Grant To Focus on Business Writing

An annual fellowship for business reporting will be added to the collection of 2010 Nieman Foundation fellowships, the group announced last week.

The Donald W. Reynolds Nieman Fellowship in Business Journalism was established with a grant from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, a national philanthropic organization that funds areas including journalism and cardiovascular research.

Nieman Fellows live in the Cambridge area, are allowed to audit undergraduate and graduate courses, and sometimes attend or participate in seminars and talks by professors and leading journalists. The business journalism fellowship will enable a journalist to connect with business leaders and study business, finance, and economics, according to the Nieman Foundation’s Web site.

“If you pay attention to the news today, there are so many stories that have an economic or business or finance angle to them, whether it is health care reform or bailouts or the stimulus package,” Nieman Foundation Curator Robert H. Giles said. “There are important economic elements to each of these stories.”

Many reporters do not have a strong understanding of economics, Giles said. “They sort of pick it up along the way, and this is a very complex subject,” he said.

The fellowship, which encourages fellows to study at the Kennedy School of Government, the Business School, and the Economics department, will “fill in their knowledge gap,” Giles said.

Like all other prospective Nieman Fellows, applicants to the Donald W. Reynolds Nieman Fellowship in Business Journalism must be full-time reporters or freelance writers who have had at least five years of experience in professional journalism. An applicant to the business reporting fellowship must also be a U.S. citizen and should be “a journalist of accomplishment, who has an upward career trajectory, [and] who has worked as a reporter in [business] for some time,” Giles said.

Applications to the fellowship are due on Jan. 31. Finalists will be invited to Cambridge for interviews in late April and early May, after which one fellow will be chosen.

The Reynolds grant—which totals $918,130—also reinstated the community journalism fellowship, established five years ago by the Reynolds Foundation to fund fellowships for reporters from small newspapers. It will be used to fund one community journalist and one business journalist per year for the next five years.