Reporting the untold tales of executioners’ songs

South Carolina reporter Chiara Eisner used public records and sensitive sourcing to tell stories of people who execute condemned prisoners. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

How to tell a good story, by Stephen Sondheim: Hummable helps

Washington Post columnist (and aspiring musical theater composer) provides a short course of what made a Sondheim song-story work. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

A journalist’s journey into her family story leads to a history of American pie

Washington Post columnist used her family's pie-making history to explore a larger story about the history — and loss — of American pie. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Two Native American journalists talk turkey about Thanksgiving

The origins and myths of American Thanksgiving, and turkey, are probed in a conversation about a story by a Washington Post journalist. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

A profile of one family divided by vaccine politics reflects the divide of a nation

A reporter-photographer team from The Washington Post spent a week watching the vaccine politics that divided a family, and a nation. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Nerding out on a mystery, weather and Gordon Lightfoot

An editor's questions led a data reporter at MinnPost to cover new territory in a well-trod event — and they event made music! | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

The spiraling nature of news

Current events often warrant looking back to where they came from and asking about future implications. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

What the world’s best story critic (a child) needs from a story

A 4-year-old offers her writer mother a bedtime lesson in the essentials of narrative. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

“It smelled like margarine and white bread, marriage and cramped flats.”

Reporting with senses can bring universal language to your writing. Smell is intriguing for its connection to memory and emotion. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Stumbling into a social media community

few words on social media. I’m not going to get mired in the meta-mess that is Meta, the New&Never Improved Facebook. That’s well-trod territory. I admire and envy friends — known and cyber — who swear off. (Although I am baffled by those who switch to Instagram, arguing that it … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

#7 rule of pitching: Prove your skills and your passion

When you pitch a story, you have to pitch yourself. What skills, experience, passion do you bring to a project that makes an editor pick you? | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Immersing into the lives of children damaged by gun violence, and laws that don’t stop it

John Woodrow Cox of The Washington Post spent five months following the physical and emotional journey of a 5-year-old paralyzed by a gunshot. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

“That’s what writing is, after all the nonsense…”

Ocean Vuong's novel, "On Earth We Were Briefly Gorgeous," is an elegy to why we write. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

50 shades of nuance in a polarized world

An author and essayist navigates the click-bait world of black-and-white polemics and the complex world of competing thoughts. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Nut grafs: Triptych III ~ The Supreme Court, Springsteen and late-night rambles

Editors who teach offer quick and creative musings on finding the center of a story. Think porn, rock 'n roll, and fever dreams. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Nut grafs: Triptych II ~ Pointed questions, including WHOGAS?

Three pros who took their reporting, writing and editing chops to the classroom explain how they help other writers find the nut of a story. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Nut grafs: A triptych of teaching approaches

Three veteran journalists who now teach at the college level share short-course ways they guide students through ledes and nuts. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Nut grafs: Seven steps to score a winning story structure

h, the nut graf. I had to mentally brace myself to write about it. After all these years, it’s still the hardest thing I write. I tell students that all the time. I want them to know it’s not just them. Here’s an outline of how I teach it in Reporting 1 at the University […] | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Nut grafs: Learning from literature, music, movie trailers and “the bones” of stories

Pulitzer-winning writer, author and teacher Tom French coaxes meanings out of reporters by asking questions, then listening. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Nut grafs (or graphs): How five sentences can help a writer focus

A freelancer who teaches college journalism borrowed and then adapted a five-sentence template to teach students how to write a nut graph. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Nut grafs: Getting to the heart of the story

y assignment was to answer this question: “Do you have a method for teaching or guiding what we often call the “nut graf?” The request came from Jacqui Banaszynski, editor of Nieman Storyboard. She and I are old newsroom cellmates. Yet she dared ask me, an ancient narrative edito … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Literary Forensics: How to edit (and self-edit) from the inside out

A highlighter and printout of stories can help writers and editors diagnose writing patterns and improve copy. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

How a lifestyle reporter tamed the tiger of Twitter

A culture and lifestyle writer who feels intimidated by Twitter has found ways to use it for finding fresh story ideas and sources. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Jim Sheeler’s legacy to journalism: Empathy, decency and stories that last

n late August, Jim Tankersley, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, learned he was going to be the pool reporter following President Biden to Dover Air Force Base for the arrival of the bodies of 13 service members, the last to die in a 20-year war with Afghanistan … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

