Making good journalistic trouble, Part V: Expanding perspective and empathy

EDITOR’S NOTE: In a series on making “good trouble” through journalism, Paul A. Kramer of Vanderbilt University argues for seven approaches that can help create partnerships between writers and readers to better address social problems. From his introduction: “The best narrative … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

Making good journalistic trouble, Part IV: Tracing the cause and effect of social issues

EDITOR’S NOTE: In a series on making “good trouble” through journalism, Paul A. Kramer of Vanderbilt University argues for seven approaches that can help create partnerships between writers and readers to address social problems. From his introduction: “The best narrative non-fic … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

Making good journalistic trouble, Part II: Highlighting urgency and proximity

EDITOR’S NOTE: In making “good trouble” through journalism, Paul A. Kramer of Vanderbilt University argues for seven approaches that can help create partnerships between writers and readers to address social problems: “The best narrative non-fiction writing on social problems … g … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

Making good journalistic trouble, Part I: Exposing overlooked problems

EDITOR’S NOTE: In a series on making “good trouble” through journalism, Paul A. Kramer of Vanderbilt University argues for seven approaches that can help create partnerships between writers and readers to better address social problems. From his introduction: “The best narrative … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

Making good journalistic trouble, Part III: Stories of empowerment and action

EDITOR’S NOTE: In making “good trouble” through journalism, Paul A. Kramer of Vanderbilt University argues for seven approaches that create partnerships between writers and readers to address shared social problems: “The best narrative non-fiction writing on social problems … gra … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

How narrative journalists can make “good trouble” for society

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post introduces readers to a rhetorical re-framing of narrative nonfiction that a Vanderbilt University professor argues can create partnerships between writers and readers in pursuit of addressing societal problems. This week and next, we feature each of his … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

A supreme beat education: The U.S. Supreme Court

  By Jacqui Banaszynski onorable readers, the writer stipulate: I once dreamed of attending law school. I took a few pre-law courses in college before reality, aka economics, led me away from more student debt and towards a reliable paycheck after graduation. I further stipulate, … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

The mastery of Supreme Court reporting, Part IV: A range of possible outcomes

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of four interviews with reporters who have made a specialty of covering the U.S. Supreme Court at a crucible time in the history of the Court and the press. By Trevor Pyle ssociated Press reporter Mark Sherman has covered some of the Court’s most seismi … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

The mastery of Supreme Court reporting, Part III: Analysis and meaning over scoops

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of four interviews with reporters who have made a specialty of covering the U.S. Supreme Court at a crucible time in the history of the Court and the press. By Trevor Pyle witty and insightful examiner of the Supreme Court for Vox, Ian Millhiser is capa … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

The mastery of Supreme Court reporting, Part II: The intersection of law and politics

EDITOR’S NOE: This is one of four interviews with reporters who have made a specialty of covering the U.S. Supreme Court at a crucible time in the history of the Court and the press. By Trevor Pyle awrence Hurley was part of a team, with Reuters colleagues Andrea Januta, Andrew C … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

The mastery of Supreme Court reporting, Part I: authoritative, clear and fast

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first of four interviews with reporters who specialize in covering the U.S. Supreme Court during a crucial time. Other interviews will follow each day this week, with links to all as they post. By Trevor Pyle olitico prised loose a historic scoop earlie … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

Reading and redefining the “classics”

By Jacqui Banaszynski long-time aspiration of mine has been to read more of the classics. My formal dip into that kind of literature was in high school, reading and discussing the usual suspects. I got to skate past English classes in college because the liberal arts university I … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

What empathy is, and isn’t, in journalism

By Lauren Kessler have chronicled the road to prison traveled by a 16-year-old Black kid involved in a double murder. I have shadowed a 22-year-old dancer struggling to find her place in a professional ballet company. I have written about the parole hearing of a man serving a lif … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

What empathy is, and isn’t, in journalism

have chronicled the road to prison traveled by a 16-year-old Black kid involved in a double murder. I have shadowed a 22-year-old dancer struggling to find her place in a professional ballet company. I have written about the parole hearing of a man serving a life sentence for sta … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

Your next book club list: National Book Award winners and finalists

he 2022 National Book Awards were announced this week. I expect I am not alone in adding the winners in fiction and nonfiction to my wish list and handing it, not very discreetly, to my gift-giver-in-residence. Come late December, I hope to have the winners — “The Rabbit Hutch” b … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

” … a slab of muscle with Olympic speed.”

hysical descriptions are challenging to write. More accurately, they are challenging to write well. And yet they are standard fare in much of our journalism, especially if we’re writing profiles or intimate stories that take readers deeply into other lives. We want readers to see … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

