated the best in journalism at our annual awards dinner on Feb. 18. Our award winners represented the best of well-known news organizations like ABC News and Bloomberg News as well as newly minted online news sites like Re/code and BuzzFeed News. The synergy of new and old created…
Solving Agriculture’s 5 Main Problems
Feeding The World The world’s population will double by 2050. While that seems far away, the race to figure out how to feed 10 billion people is under way today. Just in the United States, farmers who make up less than 1 percent of the population are responsible for feeding 319 million Americans. Two important innovations in agriculture are helping…
The Economics of Agriculture
Farms, By The Numbers Today there are 2.1 million farms in the U.S., feeding a population of 319 million. That’s down from 6.5 million at the peak a century ago when the population barely topped 100 million. What changed? The size of farms, which averaged less than 200 acres a century ago and now run close to 500 acres. “There’s…
