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Dear Storyboard community, 

My career in media and journalism has not been a straight line. I started out in newspapers, and later founded Longreads and co-founded the podcast company Ursa, but I've also worked for ad agencies, and I've worked in marketing and communications for different companies. This is a fact of working in journalism in 2025 — sometimes we also have day jobs to fund the work that is important to us. 

If there's one thing I learned from marketing, it's that it's never enough to tell a story once. This is even more critical now, when we are being inundated with misleading information and outright lies on every platform. The truth could use a bigger marketing team. 

Recently I pointed to New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie's TikTok account as an example of how journalists are using short-form video. As an opinion writer, he's one of the best, so it's worth noting how he adapts his storytelling to suit the medium, whether print, social media, or video. Here he is writing about his thesis that Donald Trump's second-term strategy is primarily about retribution: 

To get his revenge, Trump would turn the I.R.S., the F.B.I. and other powerful parts of the federal government against his political enemies. He would hound and harass them in retaliation for their opposition to his law stretching and lawbreaking.

For once in his public career, Trump wasn’t lying. As president, he has made it a priority to go after his political enemies.

Two days prior, he posted a video on TikTok outlining this same argument. The narrative style of TikTok is casual, intimate, off-the-cuff — so Bouie spoke while walking down the street in a stylish scarf and blazer, as if he were telling a friend what he’s been thinking about on a FaceTime call. The lede on his written piece is replaced by a "hook," albeit one that's similar to how he starts his New York Times piece — reminding us what Trump promised during his presidential campaign. 

Similarly, here are two approaches from Stacey Vanek Smith for a Marketplace story explaining what's going on with the bond market. In the radio version, she takes a trip to an "Ice Cream Roulette" shop to explain how bonds work. But on TikTok, she saves the ice cream analogy for the end of the video, starting instead with the headline "Why everybody is so worried about bonds." Again, TikTok means casual, so Smith ditches the big professional microphones and studios in favor of a living room and a tiny iPhone mic. Her Marketplace segment is six minutes, while her TikTok video clocks in at just over four. 

Crafting stories for social media, even just to promote written or broadcast work, is a necessity of our fragmented media ecosystem. Audiences are spread out in subcultures — one eye-opening fact about Bouie's audience on TikTok is that many of them don't even realize he writes for The New York Times. 

This could be a moment to bemoan declining traditional news readership, but there is a demand and a need for real journalists on these apps. There's also a media literacy gap to be bridged, as TikTokers remind each other that just because someone reads out a news headline on a video doesn't mean they're a journalist. 

So it goes with short-form video, like every trend before it. The same principles of reporting and storytelling apply, and I'm rooting for those who will offer a positive way forward.  

Support your fact-checkers

This week, author and Storyboard contributor Kim Cross shares her guide for journalists on how to work with fact-checkers. It's a fantastic resource for reporters doing it for the first time, as well as experienced journalists looking for tips on how to keep their work organized — from compiling detailed source lists to highlighting and linking interview transcripts and preparing your sources for the process. As Cross writes, "They are great unsung heroes, now more than ever." Read the full guide here. 

(And for more guidance on fact-checking, National Geographic fact-checker Brad Scriber is hosting a seminar on fact-checking a nonfiction book.)

Links of note 

• "Boxed Up: A Portrait of an Immigrant Community Living Under Threat of Deportation" (hat-tip Barry Yeoman.) To tell the stories of Nicaraguans working on Wisconsin's dairy farms who are facing the threat of deportation under Trump, ProPublica's Melissa Sanchez and photographer Benjamin Rasmussen documented the boxes of cherished possessions that they are shipping back to Nicaragua, in fear that they will be arrested and deported at any moment. It's a powerful visual of the panic and uncertainty immigrants are feeling in the U.S.:    

For now, many are staying in their homes, behind drawn curtains, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible as they travel to and from work or pick up their kids from school. Few have given up on their lives in America, but they’re realistic about what may be coming. Methodically, they have begun packing their most cherished belongings into boxes and barrels and shipping them to relatives back in Nicaragua, ahead of their own anticipated deportations.

• "A Thousand Snipers in the Sky: The New War in Ukraine" (via the Sunday Long Read). A superb example of collaborative storytelling through reporting and visuals. New York Times reporters, photographers, illustrators, and editors team up to show how the war in Ukraine has changed dramatically because of advances in drone warfare. The lede starts on the ground, with an account of a Russian drone strike:  

When a mortar round exploded on top of their American-made Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, the Ukrainian soldiers inside were shaken but not terribly worried, having been hardened by artillery shelling over three years of war.

But then the small drones started to swarm.

They targeted the weakest points of the armored Bradley with a deadly precision that mortar fire doesn’t possess. One of the explosive drones struck the hatch right above where the commander was sitting.

“It tore my arm off,” recounted Jr. Sgt. Taras, the 31-year-old commander who, like others, used his first name in accordance with Ukrainian military protocols.

• Ryan Teague Beckwith's newsletter Your First Byline is doing a terrific series of quick tips (aka "one weird trick") for reporting. This one is for researching local history. 
• Applications are due April 14 for the McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism, which offers journalists grants up to $15,000 and editorial support "to produce deeply reported enterprise and investigative stories with a strong economic, financial or business angle." (You don't need to be a business reporter to apply.)

Keep sharing your stories, 

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard 
On Bluesky: @niemanstoryboard.org  

Send me your story, book, podcast, and documentary recommendations: editor@niemanstoryboard.org

The post The facts bear repeating appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

It’s a chronic problem with narrative journalism. No matter what media you work in, no matter what genre, no matter whether your deadlines are short and solid or long and adjustable — it never feels like you have enough time to produce the best story.

But consider The Journal., a podcast that tells “the most important stories, explained through the lens of business,” by The Wall Street Journal in partnership with Spotify. The show has aired a narrative every weekday for five years. Even allowing for a bit of time off, that’s roughly 250 stories delivered at a very fast clip. So it’s hard imagine two people with more experience telling stories on a tight deadline than Katherine Brewer, a senior editor at The Journal podcast, and Sarah Platt, the program’s executive producer. The two offered tips for fast-turn stories in a talk at the 2024 Boston University Power of Narrative conference.

First, a caveat: The Journal. team includes several producers and works on multiple stories at a time. But they have created episodes in mere hours and rarely spend more than a few days on a single story from start to finish. The narratives are always built from a strong news hook and rooted in a keen knowledge of narrative structure. Here’s the core process:

• Find a character. In news-driven stories like the ones told on The Journal., you are really telling two stories, or two focused parts of the same story, Brewer said. The first is the traditional news story, such as echnical and business reasons that iPhones and Android phones are incompatible. The second is the story of your character. In one episode of The Journal., for example, the main character was a man couldn’t join his in-laws’ family group chats because he is an Android user and they use iPhones. In other shows, the character may be competing sides of a lawsuit, or a high-level company official or a well-known person in the business world, such as Elon Musk or Sam Altman.
• Create a timeline. “Chronology is the fastest way to narrative,” Brewer said. That doesn’t mean you have to tell your story chronologically, but a timeline helps you determine where to start, and where find the beginning, middle and end of your story.
• Use a three-act structure. Act one is the set up. Act two is confrontation. Act three is the resolution. “You can scramble those,” Brewer said, “but if you don’t have those pieces somewhere, then you probably need to re-think your narrative.”
• Know your driving question. “Reality TV is good at ‘driving questions,’” Platt said. (Example: Who will be voted off the island tonight?) Platt played a clip from an episode of The Journal. featuring a woman whose car keeps getting stolen. The driving question of that story: Why are Kias and Hyundais being stolen in record numbers? “It sets up the stakes for the character, but also for the car companies,” Platt said. While some journalists think of this as the thesis, The Journal. team likes to build stories around a strong, driving question, which then threads through the three-act structure. In the first act, a question is raised; in act two, the question is explored; and in act three, it is answered. Platt warns against building a story around a driving question that is not answerable: “That is almost always a mistake.”
• It has to mean something. While a news story can end with what’s happening next, a good narrative needs to reveal something about the world, Platt said. The answer to your driving question is what provides that meaning. This can be difficult, but small moments can be profound. The pair used an example from a story about gambling addiction. When the main character walked into her first Gamblers Anonymous meeting, the room was full and she realized that what had happened to her could happen to anybody. That small moment contained a profound realization.
• Stay focused. Keeping focused on the story in progress and the process of producing it helps The Journal team work efficiently. The editor and producers ask direct, specific questions of rpeorters and don’t allow tangents. “Know your driving question, know what you want your timeline to be, and stay within the walls of that,” Brewer said. That discipline of focus allowed The Journal. to post an episode on the day-long January 6, 2021, Capitol attack that same evening. It remains one of The Journal’s most-downloaded episodes.

