The Pitch Archives - Nieman Storyboard https://niemanstoryboard.org/tag/the-pitch/ Fri, 19 Sep 2025 11:19:13 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://niemanstoryboard.org/app/uploads/2024/02/cropped-NiemanFavicon-40x40.png The Pitch Archives - Nieman Storyboard https://niemanstoryboard.org/tag/the-pitch/ 32 32 Megan Greenwell on holding out for the once-in-a-lifetime book idea https://niemanstoryboard.org/2025/09/19/megan-greenwell-bad-company-book-idea/ Fri, 19 Sep 2025 11:02:09 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=16100 Megan Greenwell

Like so many journalists, Megan Greenwell resisted inserting herself into the story that would ultimately shape her career. But the plot came to her.

Greenwell knows as intimately as anyone how a private equity buyout can alter the fabric of a workplace. In 2019, Great Hill Partners acquired the Gizmodo Media Group — the parent company of Deadspin, where Greenwell was the first woman to become editor-in-chief. Shortly into the new ownership, Greenwell resigned — and explained why in a viral blog post. 

Her own experience catalyzed what became an obsession with understanding the wide-reaching tentacles of the private equity industry and its powerful grasp on the American economy. But Greenwell wasn’t drawn to memoir. She instead chose to pursue a rigorously reported narrative account of the industry’s impact through the lives of four people working in retail, housing, medicine, and media. Her debut book, “Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream,” was published by HarperCollins in June.  

Greenwell has previously edited or reported features for publications including Wired, Esquire, GQ, New York magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek and The New York Times, among others. She also serves as the deputy director of the Princeton Summer Journalism Program, which recruits and trains high school students from underrepresented backgrounds who are interested in journalism.

I spoke with Greenwell about the devotion necessary to bring a book project to fruition, her approach to structuring the reporting process, and how she juggled the book deal along with the rest of her freelance business. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve written plenty of long magazine features before. What was the moment when you realized or felt convinced that this idea actually needed to be a book?

After I wrote a piece for Deadspin that went viral, a lot of people said to me “You should make this a book,” including my book agent. I was resistant to that idea because I didn't want to write a book just about the media industry. It felt too niche. And I really didn't want to write a book about my own experience. I’d rejected the idea of doing a private equity book for quite a while, but I also couldn't stop reading about it. I became obsessed with how private equity works in other industries and felt myself coming back to it over and over again. 

Have you always been interested in writing a book?

This was my first. I’ve had an agent since around 2013, and she signed me because she liked my work in other places. I knew back then that at some point I wanted to write one, but I was very adamant that I was not going to until I knew it was the right idea. For years, my agent and I had lunch every six months or so. I’d float some ideas and she’d say to poke around on them. Somewhere between the initial poking around and finishing an actual proposal, I would either determine there wasn't enough there or I just wasn't interested enough. I was very afraid of signing a contract for something I wasn't going to stay excited about. That went on for almost 10 years and this was the first idea that I never lost interest in.

Is it common to find an agent so long before there’s a seedling of an idea?

I certainly have other friends who’ve done the same. My agent in particular is very good at keeping tabs on what's out there because she’s willing to play the long game. I've been in her home office and she has this whiteboard with three categories: people who have sold a book and are working on it, people who are midway through a proposal and people who are just ideating. Last time I saw it, the ideating list was the longest. It’s smart because she ends up getting a lot of people who might take more time to get there, but are going to be ready when they get there.

How much reporting was required to put together the book proposal itself?

My proposal was probably 80 pages and had character sketches of people I thought would be my primary protagonists. I did find it harder to get people to talk to me for a book proposal rather than an actual book. Others told me that most of what you write for a proposal is not going to end up in the book, and I was like, “No, I'll be different.” I was not different. Basically, nothing from the proposal ended up in the book. But I was super glad I did all that work because in editor meetings, I got feedback that this was an incredibly thorough, well-reported proposal. I think this helped me get a good deal for it and helped convince editors that I was ready to do it. I did find it hard to be doing a ton of work — more than I had ever done for any story — without knowing whether this would sell, or whether anybody would ever see any version of it. This was not a mental space I’d ever had to occupy for that long.

How did you find your protagonist? What was your process like when you were exploring potential subjects who’d occupy the real estate of the book?

This was by far the hardest part. I knew I needed people who readers were going to want to spend a lot of time with. I had three characters in the proposal but four in the book. One from the proposal ended up in the book.

I did so much grunt work to find them. A lot of LinkedIn searching for people who had previously worked at various companies. A ton of scouring Facebook groups and Reddit, and talking to nonprofit groups to see who they recommended. I was trying to plumb every possible avenue. I talked to a little over 300 people for the book as a whole, and almost 150 of those were potential protagonists. 

I needed the right mix of geographic, racial and personality diversity. I also needed people who were going to let me into their lives for two years and tell me absolutely everything — which is not most people. I got relatively deep with several people before realizing they were going to be reluctant past a certain point, which is totally understandable. 

The worst moment was when I had been talking for months to a woman for the housing section. She’d given me recordings, contemporaneous notes, everything. I flew to Indiana to meet her and texted her about when she wanted to meet up the next morning, but she didn't respond. She always responded quickly. I woke up the next morning and she still hadn't written back. I texted her and knew her address so I went to her place, but she wasn’t there. I never heard from her again. She fully stood me up, but only once I got to the point of being in her town. All I can assume is that she got cold feet when it got to that level of reality. I wasn’t going to write the chapter without spending time with her, so I had to start that section from scratch.

What do you think is most misunderstood about private equity’s relationship with the media?

The private equity industry has been very good at making everybody think that the problems of any of these industries are the inevitable result of societal and economic change — particularly with media. Most people's understanding of the landscape is that the ad market got decimated so the media was screwed — and maybe private equity profited off of the ashes, but they didn't have anything to do with killing media. I just don't think that's true.

One thing I learned from the reporting that genuinely surprised me is that a lot of these local newspapers were still profitable at the point when private equity got involved. That doesn't mean the trend line wasn't down — of course it was. But private equity wasn't going to come in unless the businesses were still profitable. Then they came in and didn't do anything to try to adapt to the new age. So they either hastened the demise of a lot of these publications or really did directly kill them.

What has the marketing experience been like since the book was released? What has surprised you most about that leg of the journey? 

I tried to go into it with as few expectations as possible. My goal was to sell enough copies so that somebody lets me do this again because I really did love the experience. I was cognizant that I had gotten a bigger advance, relative to the typical scale of advances, so I didn’t want to be a flop. There are people who write their first book, it doesn't sell enough copies and they’re unable to sell a second — which is what I was most afraid of. As long as I could sell a reasonable number of copies, I would be happy. 

Setting my expectations low has made me pleasantly surprised by how things have gone. I got to do a little tour. I got to do a bunch of sold out events in towns that are meaningful to me because I was super conservative about only booking events in towns where I knew I could draw a real crowd. I didn't want to get my hopes up that I would even get reviews, much less that they’d be positive. How long the tail of this has lasted continues to surprise me. I thought people would care about the book for two weeks then never mention it again. 

How did working on the book trickle out to the rest of your freelance business? How did it impact the amount of work you could take on or what kind of work you could take on?

Having the advance allowed me to adapt based on what the book needed. I could make decisions for any given month, or any given season, based on what I needed to do for the book — instead of the other way around. The last three months before my deadline, I didn't take on any other assignments. But when I was reporting, I was still doing a mix of newsroom management consulting, freelance editing and freelance writing. 

Even if you do get a healthy advance, they’re typically split into four payments. Mine was in five. You get the first payment upon signing the contract. It took me two years to even get a first draft in, and you don’t get the second payment until the draft is through copy edit and legal review. It was two-and-a-half years before I saw payment number two of five. So even what sounds like a life-changing amount of money on paper is not exactly a life-changing amount of payment of money in the early days, but the advance did allow me to do what was best for the book.

This didn’t mean making the book my full-time job. I was still doing a ton of other stuff. But when I really needed to buckle down, I was able to buckle down. When I needed to travel for reporting, I could afford to fund it and take the time off of whatever else I was doing. I was very glad I did not try to do this book with a full-time job, and that I had the kind of freelance career with some flexibility to it.

What do you think is important for nonfiction writers who are considering pursuing a book to know? What should they keep in mind as they embark upon this process?

Make sure you really, really love the idea. I have done plenty of features where the idea is interesting to me, but it's not something I want to marry. For a book — especially a narrative book where the reporting is so intense — you are marrying that idea. I would have been absolutely miserable if I had been even 20% less excited about this idea.

I am 41 years old and just published my first book. A lot of people feel the pressure to write a book by a certain time, a bit like pressure to get married or have kids. For a certain group of writers, it feels like the next career achievement box you have to check. I certainly felt those pressures at certain points, too. But I do not think I could have written a book as good earlier in my career — in part because I had to work on my talents, but also because I had to get to that once, or twice, or 10 times-in-a-lifetime scale of an idea. 

I'm so glad I didn't listen to the pressure of “Just do it. You don’t have to be in love with every idea.” Maybe I’ll get to a point in my book writing career where that’s true. Maybe if you write 15, it gets to the point where it feels banal. But I was very cognizant that you only get to do the first one once.

***

“Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream”

By Megan Greenwell 

CHAPTER ONE: LIZ

Once, years ago, Liz Marin was talking to a friend who had recently been laid off. The friend, Annmarie, was fretting because her husband needed insulin to treat his diabetes and she needed an inhaler to treat her asthma, but she had recently lost her health insurance along with her job, and they could only afford to cover the cost of one of the two medications out of pocket. Liz was enraged — at the company that laid her friend off, at the American health care system for failing to provide an adequate safety net, at rich people generally for fighting to preserve the status quo. 

She couldn’t fix any of those problems, but, she figured, she could get her friend an inhaler. Liz didn’t have much money either, but she did have health insurance, and she also had asthma. So she did what seemed to her like the obvious thing: she called her doctor, lied that she had lost her inhaler, got a new one, and mailed it across the country to her friend. 

“Yeah, I know it’s insurance fraud,” she said later. “But the thought of her dying because she couldn’t afford a three-hundred dollar fucking inhaler, I couldn’t fathom that. I have the power to do something, and just because the government calls it illegal is not going to stop me.”

