A writer channels her own life of fear to report about science and psychology

Award-winning freelancer and outdoorswoman Eva Holland draws on a life beset with fears to write a deeply researched book about the nature of fear. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

“… America was postoned.”

A newsroom partnership through a Slack channel leads to a perfect line in a a roundup about coronavirus cancellations. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

Classic writing in a graduation non-speech about the “great story” of coronavirus

Writing guru Roy Peter Clark uses a cancelled graduation at his alma mater to assure students about the future, and to demonstrate classic writing. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

Writing the character, contradictions and soul of a place

Dan Zak uses the quirkiness of the "first" political caucuses in Iowa to explore the why myth and reality in what becomes a surprising profile of place. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

Calling out Olympic officials’ past failures as coronavirus threatens the 2020 Games

Award-winning sports columnist challenges Olympic officials to make better decisions about the Tokyo Summer Games to protect athlete's heatlh. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

A war correspondent and mom faces new fears in the early days of coronavirus

Singapore-based freelancer Megan Stack reported her personal fears about family safety and social relationships to write about anxiety as the coronavirus grew more threatening. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

When a profile is also about art is also about climate change is also about grief

A science journalist found a way to explore the emotional trauma of climate change through the profile of an artist who painted landscapes as grief. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

Stories are read twice: Once for the literal story, then for the metaphorical meaning

The specifics of a story may fade with time, but the larger meaning stays. Writing coach Roy Peter Clark on how to write for two levels of reading. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

Coronavirus is a reminder of this universal lesson: No experience is ours until it is

When you are in the middle of a news story, when you experience it, you read the coverage differently. This reminder comes amid a coronavirus outbreak. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

What journalistic process can teach both kids and scientists

When children are given reporters' notebooks, and scientists have to answer their questions, magic happens. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

How the personal narrative can make the difference between prison and release

A reporter follows the parallel narratives of two prison inmates to show how storytelling can infliuence the parole board. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

The directions of “branches” in a sentence create shifts in mood and meaning

The placement of subordinate clauses adds to the meaning of a sentence. Roy Peter Clark analyzes one in Dan Zak's in a political profile of Iowa. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

A new anthology of science writing offers lessons for anyone covering a complex world

hile there’s no dearth of journalism how-to books on the market,   MN: Everything I needed to know about science writing I learned from my friends.   How do you persuade a source to talk to you? JH: It has to be a two-way street. This person has to trust me as much as I … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

“Iowa is a fairy tale.”

A super-long sentence does elegant work to capture quirky character, defy overused generalization, and make yet another campaign-season story anything but predictible. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

How writers show you the love

Good narrative almost always has an underlay of emotion. But to weave it into stories without cliche requires an understanding of how to report and write for it. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

A blocked writer rediscovers her voice as she discovers America’s national parks

How a daily free write on a road trip helped an uncertain writer tap into her innate talent for storytelling | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

Using narrative digression to weave backstory, context and suspense into stories

Short detours from the forward chronology of a story can strengthen your work. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

“If you think of all these words just staggering around, grammar is their social order, their government.”

A character in a novel works as a copy editor and grammar columnist, work that she seems as "ethically good" and essential to clear writing. A funny passage from the novel carries not-so-funny echoes to teh U.S. impeachment debates. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

In good writing, clarity is job one

When a retired newspaperman faces a classroom of students from all fields, he goes back to the basics: Good writing is essential to any career, and good writing is clear writing. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

Elegance on the court — and on deadline

Kobe Bryant was an anthetic wonder and complicated man. His sudden death inspired an vast array of literary remembrances on deadline. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

Dancing your way into the art of writing

ve studied an Indian classical dance form known as Bharatanatyam on and off since I was five. Bharatanatyam, like writing, has its own syntax: a combination of hand gestures, specific sequences of steps, and so on that are pieced together to tell stories. My last dance instructor … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

Free writing: pain and purpose

You have to start somewhere, so why not take 10 minutes to free-write your way to a final piece? | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

Four hundred years of harsh history carried through 8,000 unflinching words

The New York Times "1619" project weaves historical events with personal experience to create a provocative reported essay. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

An investigative journalist takes a yearly “leap out of the comfort zone” into fiction

What journalists can learn by writing fiction as a way to study and practice techniques that makes their nonfiction stories more compelling. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

When the story we cover becomes our own

t’s an all-too-familiar story. Another American factory closes, the latest in a long line in the last three decades that has seen American manufacturing devastated by foreign competition. This time it was the giant General Motors plant, the mainstay of Lordstown, Ohio. For Graig … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

Not just a sappy Christmas story

eporters of a certain place and time — Eugene, Oregon, in the 1970s — loved to tell stories about how they were hired. At the time, the Eugene Register-Guard was considered one of the finest small-city newspapers in the country. Journalists from much larger markets found their wa … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