* * *

Madeline Bodin is a freelance environmental and science journalist who is based in Vermont.

The post Power of Narrative: Compelling stories delivered on tight deadline appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: “The Best Audio Storytelling: 2022” is a newly released audiobook compendium of English-language nonfiction. The collection’s curator, Julia Barton of Pushkin Industries, spoke with creators of work in the collection about their storytelling choices and challenges. This is the final of four posts that revive “Audio Danger,” Barton’s Storyboard series on podcasting published a decade ago. Her recent pieces update the status of podcasting as a journalistic form, analyzes a podcast that takes us inside the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol and features an investigation of abuses at indigenous schools that won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Peabody Award.

Every type of documentary storytelling has a built-in tension between the need to plan — to prepare questions for interviews, plan shot lists, script narration — and the need for the kind of spontaneity and openness that results in great moments on tape. Now imagine a documentary podcast produced mostly inside a prison, requiring coordination with the warden’s communications officer. You’d think that would result in a show that’s even more tightly planned — and sounds like it. But the secret brilliance of “Ear Hustle,” the award-winning production of PRX’s Radiotopia, is that it always finds ways to sound fresh and surprising, despite its origins in the media lab at San Quentin State Prison (soon to be revamped as San Quentin Rehabilitation Center) north of San Francisco.

I reached out to the producers of “Ear Hustle” to talk about their recent episode “Last Memory: Ryan and Earlonne.” Both that episode and the one that precedes it, “Last Memory: Michael,” are poetic explorations of the memories that incarcerated people carry with them: memories of their last days on the “outside.”

“For me the idea of these stories was thinking about how memory works and how photography works,” says co-host Nigel Poor, who’s also a visual artist. “Telling stories through pictures or through the spoken word is about trying to capture something that’s quite elusive.”

Both episodes in the “Last Memory” series start with the producers trying to track down an exact location, but getting a little lost. “The idea was to go to an ordinary place where something extraordinary happened,” Poor says. “Something traumatic or life-transforming happened there.”

A story subject as trusted co-host

In 2018, California’s then-governor Jerry Brown commuted the sentence of “Ear Hustle’s” co-host, Earlonne Woods. But he hadn’t been back to the intersection in Lawndale, in greater Los Angeles, where he was arrested on December 27, 1997. Woods, his co-host, and “Ear Hustle’s” executive producer Bruce Wallace drive to the fateful location as Woods tells the story of that day. He and his friends were, he says, “up to some nefarious activities.” They wound up on a high-speed chase from cops, a chase that ended in a car crash. The police opened fire, wounding Woods and killing his best friend, Furman Little.

Woods relates all to his co-host as they sit in the car near the intersection decades later. Poor asks him to recall the last thing he saw of his friend. “His hand,” Woods says. Then the conversation veers in a surprising direction: a dream Woods once had in prison about his dead friend:

“He was in heaven, and he told me he was writing R&B songs and shit. I couldn’t compute that, but it was just good to just see him and talk to him, you know what I’m saying? And even though it was a dream, it was just something that I held onto for years.”

It’s in moments like these that you hear how “Ear Hustle” is built on trust between the co-hosts. Even though this memory is clearly painful, Woods is able to laugh about his dream. Poor and Woods say they don’t script out their interactions in the field or in the studio. They may have outline in mind, but they’d rather sacrifice the efficiency of scripted narration than to give up the spontaneous flow of conversation.

The atmospheric scoring fades out after Earlonne Woods relates the story of his dream, followed by a few seconds of silence. Then we are introduced to someone entirely new: the second character of the episode, Ryan Pagan. Nigel Poor interviews him inside San Quentin, where he talks about his last memory, having one last dinner with his family at Applebee’s before he began his 72-years-to-life sentence for first-degree murder.

The unnarrated transition from Woods’ story to Pagan’s could be jarring, but this is an episode that signaled from the start that it was going to be a bit “untethered,” as Nigel Poor puts it.

Trusting listeners to follow the threads

“‘Ear Hustle’ is a show where a lot of times we have two pieces of tape from two unrelated people, but just the proximity of them illustrates a thread that is hopefully clear enough that you don’t actually have to (explain) it,” says the show’s editor, Amy Standen. “The listener just intuits it.”

That thread becomes clear as the episode continues: These last memories, preserved in amber after incarceration, are filled with pain and regret. They mark the place in time where mistakes and bad ideas became irrevocable, and where the life of these men diverged permanently from the lives of their families and loved ones.

“Ear Hustle’s” co-hosts go to visit Pagan’s father and sister, who reminisce about him before his life took a terrible turn. The two still live in the house where he grew up. Then Nigel Poor returns us to San Quentin, where she asks Pagan if he wants to know what she (and also we) have heard about his mother, who recently passed away. He agrees, and so Poor relates the story that his mother would cry herself to sleep, years after his incarceration. Pagan reacts by saying. “I felt it.” The interview goes on:

Ryan Pagan: “When I would think about her, I knew that she was thinking about me. I never really fully processed her passing and I think it’s because I’m so far removed from out there, it hasn’t really hit me. And I still think that she’s there. There’s a lot of happiness, and there’s a lot of pain in that house. Part of me doesn’t want to go back. And then, part of me does.”

Nigel Poor: “Does it almost just seem like another world in a completely different orbit?”

Ryan Pagan: “Yeah, it seems a whole different — you’re right, a different planet. I hate that version of me. I associate that version with the house, with that area.”

It’s here that you feel the full force of the rupture that crime and incarceration bring. But the episode isn’t done with us yet. Soon we are back in Lawndale, the site of co-host Earlonne Woods’ last memory. He’s been shot in the back, and yet he’s still running, determined to get rid of the handgun in his waistband. He throws it through a window in a nearby house.

In the podcast’s final scene, Woods and his team go looking for that house. And after some persistence, they find it and its owner, the same man who decades earlier ducked for cover when gunshots erupted outside. Then, he recounts in a slight Spanish accent, a handgun broke through his window, its laser-finder pointed right at him.

“Good thing it didn’t go off,” he chuckles.

Woods tells the man that he was the one who threw the gun. He relates how his sentence was eventually commuted, and how he started a podcast about life inside and outside of prison. Then he pays the man back for the damaged window. We listen as the remarkable scene unfolds — as a new story starts to overwrite at least a part of the difficult memory set here.

Then Nigel Poor asks the man, “Why were you so nice? Why did you talk with us?”

He says, simply, “It’s my nature.”

His generosity and simple kindness comes as an emotional gut-punch after the fraught stories we’ve heard from both Ryan Pagan and Earlonne Woods. But there’s no way the team could have planned this moment. They simply went to the scene with open minds, then trusted that listeners would hear this episode, and its interwoven stories, with open minds as well.

* * *

Julia Barton is the executive editor of Pushkin Industries, following a long career in public radio. She helped develop “Revisionist History” and “Against the Rules,” among other chart-topping shows.

The post ‘Poetic explorations’ in a podcast from inside and outside prison walls appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: “The Best Audio Storytelling: 2022” is a newly released audiobook compendium of English-language nonfiction. The collection’s curator, Julia Barton of Pushkin Industries, spoke with creators of work in the collection about their storytelling choices and challenges. This is the third  of four posts that revive “Audio Danger,” Barton’s Storyboard series on podcasting published a decade ago. The first installment,  posted last week, updates the status of podcasting as a journalistic form. The second analyzes a podcast about the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Open the Apple Podcasts U.S. “top shows” list on any given day, and you will encounter the strangest magazine stand. The most popular shows, in terms of new subscribers, are usually a mix of news, religion or self-help, comedy, and — by far the biggest genre — true crime. There are series about murder, of course, but also deceit, sexual assault, terrorism, corruption. As long as someone’s doing something bad, it seems, the listeners of America can’t get enough of it.