[annotation q="Of all places to start Liz’s story, why did this anecdote stand out to you?" a="My first draft started with a different scene, one I had actually witnessed at Liz’s home. But my editor pointed out, correctly, that it felt a little generic, and we wanted to communicate to readers immediately that Liz is a particularly strong-willed person. Going back over hundreds of pages of transcripts looking for a new place to start, it was the quote below that jumped out at me. It shows several things about Liz: her fury at how working-class people lose out even on basic necessities, her primal need to do anything in her power to help people she loves, her willingness to ignore laws when necessary, her love for the word ‘fucking.’ The rest of Liz’s story is about how she fought back against Toys R Us’s private-equity owners, so establishing all of this about her from the very first sentences felt perfect. Readers have really fallen in love with Liz as a character, and I think this story is a big reason why."] 

Liz can’t help herself from speaking up or butting in when she sees injustice in the world — especially when someone she loves is involved. Most of the time, it doesn’t involve violating federal law. But it doesn’t matter how much or how little she has; she won’t be happy unless she’s sharing it with family, friends, and strangers. [annotation q="How much time did you need to spend with Liz before getting to know her personality and ethos on the level where you could make an assertion like this? Is this something you gleaned or a sentiment that she expressed to you?" a="I spent many days with Liz over two years. The first time I was at her home, for 12 hours one Saturday, she mostly ignored me because she had a house full of relatives. I was worried about it at first — I had so many questions I needed to ask her! — but I realized pretty quickly she was giving me a great gift. Seeing her interact with her kids, her sister, her dad, her husband made me understand her in a much deeper way than I would have if we had gone straight into an interview. My other visits were a mix of focused interviews and fly-on-the-wall time, and I valued both equally. I also talked to her relatives and friends about her at length. So I don’t think she ever told me this verbatim, but it’s so core to who she is that she didn’t really have to."] Several years ago, her in-laws, who had never lived outside their home country of Colombia, moved to the United States to live with her and her husband, Henry, in Washington State. More recently, her own father, Loren, whom everyone calls Buddy, came from Alaska to the American mainland and began splitting time between Liz’s home and her sister Mindy’s, a couple hours south in Portland, Oregon. 

The Marin house, which sits on a quiet street of cookie-cutter homes atop neatly manicured lawns in University Place, a suburb of  Tacoma, is designed to take care of people. In the kitchen, next to stacked cases of Kirkland water bottles, sit value-sized boxes of individually sized snacks — mixed Frito-Lay chips, chocolate and vanilla pudding, Ensure, apple chips, fruit cups. Just above that, on the kitchen counter, is a first aid kit teeming with Band-Aids, face masks, rubbing alcohol, gauze, and painkillers. When Mindy’s family comes for the weekend, which happens often, Liz’s office is swallowed by an air mattress, the living room overtaken by video-game controllers and kids’ shoes, the bathrooms drowned in other people’s toiletries. 

Like many women socialized to put everyone else first, the one person Liz often forgets to take care of is herself. [annotation q="I really enjoyed this transition; I thought it was insightful and smooth."] Sometimes it’s because she’s too busy. Sometimes she’s just too broke from providing for everyone else. A few years ago, the Marins had a little financial breathing room for the first time in their adult lives. When one of the kids outgrew their sneakers, she’d sprint to the store to buy them a new pair, but she hadn’t bought herself a new item of clothing in years. Henry encouraged her to go shopping for herself — demanded it, basically — but she didn’t see the point. So he threw out her entire wardrobe. 

Liz still sounds a little shocked about it all. Henry is the soft-spoken one of the two, the one content to sit quietly, awaiting further instruction, while people mill about. He adores his wife. So when he and their children began carrying armfuls of her clothing to a dumpster near their house, she couldn’t quite make sense of it. Now you have no choice but to buy some new things, he told her. [annotation q="What did you feel like this anecdote more broadly serves to illustrate about Liz and what made you choose to introduce it so early in the chapter?" a="I am aware this story has been controversial on Goodreads; I guess some people read it as Henry being mean. Nothing could be further from the truth. Liz is the first to admit that she has to be forced into taking care of herself, and that felt like an important contrast to the Liz of the lede. Together, they make her a fuller, more complicated character. It was really important to me to treat my protagonists as complex humans rather than caricatures of victims. And though Liz and Henry fought about this, it was clear when she told the story years later that she interpreted Henry forcing her to buy new things as an act of deep love. She still struggles to take care of herself. She still relies on Henry to make her do so. People will always map their own feelings onto someone else’s relationship, but the significance of this story for me is showing this other side of her, and the importance of her marriage, that you wouldn’t see from watching her give a speech or march in a protest."]

He didn’t realize he had missed a bucket — a literal bucket — full of her oldest, most worn-out clothes. I’ll go shopping tomorrow, she promised. Instead, she took the clothes from the bucket, folded them, and put them in her dresser. Aside from a few holes and the fact that most of them didn’t fit particularly well, they were perfectly wearable. But Henry realized pretty quickly that the holey clothes that didn’t fit were not in fact new. The resulting argument lasted for days. 

Eventually she bought some clothes. She didn’t, however, shake off the guilt. [annotation q="‘Guilt’ feels like a very specific word choice."] Sitting at the dining room table recounting the story, she wore a threadbare pair of jeans and a six-year-old T-shirt from a Native Alaskan tribal celebration, her long salt-and-pepper hair cascading over the print on the front. 

The Marin home is also a monument to the people Liz loves. Family pictures aren’t sequestered to the mantel or a single gallery display. They cover every table, shelf, and wall, and feature every imaginable combination of relatives. On the few patches of wall that don’t hold photos, traditional Native Alaskan art hangs instead. Often the two are combined: two paintings above the dining room table depict Buddy and his sister in traditional dress at a powwow. [annotation q="I appreciate your attention to detail when it comes to setting — and in particular, to Liz’s internal and external home environment. Why did it feel crucial to make clear to readers early on the type of space that she curates for herself?" a="I don’t think narrative nonfiction works without specificity; I read so many books and features that fail because they try to position themselves as ‘literary’ but it feels like the interviews were conducted over the phone. What I love about narrative is the noticing: not just what someone said, but how she said it. Was she fidgeting? Was she making intense eye contact? Did her voice crack? That’s what separates my favorite works of nonfiction from the rest, and that was really important to me when writing my own. This was another advantage of getting to spend so much time in Liz’s house when I wasn’t conducting an interview — I got to look around, jot down details, and ask her about them later. I think being in someone’s home, seeing how they live, is absolutely crucial to understanding them deeply enough for any kind of profile. The number of family photos in Liz’s house is truly astounding; it would be impossible to understand her without knowing that."]

One room, though, is devoted to a different kind of memorabilia. Behind the desk and above the air mattress in the office/guest room, a waist-high bookcase houses dozens of giraffes. Large stuffed ones and bronze ones are surrounded by smaller ones made from plastic, rubber, and wood. Photos rest among the animals, most of them of Liz grinning with friends. In one, her son, Daniyel, holds yet another stuffed giraffe. This giraffe, with the tuft of dark brown hair between its ears and the stars that stud its neck, is recognizable to anyone who has ever stepped inside a Toys R Us. The display is a shrine to Liz’s six years at the company, a shrine to what was the best job she ever had until it all came crashing down. The giraffe in the photo, Geoffrey the Giraffe, is the one that upended the Marin family’s entire life. [annotation q="My curiosity is sufficiently piqued!"]

***

Before he launched the toy store that transformed retail, Charles Lazarus was a poor kid with a dream. [annotation q="Now we’re launching into the second thread of the chapter and meeting a brand new character, who (seemingly, as of now) is not yet obviously connected to Liz. How did you think about when to make this jump to Charles? When weaving two character-driven threads together, how do you generally approach facilitating that transition as smoothly as possible?" a="I am a complete nerd for narrative structure. When I was a terrified baby features editor, I’d go through my favorite magazine stories and diagram what made the structure work, which I think helped me immensely. (I also think editing per se is invaluable for understanding structure as a writer; it teaches you to think ruthlessly about what serves the story best, rather than what sounds the prettiest. I truly believe that every shortform writer hoping to become a longform writer should do a stint as an editor.)"] 

[annotation a="The structure challenge posed by the four opening chapters of my book (collectively called ‘Before’) is that they have to introduce both a protagonist and the historical context necessary to understand the private equity part of the story. And because there are 12 chapters in the book, plus an introduction and conclusion, they each have to do all of that in 7,000 words, and compellingly enough to successfully get people to the heart of the story. This was the trickiest of those chapters, because the two stories were so far removed time-wise, and Liz didn’t even start working at Toys R Us until after Lazarus was out of the picture."] 

[annotation a="I’ve always wanted to write a feature with a classic A-B structure, because I think it’s so powerful when it works. It came to me pretty early on that I had to at least try it here. This was the first chapter I wrote, and the only one that the editor who acquired the project, the brilliant Kate Napolitano, read before she left for another job. When I wrote the first draft, I must have been scared to commit to fully separating the A and B strands; Kate’s notes were about eliminating the spots where I tried to thematically combine them prematurely. She told me I could trust readers to see the similarities, which built my confidence."]

Lazarus was born in 1923 in Washington, D.C., where his father, Frank, owned a not-particularly-successful used-bicycle store called National Sport Shop in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. The Lazaruses, one of the few Jewish families around, lived behind the store: their home was connected to the shop by an opening in the dining room, so someone could get up quickly and help a customer who happened to show up during dinnertime. 

The family rarely had money for luxuries. There was always food on the table, even during the depths of the Great Depression, but Charles wanted more. He wanted to be rich. He didn’t dream of  Madison Avenue or Wall Street. He wanted to sell things to people. 

