Communities Colin Nickerson '74
Recent Recipient of the R. Weitz prize for excellence and originality
In 2007, Colin received the Peter R. Weitz Prize for excellence and originality for his U.S. reporting on Europe (primarily Germany), between the months of January and November of 2006. Colin continued making forays to Iraq to report on the war. He spent the fall “embedded” with a combat surgical unit to report on advances in front line medicine. At a time when journalists are regularly counted among the ranks of war casualties, Colin said he narrowly survived a high-speed chase on the cratered road from Baghdad to Jordan known as ‘Ambush Alley.’ “I was in Iraq for the capture of Saddam Hussein, and covered heavy fighting in Fallujah and elsewhere in the Sunni Triangle.” “Rather more pleasant was my first reporting trip in the U.S. in decades,” says Colin, “retracing the route of Lewis and Clark from St. Louis to the western sea for a piece on the 200th anniversary of their 1804 journey.” Colin is hitting his quarter-century mark as a foreign correspondent for the Globe. “It's become easier to name the places I haven't worked—Latin America, Antarctica—than the places I have.” After spending the 2004–2005 academic year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard on a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship, Boston Globe reporter Colin Nickerson '74 half-expected to switch from foreign news to covering dark energy, tectonic plate subduction, thermal maximums and arcane squabbles over string theory. “Instead, the Boston Globe tapped me as chief Europe correspondent, based in Berlin. That means I'm chasing hard news and feature stories on a beat that stretches from Lisbon to Luhans'k, Ukraine.''