Just as established as true crime’s huge popularity has been the backlash against it, especially in audio, which until a decade ago, had no tabloid-style genre. Documentaries, parodies, think-pieces all point to an ethical queasiness about shows that seem to repackage human suffering into addictive (not to mention commercially lucrative) entertainment. And sometimes that ethical queasiness has real-world repercussions.

“This is not a podcast for me,” Young Lee told a Maryland appeals court on March 28. Lee’s sister, Hae Min Lee, had been murdered in Baltimore in 1999. The eventual murder conviction of her boyfriend Adnan Syed did not make national news until the podcast “Serial” dug up and questioned the case in 2014. Eventually, Syed’s murder conviction was dismissed — but in a move that’s now roiling the criminal justice world, Syed’s charge has been reinstated after Young Lee’s objections.

And “Serial’s” popularity could well have been a factor in the decision. According to The New York Times, Lee’s voice wavered as he talked about the case: “This is not a podcast for me. This is real life. A never-ending nightmare for 20-plus years.”

It’s worth noting that in a post right here on Nieman Storyboard, soon after “Serial” launched in 2014, the creators of the show expressed their own concerns. They said were caught off guard by the podcast’s runaway success, and even more by its rabid fanbase of amateur online sleuths trying to “solve” the murder.

“(Our sources) are real people with families and lives, who have trusted me with their information or with their anonymity, and so it makes it nervous. It makes me really nervous,” said “Serial” host Sarah Koenig.

Making ethical issues part of the story

It’s one thing to say that podcasters should confront the ethics of what they do. It’s another thing to hear them being confronted on tape and changing trajectory as a result. For me these days, the best true crime podcasts are the ones that confront their ethical issues head on and use the energy of that confrontation to make their stories better. That’s a big reason why I admire the Gimlet/Spotify series “Stolen: Surviving St. Michaels,” and in particular its third episode, “Don’t Play with This.”

The host and lead reporter of “Stolen” is Connie Walker, a longtime veteran of CBC television and radio. Walker’s past reporting includes the series “Missing and Murdered,” about crimes against indigenous Canadians. But this time, she turned to her own family’s history — in particular, the long shadow of Canada’s religious residential school system for indigenous children, a system that the country’s government has now admitted was a form of “cultural genocide.”

Walker herself did not attend residential school growing up in Okenase First Nation in Sasketchewan. But her late father, Howard Cameron, attended a large institution called St. Michael’s, a school in Duck Lake run by Catholic priests. He never talked about his experiences there with his daughter. But Walker says that after the discovery in 2021 of a mass grave at one of the Canada’s largest residential schools, she began seeing an outpouring of stories from older family and tribal members about the abuse they had endured at St. Michael’s. So she returned home to interview those relatives, and to understand more about her father, from whom she’d been largely been estranged growing up.

Letting listeners in on the reporting process

The second season of “Stolen” follows Walker’s quest to understand her father’s past and her own. At the start of the third episode, we hear a remarkable archival film, a documentary set at St. Michael’s in 1967. (The school has since closed). In the film, former students confront one of the priests, Father Anthony Duhaime.

“Father, we heard people stand up here and say they were beaten if they spoke their native tongue,” a man’s voice says.

“Yeah, but that’s one fact against the other,” the priest retorts. “What does it prove? Nothing.”

Walker’s father is not in the film, but by now she suspects one of the priests abused him. She’s on a quest to find out the man’s name and whether he’s still alive. She heads to the local library and finds that one of the possible suspects, the man in the film, has already died. But she finds a strange profile piece about another of the priests, someone her uncle had accused of sexually abusing him as a child.

In the article, the priest talks blithely about visiting a local penitentiary and confessing: “Maybe I should be in here also, but I never got caught.”

“The article gives almost no context for the quote,” Walker narrates, “But I’m shocked to read it. I don’t know what he meant, but it’s the kind of thing I can’t just ignore.”

Although this series is more personal than Walker’s other investigative podcasts, up until this point she’s been employing what I call “Nancy Drew mode:” the storyteller following a trail of clues. Nancy Drew mode works really well in the linear form of audio, as our minds naturally want to connect what we just heard with the next piece of information. It’s a big reason why true crime audio stories can be compelling and addictive. And Walker’s clear, simple narration style — honed from years of news reporting — makes the story easy to follow. One new discovery leads to the next without digression or confusion.

Walker also employs a trope that “Serial” made popular: the reporter-team field debrief. We hear as she calls her producers from her car to tell them what she’s found in the library. One suspect might still be alive, she tells them, but before approaching him, she wants to talk with one of St. Michael’s more outspoken survivors. A man named Eugene Arcand.

And it’s here that the episode takes a turn. Arcand, an advisor to Canada’s National Truth and Reconciliation Centre, is a busy guy with only a little time for an interview. But sitting on the patio of a local Starbucks, he tells Walker frankly about the abuse he’d endured, and how he’d once confronted the very priest she’d been researching, calling him a “sick pig” and threatening to throw him off a balcony.

Then Arcand tries warns her off her quest.

“I see people thinking they’re doing good when they’re not doing good. We don’t want to just be interviewed, and then somebody takes off with it and becomes an expert on the backs of our misery,” he says.

Looking back on this moment later, Walker tells me she was stunned. “I had been so motivated by wanting to seek some kind of accountability and to try to find out as much as I could. To hear him say that was really jarring.”

In the episode, Arcand goes to recount words of an elder who spoke to him in Cree, warning him that the stories of residential school survivors belong to the community:

“This is what we have learned,” Arcand quotes the man as saying. “We don’t profiteer from it. We take care of it, where we have to pass it down. But use this in a good way. Don’t play with this, you know?”

Letting the reporting shift the narrative

The episode lets us hear almost all of Walker’s intense encounter with Eugene Arcand. And it gives us the rare chance to hear a subject reshape the trajectory of a true crime narrative. Walker says after she spoke with Arcand, she asked her immediate family if she should even pursue the story further. Ultimately, her younger brothers convinced her that they, too, needed to understand what had happened to their father. It was their story as well, because it had shaped their lives.

In the following episode, Walker and her fellow producers change course. They interview 28 survivors of St. Michael’s — many of whom had never told their stories publicly before. It is painful to hear how they were abused, their childhoods stolen and culture repressed. It takes a brave, persistent and thoughtful journalist and production team to seek out these voices and handle them with care. When true crime is based more on truth than crime, the results can be powerful.

* * *

Julia Barton is the executive editor of Pushkin Industries, following a long career in public radio. She helped develop “Revisionist History” and “Against the Rules,” among other chart-topping shows.

The post A true crime podcast that is more about truth than crime appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: A revival of the Storyboard series “Audio Danger” updates the craft of narrative podcasts and introduces a new best-of collection. This introductory post will be followed by four posts that analyze outstanding podcasts and interview the journalists who made them.

More than a decade ago, Nieman Storyboard started publishing an occasional column called “Audio Danger.” Here’s how it began:

Writers and video producers live in dread of the wandering eye. Audio producers live for it. That’s what makes us, in our secret hearts, troublemakers. We want you to lose sight of everything in front of your face: to stare through that dish in your hand, ignore your children, drop into a glazed-over trance of our making. Maybe don’t drive off the road, but please do miss a few exits or get stuck in your car. Good audio should be dangerous that way.

When I wrote that, I was a freelancer, struggling to find full-time work after getting laid off as a public radio editor in the recession of 2008-09. The type of audio stories I wanted to tell Storyboard readers about were the type that almost no one was paying for: documentaries, narrative audio essays, weird one-offs. There was some wavering hope on the horizon: Back in 2005, the New Oxford American Dictionary chose “podcast” as its word of the year. By 2012, Edison Research’s Infinite Dial survey of digital media users found that “nearly half of Americans are familiar with the term ‘podcasting.’”

But podcasting, when I started the Audio Danger series, was mostly an unpaid hobby. You could take creative risks with it, free from the constraints of broadcasting, but that wasn’t going to get you a job. When I wrote “good audio should be dangerous,” I honestly didn’t know if I was writing a love letter to the future of my profession, or its obituary.

Podcasting comes of age

It turned out to be the former. These days, I’m the executive editor of Pushkin Industries, where I’ve helped create narrative shows with the likes of nonfiction writers such as Malcolm Gladwell (“Revisionist History”), Michael Lewis (“Against the Rules”) and Jill Lepore (“The Last Archive”). I’ve also had the privilege of editing some of our audiobook originals, which have no print version and which unspool like long-form documentaries with interview or archival tape, scoring and sound design.