The narrative of the year behind? Start now

ome the close of any calendar year, and look-back pieces are as common as failed New Year resolutions. At the close of a decade — even more. So when one rises out of the scrum and provides both something to think about, and a damn good read, it’s a treat. We all have our own … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

~ 30 ~

oday is the last day for the Newseum, that glitzy, over-the-top temple to journalism in Washington, D.C. It lasted 11 years, eight months and 20 days — shorter than most newspapers and even most new-media start-ups, but longer than the short-form video site Vine, the millennial-o … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

Gratitude Notes (#28): A writer’s wish for the ages

Editor’s note: We close 2019, and our month of Gratitude Notes, with a last note of reflection and aspiration. It seems fitting as we go forward.   y father read newspapers out loud. On Sundays, after church, he’d walk across the street and buy a handful of Sunday papers at the n … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

Gratitude Notes (#27): Readers who reach out, sources who let us in

Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers.   m grateful for readers, for those who help complete the circle of the conversation we start every time we pick up a pen and tell a story, f … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

Gratitude Notes (#26): The internet as archival magic

Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers. n broad strokes, the internet has contributed to several difficult situations we face as journalists in 2019, but I’m also thankful for the i … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 4 years ago

Gratitude Notes (#25): Classic guides, classy pens, fast keyboards and supportive friends

Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers.   [dcI[/dc] am thankful for William Zinsser’s book “On Writing Well.’ I read the book in one long day as a temporary receptionist and immedia … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 5 years ago

Gratitude Notes (#24): Shorthand and a driver’s license

Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers. ick Russell was the journalism professor who made my career possible. He accepted me into a 2-year community college journalism program in Va … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 5 years ago

Gratitude Posts (#23): Family, friends and a borrowed cabin in the woods

Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers. am thankful for an understanding family who supports my need to be alone in a cabin in the woods to write in monastic solitude. And I am than … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 5 years ago

The chronic pain of runaway medical debt

  izzie Presser was looking for the intersection of two wide-ranging and little-known facets of American life: the broad power of contempt laws, and the criminalization of medical debt. The ProPublica reporter  found it in Coffeyville, Kansas, and came back with a startling story … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 5 years ago

Gratitude Posts (#22): Carved ducks and coffee

Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers. m thankful for a long-ago newspaper assignment that took me to the backyard woodcutting studio of a carver whose name I can’t remember but wh … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 5 years ago

Gratitude Notes (#21): Open doors and open notebooks

Here's a brief note from Jill U. Adams about who helped her career. It's the latest from Nieman Storyboard's Gratitude Notes. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 5 years ago

Gratitude Posts (#20): The mastery behind the magic

Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers.   early every day, I’m grateful that my best friend and mentor, the late writing teacher and coach Donald M. Murray, entered my life to teach … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 5 years ago

Gratitude Notes (#19): A lifeline from the wild

Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers. m thankful for my community of fellow writers  — always, but even more so lately. This job can be so isolating, and since I’m also geographic … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 5 years ago

Gratitude Notes (#18)

Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers. y first 8 professional years at the Eugene Register-Guard, the best imaginable training in the fundamentals of community journalism. I had de … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 5 years ago

Gratitude Notes (#17)

Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers. am so incredibly thankful for everyone in journalism who has gone before — all the reporters, chewing all the gum and smoking all the cigaret … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 5 years ago

Gratitude Notes (#16)

Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers. m grateful for a hypnotherapist in my town who runs a radio ad campaign in which she tells listeners, “The answer is within you.” I listen to … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 5 years ago

Gratitude Notes (#15)

Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers.   m grateful for every copy editor who’s saved me from embarrassment; for every photojournalist who’s helped me to see stories in different w … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 5 years ago

Gratitude Notes (#14)

Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers.   am grateful for Chuck Cicconetti, the managing editor of The Daily Record when I got my first reporting job back in 1998. He hired me to wo … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 5 years ago

Gratitude Notes (#13)

Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers.   m grateful to a writing instructor who urged us to remember — in the face of spouses, friends and other well-meaning passers-by who may thi … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 5 years ago

Gratitude Notes (#12)

Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers.   read somewhere that a famous writer — Hemingway? I think — said that, while working, you should always get up from the day’s writing with s … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 5 years ago

“Failure is the best. After you fail, you’re free.”

izzy Goodman’s “Meet Me in the Bathroom” is such a raucous oral history of New York’s indie rock scene that readers’ ears are in danger of ringing while reading. It’s vivid and grimy enough to make you feel like you’ve seen The Strokes strut through a late-night set, or heard Kar … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 5 years ago

Gratitude Notes (#11)

Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers.   icrofilm of old newspapers. Basically, my entire professional writing career has built upon the reporting of others, now preserved on micro … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 5 years ago