Lazarus, who died in 2018, once told an interviewer about a pivotal conversation he had with his dad while helping him fix up an old bicycle. Charles asked Frank — who had grown up in a Jewish orphanage in  D.C. and, by his son’s account, never aspired to anything other than the ability to care for his family — why they never sold new bikes, which would bring in more money. His dad responded that new products required too much money up front, and they would never be able to compete with big retailers like Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Company. “I just didn’t believe that,” Lazarus said. “I just thought that you had to have a defeatist attitude to always sell used goods. And I told him, ‘I’m not going to do that.’” [annotation q="Given that Charles died in 2018, what was your primary method for gathering hyper-specific details about his personality and mindset?" a="I’m thrilled to be asked about this, because it was a huge reporting challenge, and because the answer to how I solved it is buried in my 400-plus endnotes! Considering how much influence Toys R Us had on the American retail industry, there is woefully little out there about Lazarus himself. Even his obituaries were fairly bare-bones; another book that covers Toys R Us’s acquisition by private equity cites his Wikipedia page in its endnotes. I had talked to some Toys R Us employees who were there toward the end of Lazarus’s time at the company, and they had some details to share. But I did think it was important to understand where he came from and who he was. I checked every source I could think of but kept coming up empty."] 

[annotation a="While scouring the internet one day, I found a link to a 3-minute YouTube video taken from an interview with Lazarus. The video description mentioned it was part of a larger project, and included the director’s name and website. When I emailed the filmmaker, I learned that he had recorded Lazarus for nine hours for a private project commissioned by his family members. After an intense negotiation over terms, he agreed to lend me the DVD version, which I had to buy an external DVD drive to access. The interview is incredibly thorough, and includes photos from various points in his life, which I was able to use to confirm details I couldn’t get from anyone else. Thank goodness his family commissioned it, because it seems that all but the most basic information about an important person in the history of American business would be lost."]

When the younger Lazarus got his first job delivering newspapers in elementary school, it didn’t take him long to spot a business opportunity. None of the other kids liked collecting subscribers’ payments, which often required multiple visits to every home. Lazarus offered to handle that part for them in exchange for a portion of their income.  Soon he had six boys funneling him a cut. He quit delivering his own papers; he was making a lot more money than he ever had on his route. [annotation q="This anecdote is very effective at illustrating how Charles’ mind was oriented and the shrewdness that drove him, even at a young age."]

After high school, Lazarus was eager to start his own business. He worked briefly for the U.S. Treasury Department, earning a relatively luxurious $25 a week, but his goal was $10,000 a year, a fortune by American standards at the time. First, though, he knew he would have to serve; it was 1943 and World War II was in full swing. Looking to avoid being drafted into work he didn’t want to do, he voluntarily enlisted in the Signal Corps as a radio operator and then cryptographer. Military life brought an important perk: there was nothing on which to spend his salary of about $100 a month. Instead he sent the money home for his mother to invest on his behalf. 

When the war ended, an honorably discharged white man with a healthy savings account had plenty of options. The GI Bill offered tuition assistance for college or trade programs, low-interest loans, and unemployment payments. Lazarus, who married his girlfriend, Udyss,  almost immediately after returning home, skipped higher education. With a $5,000 wedding gift from his father-in-law, the profits from investing his salary, and a government-backed business loan, he had enough to start a business. The GI Bill’s homeownership program also allowed him to buy his first home, in the tony town of Chevy Chase, Maryland, north of D.C. (Until the war, Jews had been banned from Chevy Chase, which was created by the white supremacist developer-turned-senator Francis Newlands in the 1890s.) 

Now Lazarus just had to figure out what kind of business would earn him that $10,000-a-year salary and put him in the upper echelons  of society. The winning idea came to him as he observed his fellow veterans. After being discharged from the Army, they all followed a  similar path: move home, marry your girlfriend, buy a house, have a child or two. Lazarus saw the baby boom coming, and he realized all those new parents would need to buy cribs, rocking chairs, changing tables, and playpens. Frank Lazarus had just about paid off his mortgage on the Adams Morgan building that housed his bicycle store and three apartments, so Charles convinced his dad to retire and offered him $320 a month for the building. National Sport Shop became National Baby Shop, a purveyor of all types of baby furniture. 

From the start, Lazarus fixated on how to make even a small neighborhood store a one-stop shop. He expanded his offerings vertically, building shelves to hold chests of drawers above their coordinating cribs instead of side by side, which allowed him to display significantly more products at once. He started with about $8,000 worth of inventory, but when his concept proved successful, he used the profits to stock up on new goods. It didn’t take too long for him to start doing well — not $10,000-a-year well, but making more money than his father ever had. [annotation q="The goal of making more money than one’s parents is such a deeply embedded ideal in American society and lore. Particularly in the 19th century, it feels like this benchmark was the standard success metric for upward mobility. How did you see echoes of this pull in both Charles’ and Liz’s stories?" a="When I started watching the Lazarus video, about a month after my first trip to Liz’s home, the parallels between their lives struck me immediately. They both grew up poor and part of a marginalized group — Lazarus Jewish in the 1930s and ’40s, Liz Native Alaskan in the ’80s and ’90s — and they were both extremely hungry to make better lives for themselves. Lazarus talked very openly about wanting to be rich, whereas Liz was focused more on stability, but yes, they both wanted to do better than their parents did. But there’s an interesting divergence in their stories, too. Lazarus’s success cannot be understood outside the context of the G.I. Bill. That funded the store that became Toys R Us, that allowed him to buy a house. But those kinds of social service programs were far less common, and far less generous, by the time Liz reached adulthood around the turn of the 21st century, and her tribe faced a unique legacy of discrimination and violence. She’s spent her entire career in retail just trying to get by."] 

Lazarus was always on the lookout for new opportunities, and one day he stumbled into one that would shape the rest of his life. “Somebody came in one day and said, ‘How about a toy for my baby?’” he said. “‘You know, to play with in the high chair or in the playpen or in the stroller.’” The idea surprised Lazarus, who recalled thinking, What do you mean, a toy? He sold essentials, not frivolities; toys didn’t fit the model. But he decided to stock a few as an experiment, and from then on, National Baby Shop offered toys along with all its other baby goods. 

Until then, people mostly bought toys in department stores. In the 1920s, Macy’s opened the country’s first permanent toy department in its midtown Manhattan store. The chain also started its Thanksgiving Day Parade, which ended with Santa Claus standing outside that Herald Square building, ginning up excitement to buy Christmas gifts. Not long after, Sears, Roebuck & Company followed suit with a toy department of its own, and quickly became the biggest toy retailer in America. 

These big department stores sold more than half of their toys between Thanksgiving and Christmas. But after the woman asked him about toys that day, Lazarus started to think maybe he could show parents that they could use toys year-round. In fact, he thought, toys might actually be a better business than furniture. After all, babies only needed one crib, one rocking chair, one changing table, and one playpen, and younger siblings typically got hand-me-downs. Toys, though — no kid could ever have enough toys. Children would out grow them, wanting new ones designed for their new ages. Or they would simply get bored with what they had and demand something new. And with the prosperity of the postwar era, selling nonessential goods, especially ones that delighted the children of the baby boom, just made sense. [annotation q="I appreciate how you dived into the nitty-gritty of his early strategy to paint a picture of the building blocks of this business."]

Soon after adding toys to the National Baby Shop inventory, Lazarus went all in. Initially he renamed his store Children’s Supermart, with reversed R’s to make it appear childlike. But that name didn’t look catchy on a sign, and it certainly didn’t spark joy in kids. So in 1957, he renamed his company Toys R Us. 

***

Liz knew what it was like to want more. [annotation q="Why did you choose this segue?" a="Is this the moment to say I actually find most section segues hackneyed and unnecessary? A new section doesn’t have to directly connect to the previous one; that’s the point of the section break! That said: this was the one place I allowed myself to directly nod at the similarities and differences between Liz’s and Lazarus’s experiences. I almost cut this line too, but I wanted readers to start thinking of these two people in relation to each other, to set up the moment when the two strands would finally cross."] As a child in Alaska—the state most associated with the American myth of rugged, individualistic bootstrapping—she heard all the legends about how anyone can will themselves to a more successful life, about how everyone has a chance to make something of themselves. Her Alaska, though, is very different from the ones written by Jon Krakauer or Jack London. Liz, or Láxhshaadoosti, is part of the Tlingit people, an Indigenous group who have lived in the southeastern part of the state for centuries. Her family’s history as members of the Eagle/Wolf house in Angoon, a community of a few hundred mostly Tlingit residents on Admiralty Island off the coast of British Columbia, goes back generations. 

As Liz likes to say, the fact that she, her family, or the village of Angoon exists at all is pretty close to a miracle. Almost exactly a century before Láxhshaadoosti was born, her own country’s government attempted to wipe her homeland off the map. On October 22, 1882, a Tlingit healer named Teel’ Tlein was killed in an accident on a Northwest Trading Company whaling boat. The United States had purchased Alaska fifteen years earlier and placed the territory under military control, so when the Tlingit reacted angrily to the company’s refusal to make amends in accordance with tribal practice, the Navy moved in. They shelled the coastal village with howitzers and Gatling guns mounted on a tugboat before sending troops to raze Angoon on foot, destroying the village and killing six children. 

Many Tlingit who were born generations after the bombardment, including Liz and her family, still speak of the event as if it were a fresh memory. Though Alaska was removed from military control in 1884 and became a state in 1959, the Tlingit and other native Alaskan peoples have continued to be discriminated against, cut off from many of the privileges associated with the American Dream. As a child, Liz’s mother, Miranda, like generations of Tlingit before her, was taken from her family in Angoon and sent to a boarding school designed to forcibly “civilize” and assimilate Indigenous Alaskans, stripping them of their native language and culture. Liz’s father, Buddy, was adopted by a white family who lived on a farm in Missouri, and returned to Alaska as an adult. 