This is all to say, the decade-old Audio Danger series now feels like something of a time capsule from right before the podcast bubble started to inflate. Audio producers, at least in the U.S., have been able to pivot from complaints about not having enough outlets for their work, to complaints about not making insane truckloads of money. More importantly, listenership of spoken word audio continues to grow, expanding into formerly dormant forms of audio fiction, plot-driven genres such as true crime, comedy and opinion podcasts, and most astronomically, audiobooks, now one of the most profitable sectors of the publishing industry. The same Infinite Dial research that, 11 years ago, got us all excited about Americans knowing the word “podcast” now shows that 42 percent of American adults and teens have listened to a podcast in the past month, a new record.

But audio producers still face the same challenge: how to earn and keep a listener’s attention. Whether we’re trying to fit a feature into a three-minute hole in the broadcast clock or storyboarding a longform series, we ultimately come up against the same issue: how to unspool a story in a way that listeners can follow, often while their eyes are distracted by other things.

To meet that one central challenge, we have to put in the listening hours. We listen to raw tape, to the written narration that is supposed to tie it all together, to the notes from our colleagues, to the work of our mix engineers and so much more. Then every time we hear something that’s not working, we need to fix it and listen again. It’s time-consuming and expensive, as many of the new owners of podcast productions are finding out to their surprise.

That surprise — followed in due course by dismaying show cancellations and layoffs — is part of why I want to revive this column. Because unfortunately, a single wrong perception has only gotten worse with the mass-commercialization of audio: the perception that it’s “just talking.”

Creating the illusion of natural speech

The term “podcast” itself is part of the problem, since it can encompass everything from an uploaded voice-memo to unedited chat shows to a narrative series that takes years of reporting and producing. But the truth is, we all have a hard time categorizing that which we can’t see. And most of us do think of speech as effortless; it’s the ocean we swim in all day. Hence the dual fallacy that all forms of spoken-word audio are basically made the same way, and that they’re just not that hard to produce.

The opposite is true, especially when it comes to narrative, story-driven audio reportage. It takes a team, including producers, editors and engineers, to craft the illusion of natural speech’s flow from interviews, archival tape and written narration. We’re not swimming in the ocean of speech; we’re desalinating it, purifying it, bottling the results and putting fancy artwork on the bottles. Because listeners notice right away if they hear the artifice in our stories and errors in our audio mixes. The very thing that’s supposed to make our work “easy” — human speech — is what makes it very hard to do well.

That all sounds like a bummer. But it’s overshadowed by the amount of great audio storytelling being made and listened to now. In the spirit of Audio Danger, we at Pushkin want to highlight audio stories that takes creative risks, that demonstrate solid craft, and that revel in the delight that only audio can deliver. So we’re publishing an audiobook anthology called “The Best Audio Storytelling: 2022.” I curated nominations from Pushkin staff and others of outstanding (non-Pushkin) podcast episodes, broadcast reportage, experimental pieces and more from the last year. In the spirit of other print-based “best of” collections, we want to use the audiobook form to break down some boundaries and show the wide range of English-language narrative audio our industry has produced in a single year. Before each entry in the collection, I narrate a short guide for listeners.

The audiobook collection rightly keeps its focus on the works themselves. Nieman Storyboard is the best place for a deep-dive into storytelling craft. And so I’m bringing back “Audio Danger” to feature some of the incredible stories in this collection. You’ll get a preview of some of the entries, and I’ll ask the creators about challenges they faced and the story-making risks they decided to take.

The seeds of this collection were really planted here at Storyboard more than a decade ago. I’m grateful for the chance to bring this column back. Our series starts just as “The Best Audio Storytelling” is available and continues with installments over the next few weeks. Nothing would make me happier than for new listeners to find the work inside and sense, perhaps, just a hint of danger.

* * *

Julia Barton is the executive editor of Pushkin Industries, following a long career in public radio. She helped develop “Revisionist History” and “Against the Rules,” among other chart-topping shows.

The post A new best-of collection of audio storytelling honors narrative podcasting appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the table-setter to a series of posts in the coming week that reprise the earlier Storyboard series “Audio Danger,” which include interviews with top narrative podcasters on their craft and the status of the form.

As 2023 dawned, it occurred to me that a decade has passed since I became consumed by a format of audio storytelling that I call “narrative podcasts.” To avoid confusion, I’ll define this term: They are original, non-fiction, serialized and generally narrated through the arc of a classic story. More simply, they are great audio storytelling.

I wish it didn’t take a mouthful of adjectives to describe them.

I learned radio in 1999 at CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp.), but then worked in other media formats for a decade. In 2013, I decided to return to audio, adapting my radio lessons to conform to the newer formats. My efforts were cute and honest, even if they make me wince to listen now.

When “Serial” was released in 2014, I found the format both stunning and efficient. Instead of multiple stories, it carried listeners through one story over 12 episodes; it was the first podcast to read 5 million downloads and the first to win a Peabody Award, launching, according to many, the podcast craze.

My attempt to make more efficient audio stories is how I steered into narrative podcasting. Maybe if I followed one story, instead of multiple stories told in a traditional three-act structure, I could produce a narrative on an extended, and thus more manageable, schedule. So in 2016, I began reporting “This Is Our Time,” a story about the first all-female, all-scientist expedition to Antarctica. I imagined the story would be so evident that the format would present itself and speed up my usual belabored production schedule.

The reality proved to be much different; I spent the next five years following this story, which eventually took me to Antarctica. The learning curve was steep. Five years and 13 episodes later, I can confirm it’s not the efficient approach I imagined.

But I had found my place.

From Orson Welles to Ira Glass

As popular as podcasting has become, a shared sense of what the word means remains elusive. Longform radio formats, including radio documentaries, personal essay formats and even audio books, have been around for decades, especially on public radio. Career radio folks can get annoyed when new-age “podcasters” claim that they invented audio storytelling; it’s akin to a Gen Z grandchild boasting about the this new thing they’ve discovered, like canning or knitting or sourdough breadmaking.

But in the last decade things have shifted. And out of this shift, a new storytelling format, a presentational genre, the narrative podcast, is being created.

While not all would agree, I believe that the podcasting of today shares an audio lineage that goes back to 1938 and the airing of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds.” But the spectrum of work we now commonly call podcasting began in the early 2000s, thanks to the alchemy of digital technology and distribution with a cultural appetite for storytelling. Many early podcasts were classic Q&As. Then came programs, like “This American Life” and “RadioLab.” But groundbreaking as they seemed, they were still single-episode stories told within an hour.

Until “Serial.” It was the first spin-off produced by “This American Life” and upended our existing understanding of audio storytelling.

Yet despite the meteoric growth of the podcasting industry and the recent flood of celebrities into this landscape, the creative beating heart inside the podcasting industry is still hard to define. The term “podcasting” has become generic, devolving into a game of semantics. There’s still no common cultural understanding of what narrative podcasts are and why they are different from other story structures. And an even more basic challenge: What I call “narrative podcasting” doesn’t really have a name that has stuck; it is still the baby called “Baby” inside a new and growing industry.

“Serial” eventually played out over three seasons. It now has been downloaded more than 300 million times; that’s basically one download for every person who has the aptitude to hit “subscribe” on a device in America.

How can we compare this to other storytelling phenomena that have earned widespread recognition? One example might be the indie film; it exists inside but also alongside, the Hollywood studio system. There’s no confusing an indie film with a Marvel hero tale or an A-List romp like Netflix’ “Glass Onion” or an action blockbuster like “Top Gun.” When you say you saw an indie film, you have a sense of what that is and what it isn’t. You don’t have to be a film critic to understand this difference.

Or how about pickleball? It has become its own sport among the plethora of racquet sports. It’s not tennis and it’s not badminton but there’s a net and a racquet and  ball involved. It has exploded in popularity, and has gradually begun to convince local gyms and community centers to lower their nets, and players in team t-shirts now throng the courts.

When I imagine the future of narrative podcasts. I imagine an industry that will one day have the same cultural acceptance understanding that indie films have within the wider landscape of film. Indie films have captured our hearts and defied the odds. They are underdogs in an industry where money and prestige are the dominant forces. Team t-shirts might help, too.