How to turn a theme and 900 words into sense-of-place poetry

Kim Cross used smart pre-reporting, creative hustle and a night on a trampoline to find freedom in a deadline essay assignment. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Cutting through numbing numbers with electrified writing

Esquire politics blogger attacks indifference to COVID-19 deaths with creative twists on classic writing techniques. He also knows history. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Lane DeGregory: Intimate access to a Florida COVID-19 ward, with conditions

The Pulitzer Prize winner started asking for entry to a COVID-19 ward in April 2020. Eighteen months later, she got in. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

How a top explanatory reporter does emotional interviews: With empathy

Ed Yong of The Atlantic, who won a Pulitzer for his COVID coverage, takes the same approach when talking to scientists or frontline nurses. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Plain-spoken words about the “7 stages of severe COVID death” go viral

A respiratory therapist who holds the hands of dying patients journaled her frustration into a cautionary tale about COVID denial. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Jim Sheeler turned the simple obituary into a high and reverent art

Sheeler won the 2006 Pulitzer in feature writing for the profile of a Marine major who supported the families of fallen soldiers. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

The New Yorker explores a dilemma in Ultra-Orthodox divorce: What about the children?

Writer Larissa MacFarquhar is drawn to stories that post questions without clear-cut answers. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

How listening to foreign languages can enrich your writing

A writer listens to her native Tamil and other languages to bring new rhythms, structures and metaphors to her writing. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

An editor annotates her own column from 20 years ago about Sept. 1

Now an editor at The Washington Post, Lisa Grace Lednicer critiques an emotional essay she wrote in the wake of 9/11. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Tracking shards of grief for 20 years, and daring to love your story subjects

Jennifer Senior of The Atlantic uses a diary as the through line for a story about a shared loss, and splintered grief, from 9/11. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

From Sept. 11 to COVID: Using the personal to write the global

A memoirist reflects on what she learned about writing during Sept. 11 to uncover story possibilities during the pandemic. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

A 9/11 survival story: Honoring accuracy and voice in eyewitness accounts

Writing scholar and coach Roy Peter Clark reflects on lessons learned from helping his cousin, Theresa, tell her 9/11 survival story. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

A pointillistic approach to a story of the Sept. 11 boat lift

Author Jessica DuLong considered pointillistic art and readers' powers of abstractions to write of the largest maritime rescue in history. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

“The Simulation of Jessica:” Chapter 3 probes the ethics and power of A.I.

As the chatbot romance between a grieving man and his dead fiance ends, it leaves questions about the role of A.I. in our future. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

“The Simulation of Jessica:” Chapter 2 unfurls an intimate chatbot conversation

The Jessica Simulation: Love and loss in the age of A.I. The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more? By JASON FAGONE | July 23, 2021 6:00 a.m. (EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of three annotated chapter … | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Jason Fagone follows the creation, life and death of a chatbot romance

Text exchanges between a grieving man and his dead lover become an exploration of the potential and problems of artificial intelligence. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

How the loss of one Olympic story led to gold on another

Wall Street Journal sports reporter Ben Cohen saw the gem of a profile in the notes of another story, and followed an unlikely Olympic journey from afar. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

“His name was Zaki Anwari …”

Active verbs are the hallmark of visual writing. But sometimes passive is exactly the right choice. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

A retired newspaper man finds a new writing voice in the solitude of wilderness

At 72, Chuck Haga still retreats to the northern Minnesota woods when he can to ponder the stars, write essays, and meet other campers. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

3 rejections before a successful pitch to ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network

Freelancer Max Blau persisted to land an investigative project fellowship, then a staff reporting position | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Pitching ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network: Focus on sources and impact

To gain support for a local reporting partnership with ProPublica, editors say reporters should focus on impact for their communities. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Braving the Drake Passage, swimming with leopard seals, and interviewing a non-talker

A reporting trip to Antarctica required writer Craig Welch to imagine a world as it had been and would become. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

What the “Insect Apocalypse” reveals about faulty human memory

Brooke Jarvis' 2018 piece in The New York Times Magazine was one of many examples of how climate changed showed itself. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago

Collected reflections on John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”

On the 76th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Hersey's deeply reported narrative still holds lessons in writing and humanity. | Continue reading


@niemanstoryboard.org | 3 years ago