As a result, Liz was born in 1979 in Anchorage, not her ancestral homeland of Angoon. She didn’t grow up understanding the Tlingit language, because her father never learned it and her mother had been brutally punished for speaking it. Miranda had moved her family to the city so that her children would blend in. In a majority-Tlingit community, they would never escape the risk of prejudice, persecution, or worse. [annotation q="Why did it feel important to establish Liz’s family history at this point in the chapter?" a="Understanding anyone’s family history is important to writing a profile, and I think writers often do themselves a disservice by thinking too narrowly about what ‘family history’ entails. Liz talks about the Angoon bombardment as part of her origin story as naturally as she does about her parents and siblings, so any story about her that didn’t talk about that would feel incomplete. (I will admit that in the first draft of the manuscript I went way too deep; I was totally compelled by a book and a doctoral dissertation about the bombardment and accidentally wrote a full two pages about this event that happened a century before my protagonist was born. One of my favorite things about being edited is having someone come in with clear eyes and point out when I’ve gotten lost in the weeds in a way that doesn’t actually serve the story.) Liz clearly feels pain about the fact that she doesn’t speak her family’s ancestral language, but to understand why she doesn’t speak it, you have to understand not just her parents’ lives but also these generations of absolutely brutal treatment of the Tlingit people. And her work as an activist, which makes up most of the later part of her story in the book, is inextricable from her identity as a Native Alaskan."]

Life in Anchorage wasn’t easy either. Buddy wasn’t around much, and Miranda struggled to pay the bills for her own three children and the four she adopted when her sister died. When Liz was in elementary school, her mom remarried, to a man who sexually abused Liz from the time she was eight until she was fifteen. He abused multiple cousins too. All the while, Liz excelled in school, particularly in math. But she also struggled with trauma and relentless feelings of worthlessness. 

When Liz was fifteen, her stepfather was arrested for sexual abuse of minors. Liz thought it might be a chance for a fresh start, but soon afterward, Miranda died suddenly from a seizure. Liz tried to care for her younger siblings herself, until an aunt intervened and took them  all in. Soon after, the state assigned the kids to different living arrangements: some moved in with relatives, some went to foster care. Liz and her sister Mindy were sent to group homes in Juneau. 

Liz completed her high school coursework there, but she missed out on a diploma because she left a few weeks early to care for a now pregnant Mindy. She gathered up her sister, left the group home, and moved in with their father, who happened to be living in Juneau too. She got a job at Costco to help pay the bills. In 2000, she had her first child, a daughter she named Alleah. [annotation q="How did you initially find Liz as a character? Was she keen to talk with you right off the bat? Was it challenging to earn her trust?" a="I found Liz because she had been quoted in a bunch of stories around the time Toys R Us liquidated, and had even written an op-ed in BuzzFeed News that mentioned Deadspin, where I had been the editor-in-chief before our private equity takeover. So on some level, she was the easiest of my four protagonists to find: I talked to more than 100 candidates to land on the other three, but Liz was the only character I wrote about in my proposal who actually made it into the final book."] 

[annotation a="That said, earning her trust took more work than the other three combined. When I first reached out to her, she didn’t respond for months. I started talking to other potential protagonists for the retail section, but I couldn’t get her out of my mind because she had done so much work on behalf of the laid-off Toys R Us employees. Finally, she responded and agreed to talk off the record. She felt burned by a lot of white people who promised to center her story, including the progressive workers’ advocacy group for which she had worked. So she wanted to interrogate me, which felt entirely fair. Once she let me in, though, she let me all the way in: I don’t remember a single question that she declined to answer or that made her clam up."]

In 2004, Liz was assigned to train a new Costco employee named Henry Marin on the overnight shift. Henry was from Bogotá, Colombia, and had moved to Alaska to live with his birth father. Liz thought Henry was cute, but he was also six years her junior, and she didn’t want to date someone so young. They became friends, though, and she loved how he cared for Alleah. They married in 2005, when Liz was twenty-six and Henry nineteen. She soon gave birth to a daughter they named Aracely. 

Liz also loved Henry’s ambition. After his night shift at Costco, he would go work days at Burger King. He had plans to become a pharmacist. Liz was used to scraping to make ends meet on a minimum wage income, but pharmacists make six figures; she knew he could care for a family. The trouble was, there was no pharmacy school in Alaska. Following Henry’s dreams and catapulting their family into the middle class would require living thousands of miles from the only homeland she had ever known. [annotation q="This is more of a general question from a pacing perspective, but how did you weigh how much real estate to spend with Liz vs. Charles in each section before flipping back to the other?" a="I thought about this a lot! I needed to include a ton of contextual information to set up how Toys R Us ended up being acquired by private equity. But I was terrified of making this book boring, and I knew that the best antidote to that was centering the four protagonists, each of whom I chose because they’re incredibly compelling people. Getting my hands on the DVDs of the Lazarus interviews allowed me to do some storytelling in those sections as well as revealing information from SEC filings and court transcripts and the like, but I did think we needed more Liz than Lazarus. (There are two sections after this one in the book; one about each of them.) I also knew right away which anecdote about Liz I wanted to use to end the section — I won’t spoil it, but it’s incredibly powerful in terms of shaking assumptions about what it means to be ‘just’ a retail worker. So I landed on hewing pretty closely to a classic A-B structure, but with Liz getting one extra section, so that she’s the first and last person we’re learning about."] 

She was terrified at the idea of moving away from Alaska, and hated leaving her family behind, but she knew it was the right thing to do. She hadn’t found much in the way of opportunities in Angoon, where the median household income was under $30,000 a year and her family usually made a lot less than that. She hadn’t found them in her mom’s apartment in Anchorage, or in the group home in Juneau. She lived in a world that had been systematically starved of resources over a period of centuries. Perhaps life on the mainland would be different. Perhaps moving to the West Coast like a twenty-first-century gold rusher would unlock the American Dream she had heard so much about. 

Relocating would require Liz to single-handedly support the Marin family — which in 2012 grew to include a son, Daniyel — for four years while Henry was in school. All of her work experience was in retail, so that’s where she focused her search. She wanted to be able to easily transfer to any city where her husband got into pharmacy school, so she looked for a job in Juneau that would allow her to move elsewhere when the time came. She needed a company with flexible transfer policies, because Henry would have to do his internship in a different city from where he was studying. She needed opportunities for career growth. She needed daytime hours so she could be home with her family in the evening. As she worked her way down her checklist,  

one company name seemed to tick every box. So Liz applied to work at Toys R Us. [annotation q="I really like the parallel construction between this line and the sentence that closes out Charles’ previous section. It’s a crisp signpost to the reader about where we’re going and how these two characters’ storylines are about to converge."]

***

Excerpted from “Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream,” by Megan Greenwell. Copyright © 2025 by Megan Greenwell. Reprinted by permission of Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. 

Author photo by Loreto Caceres. 

***

Carly Stern is an independent reporter and editor based in Brooklyn who covers health, housing and economic security. Her enterprise work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Vox and The Guardian.

The post Megan Greenwell on holding out for the once-in-a-lifetime book idea appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Megan Greenwell

Like so many journalists, Megan Greenwell resisted inserting herself into the story that would ultimately shape her career. But the plot came to her.

Greenwell knows as intimately as anyone how a private equity buyout can alter the fabric of a workplace. In 2019, Great Hill Partners acquired the Gizmodo Media Group — the parent company of Deadspin, where Greenwell was the first woman to become editor-in-chief. Shortly into the new ownership, Greenwell resigned — and explained why in a viral blog post. 

Her own experience catalyzed what became an obsession with understanding the wide-reaching tentacles of the private equity industry and its powerful grasp on the American economy. But Greenwell wasn’t drawn to memoir. She instead chose to pursue a rigorously reported narrative account of the industry’s impact through the lives of four people working in retail, housing, medicine, and media. Her debut book, “Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream,” was published by HarperCollins in June.  

Greenwell has previously edited or reported features for publications including Wired, Esquire, GQ, New York magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek and The New York Times, among others. She also serves as the deputy director of the Princeton Summer Journalism Program, which recruits and trains high school students from underrepresented backgrounds who are interested in journalism.

I spoke with Greenwell about the devotion necessary to bring a book project to fruition, her approach to structuring the reporting process, and how she juggled the book deal along with the rest of her freelance business. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve written plenty of long magazine features before. What was the moment when you realized or felt convinced that this idea actually needed to be a book?

After I wrote a piece for Deadspin that went viral, a lot of people said to me “You should make this a book,” including my book agent. I was resistant to that idea because I didn't want to write a book just about the media industry. It felt too niche. And I really didn't want to write a book about my own experience. I’d rejected the idea of doing a private equity book for quite a while, but I also couldn't stop reading about it. I became obsessed with how private equity works in other industries and felt myself coming back to it over and over again. 

Have you always been interested in writing a book?

This was my first. I’ve had an agent since around 2013, and she signed me because she liked my work in other places. I knew back then that at some point I wanted to write one, but I was very adamant that I was not going to until I knew it was the right idea. For years, my agent and I had lunch every six months or so. I’d float some ideas and she’d say to poke around on them. Somewhere between the initial poking around and finishing an actual proposal, I would either determine there wasn't enough there or I just wasn't interested enough. I was very afraid of signing a contract for something I wasn't going to stay excited about. That went on for almost 10 years and this was the first idea that I never lost interest in.

Is it common to find an agent so long before there’s a seedling of an idea?

I certainly have other friends who’ve done the same. My agent in particular is very good at keeping tabs on what's out there because she’s willing to play the long game. I've been in her home office and she has this whiteboard with three categories: people who have sold a book and are working on it, people who are midway through a proposal and people who are just ideating. Last time I saw it, the ideating list was the longest. It’s smart because she ends up getting a lot of people who might take more time to get there, but are going to be ready when they get there.

How much reporting was required to put together the book proposal itself?

My proposal was probably 80 pages and had character sketches of people I thought would be my primary protagonists. I did find it harder to get people to talk to me for a book proposal rather than an actual book. Others told me that most of what you write for a proposal is not going to end up in the book, and I was like, “No, I'll be different.” I was not different. Basically, nothing from the proposal ended up in the book. But I was super glad I did all that work because in editor meetings, I got feedback that this was an incredibly thorough, well-reported proposal. I think this helped me get a good deal for it and helped convince editors that I was ready to do it. I did find it hard to be doing a ton of work — more than I had ever done for any story — without knowing whether this would sell, or whether anybody would ever see any version of it. This was not a mental space I’d ever had to occupy for that long.

How did you find your protagonist? What was your process like when you were exploring potential subjects who’d occupy the real estate of the book?

This was by far the hardest part. I knew I needed people who readers were going to want to spend a lot of time with. I had three characters in the proposal but four in the book. One from the proposal ended up in the book.