To better make my point, consider “The Blair Witch Project.” It debuted at Sundance Film Festival in 1999 to a stunned audience. What was that?! A documentary? A farce? The producers had exploited a thin line between fact and fiction, documentary and low-budget independent film to allow a great (horrific) mystery to unfold. It became a viral sensation that grew into a cultural phenomenon. It eventually grossed $250 million in box office, which gives it a rank of 13th in the highest grossing indie films. (Given that the original budget was under $60,000, it stands out in front in the measure of bang for buck.)

When the general public got access to “Blair Witch” in mainstream theaters, no one questioned the low-fi footage that makes you want to vomit in your chair; that sense of vertigo the whole point. And that style helped launch the sub-genre of found footage in the horror films. The viewing public wasn’t confused; this was an indie film, so the production made sense. Fans didn’t have to wonder what they were seeing; they just got to spend some time lost in the woods with that creepy feeling that something bad was just about to happen.

A graphic (comic-book style) guide

When I get frustrated by all those adjectives I use to explain narrative podcasting, I remember a passage from “Out On The Wire,” Jessica Abel’s graphic tour through the storytelling technique of narrative podcasting.

To research her book, Abel sat in on story meetings and edits of a range of programs. She interviewed the people whom she calls “the new masters of radio,” including Ira Glass and his colleagues at the original “This American Life” (including Julie Snyder, on of the producers on Season 1 of “Serial”); Glynn Washington and crew at “Snap Judgement,” Jad Abumrad and others at “RadioLab,” Rob Rosenthal, then part of the Transom Story Workshop.

The style of “Out On The Wire” may seem iconoclastic to narrative podcasting: It’s graphic nonfiction (or as Abel notes on her website “that’s comics to the layperson…” because apparently it, too, is finding its place in journalism). At the same time, it’s a how-to guide and concise living history of the industry. Abel is an artist, creative coach and associate professor at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA). Her ability to work intra-industry and also understand the concept behind the forms borders on the prophetic.

Abel recognized the terminology challenge that confronts podcasts. On Page 10 of her book, there’s a frame of her looking directly at the reader. The speech bubble reports her thought:

I understood the literal process of making a radio story, but that only took me so far. There is so much more to know about what elements go into a wonderful radio story, how great producers approach the basic narrative questions.

In that sense, my search for more insight into storytelling has taken me full circle, right back to narrative nonfiction audio stories.

… uh, public radio-based creative nonfiction narratives.

Wait, um … fact-based radio (and podcast) … no, audio storytelling

Ugh. How do I still not know what to call this stuff???

And with that, the next frames show her walking back to the “This American Life” offices, where she gets ready to pose the question to Ira Glass. The following quotes are from a series of frames inspired by that conversation.

Ira. Do you have a name for this kind of radio? asks Jessica.

No. No, no. That would really help, wouldn’t it? says Ira, who then continues:

What is this kind of radio?
I mean, it’s story. We’re makin’ stories.

Ha, ha.

That’s what we call ‘em

We’re making stories. But like, you know, that’s what the BBC calls the report coming in from Dubai on the market fluctuation.

I mean, sometimes we’ll say the word “narrative” but that’s just like adding extra syllables – and brightness – to it.

It’s narrative journalism, is what it is. I mean… we don’t…

I think you might be stuck with “narrative journalism” if you want to call it something.

I just want to make something that is compelling to me.

And I wish there was a not-pretentious way to just say “compelling stories” … you know what I mean? Like …

An overdue name of its own

What indie films and pickleball have in common are their unconfused and unconfusing names. Each is defined by terminology that brings taxonomy along with it.

This is exactly what narrative podcasting needs. In order to speak about it, to rave about it, to talk about it, the first step is to actually call it the same thing, again and again, until it sticks.

So I am determined to use the term “narrative podcast” as often as I can. I will plaster my social media channels with #narrativepodcast to help it to enter the SEO landscape. I will write it in a way that builds a body of critique so there is a core of work to compare and discuss. I will move away from “Baby” and call it by its given and singular name.

Narrative storytelling has earned a place at the adults table for story formats, including podcasts. So why not put a nametag beside the plate?

* * *

Samantha Hodder is an audio producer based in Toronto and writer of Bingeworthy, a newsletter all about narrative podcasts that are just that good.

The post What’s in a name? When it comes to podcasting, it can be confusing appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

To tell this story of craft, I must share something which might ruin your first-time viewing of the short documentary film “Victoria,” by Eloisa Diez. So if you haven’t already watched it and don’t like spoilers, here is a piece of advice: Watch the film first, and then get back to what I learned in a conversation with Diez.

“Victoria” was showed at several film festivals around the world, then was featured as part of The New York Times Op-Doc project, which features award-winning short documentaries by independent filmmakers. In the opening scene, we  meet Alex Reyes de Anda. He lives in Jalisco, Mexico, a traditional town centered around the Catholic church. He works as a biochemist at the local hospital, sings in the church choir and talks with his partner, Fernanda, about having a family. The film conveys a quotidian life, told through quiet scenes of singing, family meals and conversations about mundane matters.

But soon it stars unwrapping surprises that are offered like small gifts to the viewer: Alex, who was born female, is well into the process of realizing his lifelong dream of being male. He has taken hormone treatments, had top surgery, sports a beard and speaks in a mild, mid register.

As the movie unspools over 23 minutes, so do the reveals that shape Alex’s life. Before his transition, Alex was helping parent his then-partner’s daughter; soon after he began his transition, the woman left and and denied him contact with the toddler. We start to hear his gentle dreams of creating a new family. And then we learn that Alex is receiving fertility treatments. He gets pregnant and gives birth by C-section to a girl, Victoria. The infant is cleaned, swaddled and placed in his waiting arms with a nurse’s coo: “Say hello to your father.” Alex’s voiceover cuts in: “She is a victory over the impossible.”

Reconsidering stereotypical approaches to stories

Because of the story’s structure — like a flower opening from bud to blossom — we don’t know immediately that Alex is a trans man. There are occasional references to fertility treatments, but it’s not immediately clear that they are about Alex’s desire to give birth. It isn’t until the last third of the film that we learn that Alex is pregnant — and even then it’s a gentle reveal.

As someone who has written intimate stories about transgender issues, I was curious about Diez’s approach to “Victoria.” We spoke by Zoom from my home in Copenhagen and hers in in Mexico City; our conversation was helped by an interpreter and Google translate.

“I wanted the viewer to get to know Alex, before I told his story,” Diez told me.

While working on the film, she had several conversations with Kani Arkada, a trans filmmaker and close friend. He urged her to consider her own heteronormative thinking and stereotypes about how trans identities are often portrayed. It was from those conversations that Diez decided to introduce the norms of Alex’s life before revealing that he is a trans man.

“The intention was to delay the moment, to get to know the person before the labels,” she said.

Diez is one of the founders of the working collective La Sandía Digital, a feminist collaborative of audiovisual production, training and communication that works with grassroots movements and civil society organizations in Mexico to tell stories of gender justice and humans rights.

”We try to tell stories about minority groups that are not so often portrayed in the media,” Diez said.

Determined to tell the story from Alex’s point of view, Diez continued to confront her own prejudices and ignorance: “For one, I was surprised to find that Alex has such a rich and strong network – an entire social fabric of family and friends around him. … The media and the few films about the subject tend to show us isolated trans identities, often absolutely rejected.”

Diez met Alex Reyes de Anda in 2016 after a screening of a short film she directed about families fighting to get custody over their children. At first she wanted to tell the story about the injustice Alex was experiencing as transgender. At the same time, Mexico was dealing with a rash of pushbacks against human rights’ activists.

“It was a time of great pessimism,” Diez said. “There was a sense that no matter how much we tried to picture things like forced disappearances and femicides through videos and documentaries, nothing changed.”

A more mature approach to narrative

She began questioning whether the story she was working on about Alex was the right one to tell: ”In the work on human rights, we often follow formulas that have to do with denouncing human rights’ violations. But that narrative doesn’t allow us to see the resistance and strength of people. Even with the best intentions, it treats people as victims. When I met Alex, I realized that I couldn’t continue down that path, and facing this crisis made me mature in my way of telling stories.”

The story of Alex challenged not only how Diez saw trans identities, but also how she saw her work as a storyteller.

“That’s when I learned about ‘narrative practices,’” she said, “where I found a way of rethinking my storytelling.”

