Zest

Jacqui Banaszynski is an acclaimed reporter, writer, editor, and teacher. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1988 for the series "AIDS in the Heartland." She was also a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer in international reporting. Besides her accolades, Jacqui has edited several award-winning projects over the years. She has written about topics such as corruption, crime, beauty pageants, the Olympics, dogsled expeditions, and refugee camps. Till 2017, she was the Knight Chair in Editing at the Missouri School of Journalism, and in 2008 she was named to the Society of Features Journalists Hall of Fame. She is now an editor at Nieman Storyboard.One of her newsletters at the end of 2022 inspired the theme for this season of Zest: overcoming writer's block. We were happy and honored when Jacqui accepted our invitation to talk about this topic.We discussed the six steps of the journalistic process, the motivation behind years of craft, and the Yoda approach to writing. Support the show