I did so much grunt work to find them. A lot of LinkedIn searching for people who had previously worked at various companies. A ton of scouring Facebook groups and Reddit, and talking to nonprofit groups to see who they recommended. I was trying to plumb every possible avenue. I talked to a little over 300 people for the book as a whole, and almost 150 of those were potential protagonists. 

I needed the right mix of geographic, racial and personality diversity. I also needed people who were going to let me into their lives for two years and tell me absolutely everything — which is not most people. I got relatively deep with several people before realizing they were going to be reluctant past a certain point, which is totally understandable. 

The worst moment was when I had been talking for months to a woman for the housing section. She’d given me recordings, contemporaneous notes, everything. I flew to Indiana to meet her and texted her about when she wanted to meet up the next morning, but she didn't respond. She always responded quickly. I woke up the next morning and she still hadn't written back. I texted her and knew her address so I went to her place, but she wasn’t there. I never heard from her again. She fully stood me up, but only once I got to the point of being in her town. All I can assume is that she got cold feet when it got to that level of reality. I wasn’t going to write the chapter without spending time with her, so I had to start that section from scratch.

What do you think is most misunderstood about private equity’s relationship with the media?

The private equity industry has been very good at making everybody think that the problems of any of these industries are the inevitable result of societal and economic change — particularly with media. Most people's understanding of the landscape is that the ad market got decimated so the media was screwed — and maybe private equity profited off of the ashes, but they didn't have anything to do with killing media. I just don't think that's true.

One thing I learned from the reporting that genuinely surprised me is that a lot of these local newspapers were still profitable at the point when private equity got involved. That doesn't mean the trend line wasn't down — of course it was. But private equity wasn't going to come in unless the businesses were still profitable. Then they came in and didn't do anything to try to adapt to the new age. So they either hastened the demise of a lot of these publications or really did directly kill them.

What has the marketing experience been like since the book was released? What has surprised you most about that leg of the journey? 

I tried to go into it with as few expectations as possible. My goal was to sell enough copies so that somebody lets me do this again because I really did love the experience. I was cognizant that I had gotten a bigger advance, relative to the typical scale of advances, so I didn’t want to be a flop. There are people who write their first book, it doesn't sell enough copies and they’re unable to sell a second — which is what I was most afraid of. As long as I could sell a reasonable number of copies, I would be happy. 

Setting my expectations low has made me pleasantly surprised by how things have gone. I got to do a little tour. I got to do a bunch of sold out events in towns that are meaningful to me because I was super conservative about only booking events in towns where I knew I could draw a real crowd. I didn't want to get my hopes up that I would even get reviews, much less that they’d be positive. How long the tail of this has lasted continues to surprise me. I thought people would care about the book for two weeks then never mention it again. 

How did working on the book trickle out to the rest of your freelance business? How did it impact the amount of work you could take on or what kind of work you could take on?

Having the advance allowed me to adapt based on what the book needed. I could make decisions for any given month, or any given season, based on what I needed to do for the book — instead of the other way around. The last three months before my deadline, I didn't take on any other assignments. But when I was reporting, I was still doing a mix of newsroom management consulting, freelance editing and freelance writing. 

Even if you do get a healthy advance, they’re typically split into four payments. Mine was in five. You get the first payment upon signing the contract. It took me two years to even get a first draft in, and you don’t get the second payment until the draft is through copy edit and legal review. It was two-and-a-half years before I saw payment number two of five. So even what sounds like a life-changing amount of money on paper is not exactly a life-changing amount of payment of money in the early days, but the advance did allow me to do what was best for the book.

This didn’t mean making the book my full-time job. I was still doing a ton of other stuff. But when I really needed to buckle down, I was able to buckle down. When I needed to travel for reporting, I could afford to fund it and take the time off of whatever else I was doing. I was very glad I did not try to do this book with a full-time job, and that I had the kind of freelance career with some flexibility to it.

What do you think is important for nonfiction writers who are considering pursuing a book to know? What should they keep in mind as they embark upon this process?

Make sure you really, really love the idea. I have done plenty of features where the idea is interesting to me, but it's not something I want to marry. For a book — especially a narrative book where the reporting is so intense — you are marrying that idea. I would have been absolutely miserable if I had been even 20% less excited about this idea.

I am 41 years old and just published my first book. A lot of people feel the pressure to write a book by a certain time, a bit like pressure to get married or have kids. For a certain group of writers, it feels like the next career achievement box you have to check. I certainly felt those pressures at certain points, too. But I do not think I could have written a book as good earlier in my career — in part because I had to work on my talents, but also because I had to get to that once, or twice, or 10 times-in-a-lifetime scale of an idea. 

I'm so glad I didn't listen to the pressure of “Just do it. You don’t have to be in love with every idea.” Maybe I’ll get to a point in my book writing career where that’s true. Maybe if you write 15, it gets to the point where it feels banal. But I was very cognizant that you only get to do the first one once.

***

“Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream”

By Megan Greenwell 

CHAPTER ONE: LIZ

Once, years ago, Liz Marin was talking to a friend who had recently been laid off. The friend, Annmarie, was fretting because her husband needed insulin to treat his diabetes and she needed an inhaler to treat her asthma, but she had recently lost her health insurance along with her job, and they could only afford to cover the cost of one of the two medications out of pocket. Liz was enraged — at the company that laid her friend off, at the American health care system for failing to provide an adequate safety net, at rich people generally for fighting to preserve the status quo. 

She couldn’t fix any of those problems, but, she figured, she could get her friend an inhaler. Liz didn’t have much money either, but she did have health insurance, and she also had asthma. So she did what seemed to her like the obvious thing: she called her doctor, lied that she had lost her inhaler, got a new one, and mailed it across the country to her friend. 

“Yeah, I know it’s insurance fraud,” she said later. “But the thought of her dying because she couldn’t afford a three-hundred dollar fucking inhaler, I couldn’t fathom that. I have the power to do something, and just because the government calls it illegal is not going to stop me.”

[annotation q="Of all places to start Liz’s story, why did this anecdote stand out to you?" a="My first draft started with a different scene, one I had actually witnessed at Liz’s home. But my editor pointed out, correctly, that it felt a little generic, and we wanted to communicate to readers immediately that Liz is a particularly strong-willed person. Going back over hundreds of pages of transcripts looking for a new place to start, it was the quote below that jumped out at me. It shows several things about Liz: her fury at how working-class people lose out even on basic necessities, her primal need to do anything in her power to help people she loves, her willingness to ignore laws when necessary, her love for the word ‘fucking.’ The rest of Liz’s story is about how she fought back against Toys R Us’s private-equity owners, so establishing all of this about her from the very first sentences felt perfect. Readers have really fallen in love with Liz as a character, and I think this story is a big reason why."] 

Liz can’t help herself from speaking up or butting in when she sees injustice in the world — especially when someone she loves is involved. Most of the time, it doesn’t involve violating federal law. But it doesn’t matter how much or how little she has; she won’t be happy unless she’s sharing it with family, friends, and strangers. [annotation q="How much time did you need to spend with Liz before getting to know her personality and ethos on the level where you could make an assertion like this? Is this something you gleaned or a sentiment that she expressed to you?" a="I spent many days with Liz over two years. The first time I was at her home, for 12 hours one Saturday, she mostly ignored me because she had a house full of relatives. I was worried about it at first — I had so many questions I needed to ask her! — but I realized pretty quickly she was giving me a great gift. Seeing her interact with her kids, her sister, her dad, her husband made me understand her in a much deeper way than I would have if we had gone straight into an interview. My other visits were a mix of focused interviews and fly-on-the-wall time, and I valued both equally. I also talked to her relatives and friends about her at length. So I don’t think she ever told me this verbatim, but it’s so core to who she is that she didn’t really have to."] Several years ago, her in-laws, who had never lived outside their home country of Colombia, moved to the United States to live with her and her husband, Henry, in Washington State. More recently, her own father, Loren, whom everyone calls Buddy, came from Alaska to the American mainland and began splitting time between Liz’s home and her sister Mindy’s, a couple hours south in Portland, Oregon. 

The Marin house, which sits on a quiet street of cookie-cutter homes atop neatly manicured lawns in University Place, a suburb of  Tacoma, is designed to take care of people. In the kitchen, next to stacked cases of Kirkland water bottles, sit value-sized boxes of individually sized snacks — mixed Frito-Lay chips, chocolate and vanilla pudding, Ensure, apple chips, fruit cups. Just above that, on the kitchen counter, is a first aid kit teeming with Band-Aids, face masks, rubbing alcohol, gauze, and painkillers. When Mindy’s family comes for the weekend, which happens often, Liz’s office is swallowed by an air mattress, the living room overtaken by video-game controllers and kids’ shoes, the bathrooms drowned in other people’s toiletries. 

Like many women socialized to put everyone else first, the one person Liz often forgets to take care of is herself. [annotation q="I really enjoyed this transition; I thought it was insightful and smooth."] Sometimes it’s because she’s too busy. Sometimes she’s just too broke from providing for everyone else. A few years ago, the Marins had a little financial breathing room for the first time in their adult lives. When one of the kids outgrew their sneakers, she’d sprint to the store to buy them a new pair, but she hadn’t bought herself a new item of clothing in years. Henry encouraged her to go shopping for herself — demanded it, basically — but she didn’t see the point. So he threw out her entire wardrobe. 

Liz still sounds a little shocked about it all. Henry is the soft-spoken one of the two, the one content to sit quietly, awaiting further instruction, while people mill about. He adores his wife. So when he and their children began carrying armfuls of her clothing to a dumpster near their house, she couldn’t quite make sense of it. Now you have no choice but to buy some new things, he told her. [annotation q="What did you feel like this anecdote more broadly serves to illustrate about Liz and what made you choose to introduce it so early in the chapter?" a="I am aware this story has been controversial on Goodreads; I guess some people read it as Henry being mean. Nothing could be further from the truth. Liz is the first to admit that she has to be forced into taking care of herself, and that felt like an important contrast to the Liz of the lede. Together, they make her a fuller, more complicated character. It was really important to me to treat my protagonists as complex humans rather than caricatures of victims. And though Liz and Henry fought about this, it was clear when she told the story years later that she interpreted Henry forcing her to buy new things as an act of deep love. She still struggles to take care of herself. She still relies on Henry to make her do so. People will always map their own feelings onto someone else’s relationship, but the significance of this story for me is showing this other side of her, and the importance of her marriage, that you wouldn’t see from watching her give a speech or march in a protest."]