So in the middle of filming, Diez took a one-year diploma course in Narrative Practices,  where she was introduced to the work of Australian Michael White around “narrative therapy,” originally developed as a way to help people deal with negative challenges or perceptions through narrative. The idea at core: We give meaning to our lives based on the stories we tell, and we can change the meaning of our experience though storytelling.

As Diez explained it, the stories we build about our experiences shape or constitute the worlds we inhabit. “It’s not a tool, but a way of thinking,” she said. “If we transform those stories, we can give new meaning to our own experience. A story that victimizes us, and then turns into our identity, builds very small worlds. But through story we can rebuild worlds that we can inhabit in a more dignified and stronger way.”

So instead of recounting the violence and injustice that Alex had experienced during his transition, Diez went looking for the victories in his life.

“They were not necessarily public victories with public recognition, but smaller and more intimate,” she said. “It made a huge difference in my focus and way of telling his story.”

Patient reporting and a well-paced structure

Filming the short doc took several years; Alex lived seven hours drive away from Diez, and her other work as a sound producer limited her availability to travel. But the slow pace of making the documentary became an advantage as it allowed Diez was to witness Alex’s pregnancy and delivery.

“If I had finished much earlier, the story would end with Alex in a depression, unable to reconnect with his first daughter,” she said. “Over the years, Alex overcame that struggle, reformulated his life based on music, formed a relationship with Fernanda and decided to bear his second daughter.”

Diez mapped out the story structure to identify the main topics and the path of the story, which was key to determining what to include and what to leave out.

“It helped me not to get lost,” she said, showing me her notebooks, several maps, drawings and charts, all organized with colorful sticky notes. “I was building a map with all the themes, to later make decisions about which ones were going to be present. It was a slow process, because there were so many topics.”

Among those topics:

• Identity
• Gender
• Promises
• Memory
• Oblivion
• Transition
• Body
• Sacrifice
• Hate
• Church

And not least: Music. Alex and his partner Fernanda both sang in the choir, and music plays an important part in the film.

“Music is a character within the story, since music allows Alex to express sadness and at the same time helps him reposition himself within his society brings him closer to his new partner,” Diez explained.

Songs for the score of the film were chosen from the repertoire of the choir: “I didn’t want anything instrumental, and the music was recorded specifically with the choir to underline the narrative. Music has an emotional function of the story, but is also an extra protagonist.”

The film premiered at a film festival in 2021 and has since been screened more than 100 times at festivals, cultural institutes and schools, and included in The New York Times Op-Docs.

When Alex had a chance to watch the first edit of the film, he was worried about how people in his family and community would react, and he requested a few changes. But on the whole, he accepted the film as a genuine representation of his life, and is very proud of it, Diez said: “He calls it our film.”

* * *

Line Vaaben is a writer and editor for Politiken, the largest newspaper in Denmark. Her work has been published in several Danish textbooks, and she teaches narrative and longform journalism to students and professionals.

* * *

Alex seen through knowing eyes

Through immersive journalism, I reported and wrote “He Should Have Been A Boy,” a story published in 2020 about Daniel Valter Jensen who finally gets top surgery (breast removal) after waiting for years. After “Victoria” was released, I asked Daniel what he thought of it from a transgender point of view.

“I’m both a man and a woman,” he said. “My expression is fundamentally masculine, but I have feminine features. And I am at peace with that — something I recognize in the story of Alex.”

But the film brought conflicted emotions. He spent most of his youth struggling with his identity; when he finally transitioned, he was too old to give birth. His ex-partner, with whom he spent many years, has children, but he lost contact after the relationship ended.

“I cried when I watched the film,” he said. “As a middle aged, 50-year-old trans man, I feel a deep sadness, because I never managed to build a family of my own. Like Alex, I had to leave a person behind; I couldn’t be Linda anymore — I just couldn’t. And as he says in the film, transition comes at a price.”

Daniel knows two trans fathers who lost their children when the biological mothers left; the men had no custodial rights.

“I just so very much hope that Alex’s partner, Fernanda, stays with him,” Daniel said. “I really admire his courage and calmness during his pregnancy. It must have been hard.”

And he loves that Alex names his daughter Victoria: “The price for being a rebel is high. But it’s worth it.”

~ Line Vaaben ~

The post A doc film that gently unspools surprises appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

By Kristen Chin

[dc]A[/dc] self-described “perennial schoolboy” at heart, Omar Mullick is both romantic daydreamer and pragmatic journalist. It’s in the first few moments speaking with him that I can tell why he is a documentary filmmaker. He loves to indulge in the whimsies and wonders of the world and capture its beauty, but some things need to be rendered in black-and-white. For example, he says, a journalist’s moral code is one and the same with their personal morals: The way he treats a subject in a film is with the same level of respect and humanity that he treats anyone else. In other words, people first, people first, people first.

[caption id="attachment_173612" align="alignright" width="450"] Omar Mullck[/caption]

I had the pleasure of speaking to Mullick about his 2022 documentary “Flight/Risk”, which probed the aftermath of back-to-back crashes of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, one in Indonesia in 2018 and the second in Ethiopia in 2019. In the two crashes combined, 346 people were killed.

There was no way a doc filmmaker could be on the scene when a crash happens. So Mullick’s decision was to follow several families of crash victims, a whistleblower from Boeing who tried to warn of problems with a new computer system in the MAX and a newspaper journalist, Dominic Gates, who won a Pulitzer Prize for team coverage of coverage of the crashes, the investigation and the insider culture of Boeing.

I interviewed Gates for a previous Storyboard piece about how a print reporter adjusted to being both source and star of Mullick’s documentary film. As aviation beat reporter for The Seattle Times, Gates has distinguished himself as an expert in that field. After the release of “Flight/Risk,” I was curious how he viewed the pros and cons of filmmaking versus print as journalistic mediums. His take: While film can reach a wider audience through more compelling storytelling, it can’t provide the deep detail or context that print can, particularly for complex stories that unspool over time.

That made me wonder what Mullick, as the filmmaker wondered about that perspective. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

[dc small]H[/dc]ow did you become interested in doing a story on the families and people impacted by the 737 MAX crashes?
I like to bring stories back to the lived experience. That’s what documentaries can do. They can catapult you into the point-of-view and empathetic experience of someone actually dealing with the issue at hand — and in a radical way.

What I also find compelling are stories of ordinary people who do extraordinary things. For example, “These Birds Walk” was a film featuring Abdul Sattar Edhi, who ran 70% of Pakistan’s social services and slept amongst the poor in the back of his office in Karachi. A man who worked for him said to me very early on, “It’s not that [Edhi] is extraordinary. He’s an ordinary man, but he has some extraordinary qualities.” I loved that because the film could have been a hagiography or a story that is equally mistrustful to me, which is making Napoleon or some other hero seem like just a regular guy. But I find both those extremes to be dissatisfying. What is compelling to me is that this is a mortal human being who has some extraordinary qualities.

Humans have always been attached to visual storytelling. I think it’s because of that magical moment where you suspend your own disbelief, your own thinking, even if just for an hour or two, and yield yourself to the experience of being in someone else’s shoes. That’s what drew me to tell a story about the families, rather than, for instance, Boeing or just the facts of the story.

I count Dominic Gates as one of those very fine individuals that I’ve been lucky to work with as well.

I imagine you interviewed more families than were featured in the film. How did you decide who would be in the film?
We spoke to a number of families and other people whom we would have liked to include, but some declined to be in the film. Perhaps they did not want to be as public about their stories as a documentary would invite. We were expecting that and I’m very proud that we respected their wishes. People should never feel like they have to participate in a film, no matter how sincere or genuine the film’s goals may be. That might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how much bad faith you can witness in a documentary project that’s focused on its own ends. So we always supported people’s choice to participate or decline. It demonstrates an integrity around treating people as people first.

When families agreed to be part of the film, did you have to agree to any conditions?
No, but director/producer Karim Amer did something that would make most people’s jaw drop: In the appearance releases he didn’t limit what subjects could later retract. We also did not ask people to sign releases until after filming. I can’t remember how far after filming it was, but I do know that we had already sunk thousands of dollars into the film by that point. That’s what was right for this film. There were so many security concerns over what you could say and what you could be sued for saying that we had to allow people to speak freely and then mitigate later what could be shared. People can’t be expected to be fully aware of the legal parameters around them at all times when they’re speaking for hours into an interview.

What story craft lessons did you learn while making this film that will influence your future works?
I take great joy and satisfaction out of creating a great cinematic piece and taking the facts of a story and making it feel new and alive again for the audience.

