In case the Lab is your introduction to the Nieman Foundation, we’re actually best known for our annual class of Nieman Fellows. They’re a group of 20-30 top-notch journalists — half American, half from around the world — who get to spend a year studying the subjects of their choices here at Harvard, while being paid. It’s a good gig, trust me. (Back row, sixth from left.)

Today we announced the members of our newest class, who’ll arrive in Cambridge this fall. They survived a very competitive process; we received far more applications than ever before. Lots of great people made the cut, as always, but there are three who might be of particular interest to Lab readers:

— Jeff Howe of Wired magazine, who you may remember as the subject of our first Lab Book Club in November;

— Kevin Sites, who was a trailblazer in independent reporting online for Yahoo and others; and

— Shankar Vedantam of The Washington Post, who will be studying how online social networks might be used to help solve public policy challenges.

I hope I’ll be able to coax them into sharing some of their accumulated wisdom with Lab readers over the year. Meanwhile, if you know any members of the new class, go send them a congratulatory and subtly envious email. And if you’re a journalist who meets the eligibility requirements, it’s never too early to start planning your application. (Deadlines for next year are still a long ways off: December 15 for international applicants and January 31 for Americans. But it’s fun to think about what you’d do with a year at Harvard.)