He didn’t realize he had missed a bucket — a literal bucket — full of her oldest, most worn-out clothes. I’ll go shopping tomorrow, she promised. Instead, she took the clothes from the bucket, folded them, and put them in her dresser. Aside from a few holes and the fact that most of them didn’t fit particularly well, they were perfectly wearable. But Henry realized pretty quickly that the holey clothes that didn’t fit were not in fact new. The resulting argument lasted for days. 

Eventually she bought some clothes. She didn’t, however, shake off the guilt. [annotation q="‘Guilt’ feels like a very specific word choice."] Sitting at the dining room table recounting the story, she wore a threadbare pair of jeans and a six-year-old T-shirt from a Native Alaskan tribal celebration, her long salt-and-pepper hair cascading over the print on the front. 

The Marin home is also a monument to the people Liz loves. Family pictures aren’t sequestered to the mantel or a single gallery display. They cover every table, shelf, and wall, and feature every imaginable combination of relatives. On the few patches of wall that don’t hold photos, traditional Native Alaskan art hangs instead. Often the two are combined: two paintings above the dining room table depict Buddy and his sister in traditional dress at a powwow. [annotation q="I appreciate your attention to detail when it comes to setting — and in particular, to Liz’s internal and external home environment. Why did it feel crucial to make clear to readers early on the type of space that she curates for herself?" a="I don’t think narrative nonfiction works without specificity; I read so many books and features that fail because they try to position themselves as ‘literary’ but it feels like the interviews were conducted over the phone. What I love about narrative is the noticing: not just what someone said, but how she said it. Was she fidgeting? Was she making intense eye contact? Did her voice crack? That’s what separates my favorite works of nonfiction from the rest, and that was really important to me when writing my own. This was another advantage of getting to spend so much time in Liz’s house when I wasn’t conducting an interview — I got to look around, jot down details, and ask her about them later. I think being in someone’s home, seeing how they live, is absolutely crucial to understanding them deeply enough for any kind of profile. The number of family photos in Liz’s house is truly astounding; it would be impossible to understand her without knowing that."]

One room, though, is devoted to a different kind of memorabilia. Behind the desk and above the air mattress in the office/guest room, a waist-high bookcase houses dozens of giraffes. Large stuffed ones and bronze ones are surrounded by smaller ones made from plastic, rubber, and wood. Photos rest among the animals, most of them of Liz grinning with friends. In one, her son, Daniyel, holds yet another stuffed giraffe. This giraffe, with the tuft of dark brown hair between its ears and the stars that stud its neck, is recognizable to anyone who has ever stepped inside a Toys R Us. The display is a shrine to Liz’s six years at the company, a shrine to what was the best job she ever had until it all came crashing down. The giraffe in the photo, Geoffrey the Giraffe, is the one that upended the Marin family’s entire life. [annotation q="My curiosity is sufficiently piqued!"]

***

Before he launched the toy store that transformed retail, Charles Lazarus was a poor kid with a dream. [annotation q="Now we’re launching into the second thread of the chapter and meeting a brand new character, who (seemingly, as of now) is not yet obviously connected to Liz. How did you think about when to make this jump to Charles? When weaving two character-driven threads together, how do you generally approach facilitating that transition as smoothly as possible?" a="I am a complete nerd for narrative structure. When I was a terrified baby features editor, I’d go through my favorite magazine stories and diagram what made the structure work, which I think helped me immensely. (I also think editing per se is invaluable for understanding structure as a writer; it teaches you to think ruthlessly about what serves the story best, rather than what sounds the prettiest. I truly believe that every shortform writer hoping to become a longform writer should do a stint as an editor.)"] 

[annotation a="The structure challenge posed by the four opening chapters of my book (collectively called ‘Before’) is that they have to introduce both a protagonist and the historical context necessary to understand the private equity part of the story. And because there are 12 chapters in the book, plus an introduction and conclusion, they each have to do all of that in 7,000 words, and compellingly enough to successfully get people to the heart of the story. This was the trickiest of those chapters, because the two stories were so far removed time-wise, and Liz didn’t even start working at Toys R Us until after Lazarus was out of the picture."] 

[annotation a="I’ve always wanted to write a feature with a classic A-B structure, because I think it’s so powerful when it works. It came to me pretty early on that I had to at least try it here. This was the first chapter I wrote, and the only one that the editor who acquired the project, the brilliant Kate Napolitano, read before she left for another job. When I wrote the first draft, I must have been scared to commit to fully separating the A and B strands; Kate’s notes were about eliminating the spots where I tried to thematically combine them prematurely. She told me I could trust readers to see the similarities, which built my confidence."]

Lazarus was born in 1923 in Washington, D.C., where his father, Frank, owned a not-particularly-successful used-bicycle store called National Sport Shop in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. The Lazaruses, one of the few Jewish families around, lived behind the store: their home was connected to the shop by an opening in the dining room, so someone could get up quickly and help a customer who happened to show up during dinnertime. 

The family rarely had money for luxuries. There was always food on the table, even during the depths of the Great Depression, but Charles wanted more. He wanted to be rich. He didn’t dream of  Madison Avenue or Wall Street. He wanted to sell things to people. 

Lazarus, who died in 2018, once told an interviewer about a pivotal conversation he had with his dad while helping him fix up an old bicycle. Charles asked Frank — who had grown up in a Jewish orphanage in  D.C. and, by his son’s account, never aspired to anything other than the ability to care for his family — why they never sold new bikes, which would bring in more money. His dad responded that new products required too much money up front, and they would never be able to compete with big retailers like Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Company. “I just didn’t believe that,” Lazarus said. “I just thought that you had to have a defeatist attitude to always sell used goods. And I told him, ‘I’m not going to do that.’” [annotation q="Given that Charles died in 2018, what was your primary method for gathering hyper-specific details about his personality and mindset?" a="I’m thrilled to be asked about this, because it was a huge reporting challenge, and because the answer to how I solved it is buried in my 400-plus endnotes! Considering how much influence Toys R Us had on the American retail industry, there is woefully little out there about Lazarus himself. Even his obituaries were fairly bare-bones; another book that covers Toys R Us’s acquisition by private equity cites his Wikipedia page in its endnotes. I had talked to some Toys R Us employees who were there toward the end of Lazarus’s time at the company, and they had some details to share. But I did think it was important to understand where he came from and who he was. I checked every source I could think of but kept coming up empty."] 

[annotation a="While scouring the internet one day, I found a link to a 3-minute YouTube video taken from an interview with Lazarus. The video description mentioned it was part of a larger project, and included the director’s name and website. When I emailed the filmmaker, I learned that he had recorded Lazarus for nine hours for a private project commissioned by his family members. After an intense negotiation over terms, he agreed to lend me the DVD version, which I had to buy an external DVD drive to access. The interview is incredibly thorough, and includes photos from various points in his life, which I was able to use to confirm details I couldn’t get from anyone else. Thank goodness his family commissioned it, because it seems that all but the most basic information about an important person in the history of American business would be lost."]

When the younger Lazarus got his first job delivering newspapers in elementary school, it didn’t take him long to spot a business opportunity. None of the other kids liked collecting subscribers’ payments, which often required multiple visits to every home. Lazarus offered to handle that part for them in exchange for a portion of their income.  Soon he had six boys funneling him a cut. He quit delivering his own papers; he was making a lot more money than he ever had on his route. [annotation q="This anecdote is very effective at illustrating how Charles’ mind was oriented and the shrewdness that drove him, even at a young age."]

After high school, Lazarus was eager to start his own business. He worked briefly for the U.S. Treasury Department, earning a relatively luxurious $25 a week, but his goal was $10,000 a year, a fortune by American standards at the time. First, though, he knew he would have to serve; it was 1943 and World War II was in full swing. Looking to avoid being drafted into work he didn’t want to do, he voluntarily enlisted in the Signal Corps as a radio operator and then cryptographer. Military life brought an important perk: there was nothing on which to spend his salary of about $100 a month. Instead he sent the money home for his mother to invest on his behalf. 

When the war ended, an honorably discharged white man with a healthy savings account had plenty of options. The GI Bill offered tuition assistance for college or trade programs, low-interest loans, and unemployment payments. Lazarus, who married his girlfriend, Udyss,  almost immediately after returning home, skipped higher education. With a $5,000 wedding gift from his father-in-law, the profits from investing his salary, and a government-backed business loan, he had enough to start a business. The GI Bill’s homeownership program also allowed him to buy his first home, in the tony town of Chevy Chase, Maryland, north of D.C. (Until the war, Jews had been banned from Chevy Chase, which was created by the white supremacist developer-turned-senator Francis Newlands in the 1890s.) 

Now Lazarus just had to figure out what kind of business would earn him that $10,000-a-year salary and put him in the upper echelons  of society. The winning idea came to him as he observed his fellow veterans. After being discharged from the Army, they all followed a  similar path: move home, marry your girlfriend, buy a house, have a child or two. Lazarus saw the baby boom coming, and he realized all those new parents would need to buy cribs, rocking chairs, changing tables, and playpens. Frank Lazarus had just about paid off his mortgage on the Adams Morgan building that housed his bicycle store and three apartments, so Charles convinced his dad to retire and offered him $320 a month for the building. National Sport Shop became National Baby Shop, a purveyor of all types of baby furniture. 