What humbled me about this film was that I don’t know if I fulfilled the expectations I originally had to create the great cinematic piece I wanted to make. That usually bothers someone like me.

I did sound and I often shot and directed alone with our producer, Paul McGuire. I really wanted to achieve a new level in my craft. But it wasn’t until I sat and watched the film with the audience that I realized what was really important was that people got the message and the content of the film even without me hitting that bar.

What I realized was that I did create a great film, but perhaps in a different way than I had expected. I might say I did it with a simpler, more straightforward approach — maybe a more honest approach. It met the bar of being a generous and unprecedented piece of cinema. And I know that the journalistic imperative of the story was enough.

It would have been enough to just get the story out there cleanly and simply. But you see, that's the difference between the printed word as in a newspaper, like what Dominic Gates does and what I do.

What else do you see are the strengths and limitations of each medium?
I’m going to piggyback off of what Dominic said because he’s absolutely right: One of the great virtues amongst many of Dominic's works is that he can revisit and stay with this story and build a body of connected knowledge about what happened over years. I, at best, am capturing a moment, especially over a one- or two-year span of shooting. Dominic can go into footnotes and addendums and details, and then he can be rigorous to make sure he fleshes out the argument in a way that satisfies the requirements of academic rigor. Whatever he writes has to be verifiable and fact-checked.

Documentary filmmakers have to do that, too. But I have to weave in the lived experience of the people. I often have to start with the conclusion and give just enough information to pique your interest and allow you to hold that as we build along that 90-minute experience.

That’s really the experience we had with Ed Pierson, the Boeing whistleblower. Ed’s rightful prerogative was to go through, over a period of five days, pages and pages of stuff. Mine was to constantly remind him that I would lift the nuggets or turning points of him arriving at this conclusion to make this the most compelling story, and sometimes what I lift is three things at best. What is as important in my medium is that the audience sees the email and the red mark of your exclamation point next to the lie that was told, and see and hear you holding and reading the email out loud. That is more important in my medium than you just having the information, which you could get from the newspaper alone. My job is to get you red-faced and appalled with it along with us as a lived experience. That means that I am editing more as I shoot than I would be if it was print, and I am weaving a narrative that has to serve the old guard of being rigorously correct but also compelling so that the audience stays with it through the end.

That is the strength of my medium, that someone will get the core message and experience in a lived, visceral way.

* * *

Kristen Chin studied filmmaking at Boston University and now works as a documentary filmmaker and writer.

The post How a documentary filmmaker captures “lived experience” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

As the aerospace beat reporter for the Seattle Times, Dominic Gates is one of the world’s most knowledgeable journalists about the business of commercial aviation, and especially about the Boeing Company, long based in Seattle and long the premier manufacturer of commercial aircraft. A former math teacher from Ireland, Gates landed the Times aviation beat in 2003; he’s since published hundreds of articles on the subject.

That knowledge came to bear after 346 people were killed in back-to-back crashes of Boeing 737 MAX airplanes, one in Indonesia in 2018 and another in Ethiopia in 2019. The 737 MAX was grounded as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) launched an investigation into possible mechanical and oversight failures that may have led to the crashes. At the same time, Gates launched his own investigation.

The resulting work by Gates and three colleagues at the Times won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting. (Editor's note: There were two Pulitzers in national reporting awarded that year, the other to a team from Pro Publica that investigated a series of deadly naval accidents.)

The work also caught the attention of other media. Gates has been featured in or interviewed by several other news outlets. Most recently, he was both a key source and main character in the documentary “Flight/Risk” (2022) about the lead-up to and aftermath of the fatal crashes.

As a documentary filmmaker, I was curious about the experience of a straightforward print beat reporter who is tapped as both source and subject of a film told along a more narrative arc. What did Gates make of the challenges and possible advantages of the two nonfiction forms? Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

When you were initially invited to participate in “Flight/Risk,” how did the team behind the film pitch it?
In January 2020, I got pitches to be part of three different documentaries. The “Flight/Risk” pitch sold me because, as they essentially said, “We don't want a TV-style documentary. We want storytelling that's more like a movie. We want characters. You're not going to be sitting down with a bookcase behind you.” I was also sold on the people who pitched me. I was wary at the beginning because one thinks of Hollywood-types as not being very trustworthy, but these weren't Hollywood-style stereotypes at all. They were much more earnest, interested in the content of what they were doing. I really bonded with the main director, Omar Mullick, a British guy of Afghan descent. He and I shared a working class upbringing, outsider status growing up (me a Catholic in Northern Ireland and him a dark-skinned Muslim in England) and a life lifted higher through education.

I've been part of six other TV documentaries about the MAX crashes where I was exactly that — a talking head. It just seemed a lot more interesting to do something that would be more gripping to a bigger audience.

What was involved in the filming of “Flight/Risk?”
It was pretty easy. Early in the process, I took some days off from the newspaper to film with them in 2020 and 2021. They’d come and ask me questions and they’d sometimes film me sitting around a table showing them documents. Later they wanted scenes of me working, but I was apprehensive because I didn’t want to have to act. They said, “You’re not going to be acting, pretending or doing something fake. We’ll film you doing what you do. We'll talk to you and ask questions and you can answer them, but when we film you doing things, it'll be real.”

I was also a consultant on the film. They had many different people in the movie, but I knew most about the overall story and what caused the crashes. So I helped them contact other people, including some of my sources who agreed to talk to them.

At one point, they asked whether one of my sources wanted to be in the movie. That was a problem because the sources we’re talking about are very confidential. At first, I said they couldn’t film me meeting that source because the cameras would draw attention. So, one of the directors scouted around Seattle and said he’d found the perfect place: a downtown parking garage that was empty in the upper levels during the pandemic. It was discreet enough that they could film me meeting my source in person without drawing attention. The resonance with the Watergate story is obvious now, but the the views offered a sense of place that was great for the scene.

Before that, when the COVID lockdown was new, they asked if my two college-age daughters could help with filming. They sent us a high-end iPhone, tripod and all sorts of equipment. They asked my daughters to film me doing different things and interview me, although the only piece of that footage that made it into the movie was in the credit scene where you see me reacting to winning the Pulitzer.

As a behind-the-notebook beat reporter, how did you handle being both source and subject in the film?
I went with the flow, but I did draw some lines. For example, they wanted to film me in the bathroom shaving, then putting on my shirt and suit. After seeing the film, it made sense why they wanted it, but in that moment I just thought it was ridiculous to be filmed shaving, so I said no.

What did you learn by being part of this film that you might take back to your own beat work?
In terms of the story, what I reported in print was much more detailed than the story they managed to tell. They didn't go into the technicalities very much at all, which is perfectly understandable. I was perfectly happy with the portrayal of me and my work. However, the film also tells these other stories and one of them in particular is problematic for me, which is the story of Ed Pierson, the whistleblower.

Ed is a really good guy. He's got great integrity. And what Ed testified about —what he says in the movie about what was happening in the factory in the summer of 2018 before the first crash — is totally true. In fact, I wrote about it at the time, and there's a shot in the movie of my front page from that summer. But, what happened in the factory then didn't cause the 2018 crashes, and some could infer that the movie suggests otherwise.

Ed has continued to campaign that the MAX is still unsafe. He compiled a dossier of in-flight incidents reported by pilots of the MAX’s service. He sent that dossier to me and other journalists and none of us wrote about it. I investigated and concluded that the incidents were not safety incidents. They were routine. So unlike Ed, I don't believe the MAX is unsafe. Boeing has since fixed the MCAS (an inflight computerized maneuvering system). But saying that doesn't detract one iota from Boeing's responsibility for the crashes.

The chief thing I really regret is right at the end of the movie. A line appears just before the credits that says something like, “The MAX continues to have inflight incidents since it returned to service.” That's a direct reference to Pierson's dossier but, like I said, I don't agree that those incidents are significant safety issues.

I saw the film close to the final cut and they asked me for feedback. I told them that there was not enough emphasis on telling the viewers about MCAS and the engineering flaws and that that’s what caused the crashes. And there was too much emphasis on Ed Pierson's concerns about the factory which, although real, were not related to the crashes.