How curiosity about cats inspired practical science stories

By Philip Kiefer n the last several weeks, Katherine J. Wu, a science writer at the Atlantic, has written a lot about cats. Her run started in late August with a profile of vet dentists and the fact that while all cat-owners are supposed to brush their pets’ teeth, almost none of … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

What 8-year-olds can remind us about good writing

By Katharine Gammon mall-moment stories. That’s what the writers were laboring over the day I stepped onto the rainbow rug in my son’s third-grade classroom. I was there to share some of my work as a writer and to spend time with them as writers, punching up their stories. I’m a … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

How the WriterL came to be: The origin story of a narrative community

EDITOR’S NOTE: “A Place Called WriterL” is a new collection of some of the listserv discussions about narrative journalism held in the late 1990s through the early 2010s. In a previous post, nonfiction author John Clayton writes about the enduring lessons captured in those conver … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

WriterL, the book: A “greatest hits” collection of narrative discussions

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of two essays about the new book “A Place Called Writer L,” a collection of listserv discussions from the 1990s and 2000s. Tomorrow, co-editor Stuart Warner writes of the origins and ending of the early online community. By John Clayton n the 1990s, whe … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

Journalistic superpowers: Curiosity, clarity and discomfort

indness isn’t a word often used to describe journalism or journalists. I get that. To those who don’t do this work, we can seem abrupt, aggressive, even cynical and certainly impolite. In the too-close village and crowded confines of the house of my childhood, my mother enforced … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

The challenge of ethics in the field

ve always questioned the old aphorism that misery loves company. When I let myself throw a Pity Party, it’s a pretty self-absorbed affair, with room for only one in the spotlight. But it is comforting to be reminded, now and then, that our struggles are seldom unique and that we … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

When the best form for a complex narrative is a simple structure

standard — some would say ideal — approach to effective narrative nonfiction is to follow a single, primary character through an intimate journey that illuminates a larger social situation. The key is to find a person to follow — one who fully represents the issue you’re explorin … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

“…Baldwin when you’re stuck. …Coltrane when you’re not.”

speechwriter, a couple of jazz geniuses and the 44th president of the United States. That would be an enticing dinner-party guest list. As it turns out, it’s also an intriguing source of writing insight published last month in Esquire. Former Obama speechwriter Cody Keenan penned … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

A political narrative shaped for a public audience

he headlines coming out of last week’s public hearing of the Congressional Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol focused on the unanimous vote to issue a subpoena to a former president requiring his testimony under oath. The formal vote was s … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

How one death by gun violence revealed an epidemic of indifference

hootings are so common in the U.S. that victims are often reduced to 10-point type in news stories: A name and age, maybe alongside a loved ones’ baleful quote set snug against a margin. Peter Sagal made sure that didn’t happen to Isabella Thallas. Perhaps best-known as the host … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

Personal stories on what Afghan women want the rest of us to know

here has been a small but steady wave of recent stories focused on the plight of women in Afghanistan, who have been stripped of their rights — to jobs, to education, to choosing their wardrobe or having their hair uncovered in public, to having a voice in their lives in public a … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

How do you make the bear facts interesting?

2021 public service announcement about bear encounters, included these one-liners; Do not immediately drop to the ground and “play dead.” Bears can sense overacting.⁣ Do not run up and push the bear and do not push a slower friend down…even if you feel the friendship has run its … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

A better way to teach writing? Try journalism

irst there was Nathalie, an English language learner who whispered that she’d never done well in English, never liked it, but this course was different. And her writing was getting better. Then there was Nseandra, who avoided the news because it was depressing and paralyzing. Yet … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

Non-news that hits big close to home

group of journalists clustered along a table at a lovely restaurant in Bergen, Norway, late last month, chattering about our work and how good it was to be back in the wrap of the narrative tribe after our long COVID winters. The tattooed young waitress was a hoot: Course by cour … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

Hearing stories from behind the burqa

n the spring of 2021, when President Biden announced the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Afghanistan, Anand Gopal knew there was an untold story concealed in the flood of media attention that the withdrawal would trigger. About a decade earlier, Gopal, a journalist, sociologis … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

What reporters need from editors and editors need from reporters

oni Basu was a news reporter at the Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC) when she was sent to Baghdad to write about a Georgia-based military unit. It was 2005. The 48th Infantry Brigade, a National Guard unit, hadn’t been called to combat since World War II. Basu had never been as … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