From the start, Lazarus fixated on how to make even a small neighborhood store a one-stop shop. He expanded his offerings vertically, building shelves to hold chests of drawers above their coordinating cribs instead of side by side, which allowed him to display significantly more products at once. He started with about $8,000 worth of inventory, but when his concept proved successful, he used the profits to stock up on new goods. It didn’t take too long for him to start doing well — not $10,000-a-year well, but making more money than his father ever had. [annotation q="The goal of making more money than one’s parents is such a deeply embedded ideal in American society and lore. Particularly in the 19th century, it feels like this benchmark was the standard success metric for upward mobility. How did you see echoes of this pull in both Charles’ and Liz’s stories?" a="When I started watching the Lazarus video, about a month after my first trip to Liz’s home, the parallels between their lives struck me immediately. They both grew up poor and part of a marginalized group — Lazarus Jewish in the 1930s and ’40s, Liz Native Alaskan in the ’80s and ’90s — and they were both extremely hungry to make better lives for themselves. Lazarus talked very openly about wanting to be rich, whereas Liz was focused more on stability, but yes, they both wanted to do better than their parents did. But there’s an interesting divergence in their stories, too. Lazarus’s success cannot be understood outside the context of the G.I. Bill. That funded the store that became Toys R Us, that allowed him to buy a house. But those kinds of social service programs were far less common, and far less generous, by the time Liz reached adulthood around the turn of the 21st century, and her tribe faced a unique legacy of discrimination and violence. She’s spent her entire career in retail just trying to get by."] 

Lazarus was always on the lookout for new opportunities, and one day he stumbled into one that would shape the rest of his life. “Somebody came in one day and said, ‘How about a toy for my baby?’” he said. “‘You know, to play with in the high chair or in the playpen or in the stroller.’” The idea surprised Lazarus, who recalled thinking, What do you mean, a toy? He sold essentials, not frivolities; toys didn’t fit the model. But he decided to stock a few as an experiment, and from then on, National Baby Shop offered toys along with all its other baby goods. 

Until then, people mostly bought toys in department stores. In the 1920s, Macy’s opened the country’s first permanent toy department in its midtown Manhattan store. The chain also started its Thanksgiving Day Parade, which ended with Santa Claus standing outside that Herald Square building, ginning up excitement to buy Christmas gifts. Not long after, Sears, Roebuck & Company followed suit with a toy department of its own, and quickly became the biggest toy retailer in America. 

These big department stores sold more than half of their toys between Thanksgiving and Christmas. But after the woman asked him about toys that day, Lazarus started to think maybe he could show parents that they could use toys year-round. In fact, he thought, toys might actually be a better business than furniture. After all, babies only needed one crib, one rocking chair, one changing table, and one playpen, and younger siblings typically got hand-me-downs. Toys, though — no kid could ever have enough toys. Children would out grow them, wanting new ones designed for their new ages. Or they would simply get bored with what they had and demand something new. And with the prosperity of the postwar era, selling nonessential goods, especially ones that delighted the children of the baby boom, just made sense. [annotation q="I appreciate how you dived into the nitty-gritty of his early strategy to paint a picture of the building blocks of this business."]

Soon after adding toys to the National Baby Shop inventory, Lazarus went all in. Initially he renamed his store Children’s Supermart, with reversed R’s to make it appear childlike. But that name didn’t look catchy on a sign, and it certainly didn’t spark joy in kids. So in 1957, he renamed his company Toys R Us. 

***

Liz knew what it was like to want more. [annotation q="Why did you choose this segue?" a="Is this the moment to say I actually find most section segues hackneyed and unnecessary? A new section doesn’t have to directly connect to the previous one; that’s the point of the section break! That said: this was the one place I allowed myself to directly nod at the similarities and differences between Liz’s and Lazarus’s experiences. I almost cut this line too, but I wanted readers to start thinking of these two people in relation to each other, to set up the moment when the two strands would finally cross."] As a child in Alaska—the state most associated with the American myth of rugged, individualistic bootstrapping—she heard all the legends about how anyone can will themselves to a more successful life, about how everyone has a chance to make something of themselves. Her Alaska, though, is very different from the ones written by Jon Krakauer or Jack London. Liz, or Láxhshaadoosti, is part of the Tlingit people, an Indigenous group who have lived in the southeastern part of the state for centuries. Her family’s history as members of the Eagle/Wolf house in Angoon, a community of a few hundred mostly Tlingit residents on Admiralty Island off the coast of British Columbia, goes back generations. 

As Liz likes to say, the fact that she, her family, or the village of Angoon exists at all is pretty close to a miracle. Almost exactly a century before Láxhshaadoosti was born, her own country’s government attempted to wipe her homeland off the map. On October 22, 1882, a Tlingit healer named Teel’ Tlein was killed in an accident on a Northwest Trading Company whaling boat. The United States had purchased Alaska fifteen years earlier and placed the territory under military control, so when the Tlingit reacted angrily to the company’s refusal to make amends in accordance with tribal practice, the Navy moved in. They shelled the coastal village with howitzers and Gatling guns mounted on a tugboat before sending troops to raze Angoon on foot, destroying the village and killing six children. 

Many Tlingit who were born generations after the bombardment, including Liz and her family, still speak of the event as if it were a fresh memory. Though Alaska was removed from military control in 1884 and became a state in 1959, the Tlingit and other native Alaskan peoples have continued to be discriminated against, cut off from many of the privileges associated with the American Dream. As a child, Liz’s mother, Miranda, like generations of Tlingit before her, was taken from her family in Angoon and sent to a boarding school designed to forcibly “civilize” and assimilate Indigenous Alaskans, stripping them of their native language and culture. Liz’s father, Buddy, was adopted by a white family who lived on a farm in Missouri, and returned to Alaska as an adult. 

As a result, Liz was born in 1979 in Anchorage, not her ancestral homeland of Angoon. She didn’t grow up understanding the Tlingit language, because her father never learned it and her mother had been brutally punished for speaking it. Miranda had moved her family to the city so that her children would blend in. In a majority-Tlingit community, they would never escape the risk of prejudice, persecution, or worse. [annotation q="Why did it feel important to establish Liz’s family history at this point in the chapter?" a="Understanding anyone’s family history is important to writing a profile, and I think writers often do themselves a disservice by thinking too narrowly about what ‘family history’ entails. Liz talks about the Angoon bombardment as part of her origin story as naturally as she does about her parents and siblings, so any story about her that didn’t talk about that would feel incomplete. (I will admit that in the first draft of the manuscript I went way too deep; I was totally compelled by a book and a doctoral dissertation about the bombardment and accidentally wrote a full two pages about this event that happened a century before my protagonist was born. One of my favorite things about being edited is having someone come in with clear eyes and point out when I’ve gotten lost in the weeds in a way that doesn’t actually serve the story.) Liz clearly feels pain about the fact that she doesn’t speak her family’s ancestral language, but to understand why she doesn’t speak it, you have to understand not just her parents’ lives but also these generations of absolutely brutal treatment of the Tlingit people. And her work as an activist, which makes up most of the later part of her story in the book, is inextricable from her identity as a Native Alaskan."]

Life in Anchorage wasn’t easy either. Buddy wasn’t around much, and Miranda struggled to pay the bills for her own three children and the four she adopted when her sister died. When Liz was in elementary school, her mom remarried, to a man who sexually abused Liz from the time she was eight until she was fifteen. He abused multiple cousins too. All the while, Liz excelled in school, particularly in math. But she also struggled with trauma and relentless feelings of worthlessness. 

When Liz was fifteen, her stepfather was arrested for sexual abuse of minors. Liz thought it might be a chance for a fresh start, but soon afterward, Miranda died suddenly from a seizure. Liz tried to care for her younger siblings herself, until an aunt intervened and took them  all in. Soon after, the state assigned the kids to different living arrangements: some moved in with relatives, some went to foster care. Liz and her sister Mindy were sent to group homes in Juneau. 

Liz completed her high school coursework there, but she missed out on a diploma because she left a few weeks early to care for a now pregnant Mindy. She gathered up her sister, left the group home, and moved in with their father, who happened to be living in Juneau too. She got a job at Costco to help pay the bills. In 2000, she had her first child, a daughter she named Alleah. [annotation q="How did you initially find Liz as a character? Was she keen to talk with you right off the bat? Was it challenging to earn her trust?" a="I found Liz because she had been quoted in a bunch of stories around the time Toys R Us liquidated, and had even written an op-ed in BuzzFeed News that mentioned Deadspin, where I had been the editor-in-chief before our private equity takeover. So on some level, she was the easiest of my four protagonists to find: I talked to more than 100 candidates to land on the other three, but Liz was the only character I wrote about in my proposal who actually made it into the final book."] 

[annotation a="That said, earning her trust took more work than the other three combined. When I first reached out to her, she didn’t respond for months. I started talking to other potential protagonists for the retail section, but I couldn’t get her out of my mind because she had done so much work on behalf of the laid-off Toys R Us employees. Finally, she responded and agreed to talk off the record. She felt burned by a lot of white people who promised to center her story, including the progressive workers’ advocacy group for which she had worked. So she wanted to interrogate me, which felt entirely fair. Once she let me in, though, she let me all the way in: I don’t remember a single question that she declined to answer or that made her clam up."]

In 2004, Liz was assigned to train a new Costco employee named Henry Marin on the overnight shift. Henry was from Bogotá, Colombia, and had moved to Alaska to live with his birth father. Liz thought Henry was cute, but he was also six years her junior, and she didn’t want to date someone so young. They became friends, though, and she loved how he cared for Alleah. They married in 2005, when Liz was twenty-six and Henry nineteen. She soon gave birth to a daughter they named Aracely. 

Liz also loved Henry’s ambition. After his night shift at Costco, he would go work days at Burger King. He had plans to become a pharmacist. Liz was used to scraping to make ends meet on a minimum wage income, but pharmacists make six figures; she knew he could care for a family. The trouble was, there was no pharmacy school in Alaska. Following Henry’s dreams and catapulting their family into the middle class would require living thousands of miles from the only homeland she had ever known. [annotation q="This is more of a general question from a pacing perspective, but how did you weigh how much real estate to spend with Liz vs. Charles in each section before flipping back to the other?" a="I thought about this a lot! I needed to include a ton of contextual information to set up how Toys R Us ended up being acquired by private equity. But I was terrified of making this book boring, and I knew that the best antidote to that was centering the four protagonists, each of whom I chose because they’re incredibly compelling people. Getting my hands on the DVDs of the Lazarus interviews allowed me to do some storytelling in those sections as well as revealing information from SEC filings and court transcripts and the like, but I did think we needed more Liz than Lazarus. (There are two sections after this one in the book; one about each of them.) I also knew right away which anecdote about Liz I wanted to use to end the section — I won’t spoil it, but it’s incredibly powerful in terms of shaking assumptions about what it means to be ‘just’ a retail worker. So I landed on hewing pretty closely to a classic A-B structure, but with Liz getting one extra section, so that she’s the first and last person we’re learning about."] 