I like the movie. I think it will help spread the word of what happened here to a much bigger audience. But I do regret that many people, especially those who haven't followed all the details of previous news coverage, will look at the movie and will come away with the impression that what I talked about (the engineering flaws) and what Ed Pierson talked about (the factory flaws) are all of the same piece, and they’re not. To give people the impression that these two different aspects contributed equally to the crashes is, in my mind, false. So I wish that had been a bit different, but of course I didn’t control anything in the movie except the parts I was in.

After your feedback on the final cut, did you see any significant changes in the film?
They said they went through a lot of footage. They spent a lot of time looking for ways to amend the film, but they were very close to the end at that point. They just couldn't find something that fit in without destroying the narrative. In the end, the final product wasn't significantly changed.

Having been part of this film, what do you think is better captured in print versus film or vice versa?
You can provide much more detail in print. I don’t mean to be disparaging of film as a medium, and I think the filmmakers in this documentary provided deep emotional truth. In print, the Seattles Times news stories on the MAX crashes, one following another, scoop after scoop, over the course of a year, provided a level of detail that a movie couldn't cover.

In a documentary, you can't tell every story; you have to pick. The stories picked for the film were told at a top level of detail appropriate to the medium. What a movie can offer is emotional vividness. I think the filmmakers captured the story wonderfully through the people they chose to tell it. I'm proud to have worked with them. I admire what they did and the skill and passion with which they did it.

On the other hand, a movie can also be unfair to some of the people because it’s a simplified snapshot.

For example, in the movie, Steve Dickson, the FAA administrator, comes across terribly. In his testimony in Congress, which is what they filmed, he was off and the senators grilling him were grandstanding. I felt sorry for him afterwards because Dickson was appointed FAA administrator after the second crash. He was called in to try and fix it and he did move the FAA in a direction towards safety. He was also responsible for the CEO of Boeing, Dennis Muilenburg, being fired. Muilenburg kept saying, “The FAA is going to approve us within the next month,” except he said that repeatedly and it never happened. Eventually, in December of 2019, Dickson called him into his office and told him that he was taking one of the statements as pressure on the FAA and it had to stop. Dickson then issued a press release telling everybody that he had given Muilenburg a dressing down. The board fired Muilenburg a week later because it had become totally clear by Dickson's action that Muilenburg had lost the confidence of the FAA regulator. Dickson didn’t come out looking well in the film, but in the background Dickson actually did a very difficult job reasonably well. Since the crashes, the FAA has begun to hold Boeing's feet to the fire.

What I'm getting at is that every one of the characters in a real-life movie is more complex than it's possible to portray in 90 minutes.

***

Kristen Chin studied filmmaking at Boston University and now works as a documentary filmmaker and writer.

The post Print beat reporting vs documentary film drama: Pros and cons appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR'S NOTE: All time codes in this post correspond to the YouTube version of "The Queen of Basketball." It's also available, with an introduction by filmmaker Ben Proudfoot, on The New York Times site.

[dc]A[/dc] confession: I love films that make me cry. Not tears of sadness, but tears that spring from being touched, moved and inspired by the spirit with which people face the challenges in their lives. Tears are one of my reliable signs of a great film.

I was introduced to Canadian filmmaker Ben Proudfoot through a mutual friend and have since then become a huge fan of his work. Last year, I joined a year-long networking/mentorship group he created for young filmmakers. It was out of participating in that group that Proudfoot provided ample encouragement and feedback, supporting me in finishing my first film.

[caption id="attachment_169913" align="alignleft" width="325"] Filmmaker Ben Proudfoot at the 2022 Academy Awards.[/caption]

Proudfoot is an Emmy and Academy Award-winning director and founder/CEO of Breakwater Studios, a production company that specializes in humanist short form documentaries for The New York Times and branded documentaries for a range of clients, including governments and companies like Huckberry, Lululemon and Sotheby’s. According to the Breakwater website, “Proudfoot is highly sought-after for telling emotionally moving and easily shareable stories in a short-form documentary style that combines the best of premium Hollywood filmmaking.”

My version: His films make me cry – a lot. (Thanks, Ben.) His Oscar-winning short doc, “The Queen of Basketball,” was no exception. I was barely two minutes into the story when I reached for the tissues.

Profiles of unsung genius

In December 2019, Breakwater Studios and The New York Times launched a new historical and op-doc series called “Almost Famous.” Films in the ongoing series focus on people who, due to time and circumstance, fell just short of making history but went on to live fulfilling lives anyway. Breakwater calls them “unrecognized geniuses” and “singular accomplices to history.”

One such person was Lusia “Lucy” Harris, who led the women’s basketball team at Delta State University to three national championships in the 1970s, scored the first points in the first Olympic women’s basketball game in 1976 in Japan, and was the only woman to be officially drafted by a pro team, the then-New Orleans Jazz, in 1977. She declined to join the pros (watch the film to learn why), instead becoming a special education teacher and high school basketball coach. Later on, she was the first Black woman to be inducted in the Basketball Hall of Fame. Harris died earlier this year, at age 66, so never knew her story was awarded an Oscar.

My public speaking coach once likened the emotional journey of a great story to a heartbeat: We should experience ups and downs of all intensities to create emotion and aliveness.  From the music to the framing to Harris’s storytelling, Proudfoot and his team delivered those ups and downs in Harris’ life in 22 minutes on the screen.

MUSIC as tone and tension

Proudfoot once told me that music to a director is like sauce to a chef: It provides flavor that shapes the piece. The opening track in “The Queen of Basketball” (starting at 0:09) is some enticing sauce! The film starts with a light, staccato classical score that feels whimsical, exciting and dream-like. As more string instruments and drums are added, it sounds like the soundtrack to a victory lap. The music sets the tone: This is a celebration of Harris’ life. By this point, I’m already all in: “What an incredible person. Who is she?”

The musical arrangement that plays under the 1975 National Basketball Championship, Delta State University and Harris’s first national win, is used to heighten and then release tension, another hallmark of great storytelling (6:07 to 9:04). Harris’ team, the Lady Statesmen, is the underdog and seeks to end Immaculata College’s three-time, back-to-back reign over the National Championship. “Gloria in excelsis Deo” by Vivaldi (Immaculata College is a Catholic school) plays over the first few clips of the game until Harris’ team starts to pull ahead. A marching drumbeat comes up, merging with “Gloria” as the teams battle head-to-head. Tension and anticipation rise. “Gloria, Gloria…” is sung over and over under the drumbeat. It’s hilarious and releases some of the moment’s tension.

FRAMING as intimacy

Breakwater’s films are often in a width-to-height 4:3 aspect ratio which looks square-ish, distinct from the more common elongated rectangular frame. Sometimes, Breakwater makes the frame even smaller, creating a feeling of peeking into someone’s world. Right at 1:10 in “The Queen of Basketball,” for example, the smaller frame is used over archival, black-and-white footage of Black neighborhoods. It feels nostalgic, like a distant memory, and fits under audio of Harris describing her childhood.

I’ve always been taught to leave enough room for a subject to move when framing my interview shots, but the 4:3 aspect ratio in Breakwater films break that rule. The square crop only allows for Harris’ face — according to effective Zoom etiquette, that would qualify as “too close.” There are even brief moments when Harris laughs and moves her head partly out of the frame. More rule-breaking! But it creates a very intimate experience; you can see and feel the excitement, heartbreak and emotion that Harris experiences as she tells her story.

WIN, WIN, WIN throughout the journey

One of the most genius things about “The Queen of Basketball” is how Proudfoot and his team take full advantage of Harris’ humor and playfulness. Her speech is structured like a comedian’s: there’s the set-up and then her punchline. All the “Almost Famous” pieces are structured as hero’s journeys, but because Harris is so clever, we get to experience the satisfaction of a win every few minutes rather than having to wait until the film gets to her major life victories, like winning the national championships or going to the Olympics.

That technique works especially well at the end (20:45), where Harris explains why she turned down an offer from the NBA. Does she have any regrets? “Maybe the world would have known my name had I continued playing,” she says. You think, for a brief beat, that that’s her final word. And then, “But it didn’t,” she says, “so I don’t speculate.”

What memorable last words.

Celebrating the human

Breakwater Studios calls itself a “leader in humanist short form documentaries.” Google “humanism,” and there are many definitions, but a common thread is a celebration of the human condition. Proudfoot and his team demonstrate, in film after film, that they love telling stories that reconnect us to the wonder of being human.

They make me cry, and remind me that it’s great to be alive.

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