How M*A*S*H* practiced journalism to deepen its storytelling

tory craft surrounds us, not just in journalism but in pretty much everything I can think of. Proof, I guess, that humans are hard-wired for story. It teaches, informs, entertains, enlightens, cautions, guides us and more. I have been especially attuned to its presence in the fou … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

A top Danish journalist reflects society in autopsies, trans surgery and pork roast

few years ago, Line Vaaben was eating a traditional Christmas dinner at her home in Copenhagen. Vaaben, a 2014 European Press Prize finalist, remembered a story that followed a potato from the field to a bag of french fries. Part of a 1999 Pulitzer-winning  series in The Oregonia … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

What to do when you write the kinds of stories you find hard to read

very morning I wake up and do exactly what selfcarefederation.org and everydayhealth.com and verywellmind.com and all those other “take care of yourself” sites and blogs and organizations tell me not to do. I dive into the news of the day. Lying in bed, barely emerging from what … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

How narratives defined a Queen and a Queen changed a narrative

he Queen is dead. Long live the King. OK, that may be the most predictable line I’ve ever written, but a version of it has been working for the Brits for, what, about 1,100 years now? And as much turbulence as the Crown has faced through that millennium of time, it has endured. S … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

What stacking wood can teach us about structuring stories

s I write these words I am propped up in bed, six days into COVID, chipping through my fugue at a 6,000-word story that was due before I got COVID. It’s 99 degrees outside my window in Boise, Idaho, in what has become a worrisome extended summer. But in my mind I’m splitting wood … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

So you want to write book? A long journey from newspaper reporter to book author

stray remark during a visit with her grandmother sent newspaper reporter Casey Parks, then a college journalism student, on a years-long quest to unearth the story of a trans man in Louisiana. As the project evolved — from aspirational podcast to hoped-for movie and finally to a … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

Teaching (or learning) story craft? Storyboard is here to help

e interrupt your syllabus prep with this important message: Consider Nieman Storyboard as a resource – and even publication destination – in your reporting, writing and journalism ethics courses. Storyboard is a trove of what I call “story work.” It’s part anthology, part textboo … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

Combing through clips, records and emotions for lessons from the past

s abortion rights in the United States grew more and more tenuous this summer, Los Angeles Times reporter Brittny Mejia grew curious about the history of those rights. That led her to uncover a pivotal court case that was seldom mentioned in news coverage, and to excavate the rec … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

Cutting through compassion fatigue with sensory writing

ar can become an abstraction unless, of course, you’re in the middle of it. We can read about it or see images, which often are more powerful than words in conveying the realities. As the war in Ukraine lurches on — six months now — distance is made greater by our gnat-like atten … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

Hacking and whacking the way to writing clarity — and pie

hey are sweet, tart, succulent and tangy. Summer on the tongue. The mighty blackberry: as big as your thumb; a deep, inky sheen with purple highlights; a nuanced flavor with earthy undertones and hints of Pinot Noir that lends itself equally to ice cream and balsamic vinegar, to … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

Storytelling that reaches through your feet to your soul

t’s probably a good thing I missed the memo about suggested attire to the Chicks concert earlier this month. I don’t have a straw cowboy hat. My days of strappy tank tops and butt-tight cut-off jeans are best behind me. Even the Western boots I’ve kept, nostalgia being what it is … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

The Pitch: Landing a “definitive narrative” in The Atavist Magazine

EDITOR’NOTE: Tbis is the second of two posts about how the pitching, reporting and editing of a complex story about crime, assumptions and mental health. Today, Storyboard talks with Atavist editor Seyward Darby about essential story elements and annotates the pitch that led to t … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

Four years of reporting follows new threads in a previously reported crime story

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of two posts about a complex tale of crime, assumptions and mental health published by The Atavist. Today we talk with writer Katia Savchuk about how she found and reported the story. Tomorrow, Atavist editor Seyward Darby answers questions about the ki … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

J-school everywhere, everyday

he start of a new school year is upon us. That may have some feeling excited — days spent with old and new friends, new adventures in learning and all those yummy new school supplies. I retired from the classroom five years ago, but the other evening found myself culling my rando … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

Not just SayWhat, but SezWho?

or a time in the early 1990s, I wrote narrative journalism for a business magazine. One of my better efforts recounted the fight for control of an investment bank. Someone would become the bank’s next CEO and several smart, ambitious people wanted the job. Dueling factions within … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago

Unlearning old-school lessons from a J-school education

wo months into my just-the-facts-ma’am, inverted pyramid life as a novice reporter assigned to cover every commission had that ever been formed anywhere in any municipality on Earth at any time (planning, zoning, parking, library, arts, historic preservation, downtown development … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 2 years ago