She was terrified at the idea of moving away from Alaska, and hated leaving her family behind, but she knew it was the right thing to do. She hadn’t found much in the way of opportunities in Angoon, where the median household income was under $30,000 a year and her family usually made a lot less than that. She hadn’t found them in her mom’s apartment in Anchorage, or in the group home in Juneau. She lived in a world that had been systematically starved of resources over a period of centuries. Perhaps life on the mainland would be different. Perhaps moving to the West Coast like a twenty-first-century gold rusher would unlock the American Dream she had heard so much about. 

Relocating would require Liz to single-handedly support the Marin family — which in 2012 grew to include a son, Daniyel — for four years while Henry was in school. All of her work experience was in retail, so that’s where she focused her search. She wanted to be able to easily transfer to any city where her husband got into pharmacy school, so she looked for a job in Juneau that would allow her to move elsewhere when the time came. She needed a company with flexible transfer policies, because Henry would have to do his internship in a different city from where he was studying. She needed opportunities for career growth. She needed daytime hours so she could be home with her family in the evening. As she worked her way down her checklist,  

one company name seemed to tick every box. So Liz applied to work at Toys R Us. [annotation q="I really like the parallel construction between this line and the sentence that closes out Charles’ previous section. It’s a crisp signpost to the reader about where we’re going and how these two characters’ storylines are about to converge."]

***

Excerpted from “Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream,” by Megan Greenwell. Copyright © 2025 by Megan Greenwell. Reprinted by permission of Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. 

Author photo by Loreto Caceres. 

***

Carly Stern is an independent reporter and editor based in Brooklyn who covers health, housing and economic security. Her enterprise work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Vox and The Guardian.

The post Megan Greenwell on holding out for the once-in-a-lifetime book idea appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Carly Stern Writer Claire Willett on how Trump upended federal grants for the arts and journalism https://niemanstoryboard.org/2025/03/27/claire-willett-nea-grants-arts-journalism/ Thu, 27 Mar 2025 13:49:56 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=15169 Oregon ArtsWatch

On February 6, Claire Willett was in the middle of writing an application for a National Endowment for the Arts grant on behalf of the Portland Opera when she received a press release that would completely upend her work. 

There were two big announcements from the NEA: First, the Challenge America program, which awarded $10,000 grants to smaller organizations, typically going to underserved communities, was canceled. Second, they were scrapping the first round of applications for the Grants for Arts Projects—in the middle of the open application cycle—pending new guidelines. While previous guidelines had a long list of suggested topics for applicants, the press release highlighted just one. 

“Under the updated guidelines, the NEA continues to encourage projects that celebrate the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity by honoring the semiquincentennial of the United States of America (America250).” 

Willett says she was shocked, worried, and confused. She recalls thinking: “They’re pushing us all towards patriotism theater. This is some shady shit.” 

Reading the fine print: 'Assurance of Compliance'

But the changes were even more insidious than they seemed, and at first, it was only grant writers working in the depths of the application who saw it. What eventually became public knowledge was new language added to the Assurance of Compliance page, which was not included in the press release but linked to text buried in the application. Through this new language, applicants would be required to comply with all presidential executive orders—not only within the project with which they sought funding but across the board. Organizations that engaged with any DEI efforts or “gender ideology” would not be considered. 

Grants for Arts Projects and Challenge America were the two programs highlighted in the press release, but this alignment and enforcement with executive orders seemed to apply to all NEA funding, including Creative Writing Fellowships, which are awarded to individual writers in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Through its variety of funding programs, the NEA awarded nearly $36.8 million in awards at the start of 2025. The National Endowment for the Humanities, which announced $22.6 million in funding for arts projects in January, also added compliance to executive orders to their application restrictions.

What the court battles mean for artists and journalists seeking grants

Willett urged writers seeking any kind of federal funding from the NEA or NEH to proceed with caution. She was planning on applying to a Creative Writing Fellowship for herself this year, but decided not to when she learned of the executive order restrictions.

The weekend following the press release, Willett emailed Oregon ArtsWatch about covering these changes. As a grant writer, Willett had deep knowledge of how restrictions against “gender ideology” and DEI could devastate arts and culture nationally, not only through these specific NEA grants but in how funding and ideologies trickle down to local organizations. 

On her blog, Willett detailed the complicated moral considerations that have always plagued funding in the arts. Regardless of how the new restrictions played out, it seemed that decision-makers at the highest level had complied with the notion that trans and queer stories and marginalized voices should not be supported. 

Oregon Arts Watch saw the urgency in the NEA story and the countless branching narratives about artists and arts organizations attempting (or not) to uphold inclusive values and meaningful art under the Trump administration. So they asked Willett to come on as a regular contributor. 

Outrage and opposition grows in the arts community

In the weeks following the initial press release, the news caught up. Outrage among artists and arts organizations spread quickly. On February 18, hundreds of artists signed a letter sent to the NEA, demanding rollbacks on the new restrictions. On March 6, the ACLU of Rhode Island filed a suit against the NEA on behalf of several community-based arts organizations, including Rhode Island Latino Arts and the National Queer Theater. The next day, the NEA and NEH removed the certification requirement regarding "gender ideology" while the case is pending. 

Even after the injunction on these new terms, Willett said she still wouldn't be applying for herself in this round. 

“Personally, I don’t feel comfortable as a queer writer throwing my hat in the ring until a judge definitively overturns it. And I would still caution particularly trans/nonbinary writers to approach this with extreme caution because things could change again at any time.” 

Electric Literature rejects NEA support, launches fundraising campaign

Similarly, Electric Literature, a nonprofit literary publication that has received NEA support since 2016, announced it would not be seeking further funding and launched a fundraising campaign to make up the gap. "Electric Literature stands with trans writers and readers, and will continue to fiercely advocate for their rights, protection, and the full expression of their humanity," Executive Director Halimah Marcus wrote.  

While there are many funding and career advancement opportunities available to writers and artists that are not tied to federal funding, Willett worries about the precedent this sets for decisions that are often made behind closed doors. It will take committed journalists following funding and philanthropy across the country to track the ripple effects. 

Willett’s first piece for Oregon ArtsWatch was a detailed timeline of the changes and the implications for writers, artists, and arts organizations across the country. I spoke to Willett about her work and the sudden urgency for more arts and philanthropy coverage as funders pull back from platforming the voices that most need to be heard right now. (Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.) 

***

Claire Willett

How did you first get involved  in arts philanthropy? 

My degree is in theater, and I’ve always been in the arts administration field. I fell into grant writing as a lot of artists do. For over twenty years, I’ve been writing grants. And I’ve really specialized in arts organizations. That’s where my heart is. 

How did covering this story about NEA changes evolve into this new role for Oregon ArtsWatch?

[The NEA changes] really landed in my lap when I was in the middle of an application that we now couldn't finish because it was for equity-centered projects. 

I know the staff at Oregon ArtsWatch pretty well. It was started by a coalition of folks who [wrote for] The Oregonian, back in the day when they had a phenomenally robust arts section, before local newspapers all got bought up and stripped for parts; everyone who left during that wave left to start this organization. 

So I reached out to the executive editor, Laura Grimes, and I said, “Hey, I think this is a story that needs a journalist on it. We’re past the point where people will answer questions for Claire, the grant writer.” 

Laura and I got together for coffee and talked for hours about the NEA and all of the potential impacts on arts organizations and nonprofits. And she was telling me how they get all these press releases and pitches that are in the philanthropy sector. She said I know there are stories we’re losing because none of us has a fundraising background. 

These [philanthropy] stories are important to me. When I was coming up in the ranks, no one ever talked about about the complicated ethics of fundraising. 

How do you decide when to say no to that check because it comes with strings attached, or because you don't want to be in business with the kind of person who is holding on to the purse strings? Or you take the money and you hold your nose, because what you're going to do with it is feels sufficiently important. The ethical math is different every time. 

So how do we hold the philanthropic sector accountable? As a grant writer, as a queer person in Trump’s America, it’s important to me across the board. 

What stories are you focused on right now? 

The NEA is the biggest, most time-sensitive story. But there’s a ton of stuff they want to cover at OAW. On the local level, there were big changes this year in Oregon’s arts funding. 

One thing I’m excited about, is how we’ve already found three private Oregon foundations that have made really intentional shifts in their grant making as a response to the Trump executive orders and the changes at the NEA. They’re basically saying we’re going to fund equity harder because we know that people we support are going to have a harder and harder time accessing the government grants they used to rely on for their programming. That’s important to cover, as a medicine against despair, but also so that people in the arts community know who are the funding entities who are on this journey with them. 

There have been so many details to keep up with as this NEA story has unfolded. It’s confusing, but it’s also a very emotional situation for a lot of people, especially for someone like you who has a connection to the arts from so many angles. What has this news felt like for you personally? 

I think why it made me so really deeply angry as a queer person, is for myself and for so many queer and trans people I know, the arts were what saved you. The arts are where you find yourself when you don't fit in anywhere else. And the arts are a way to really put an audience member into somebody else's shoes, whose life is totally different. And this is the total erasure of a whole category of people from access to resources. Meanwhile the NEA’s whole website is full of this lofty language about the arts being for all Americans. 

So now the NEA changes are being covered nationally. But it seems like what we need to worry about is the trickle-down impact on local organizations in places that no longer have an arts journalist at their local paper. Do you have any advice for journalists who maybe aren’t experts in the arts scene but see this as an urgent story that needs more coverage—what should we be looking for? 

I think the elephant in the room is that the arts are treated like a luxury thing—a trivial thing. The NEA is one of the government’s smallest agencies. We’re also watching healthcare stripped away and like, are we going to go to war with Europe? So how do we position the conversation about the arts as an important component of everything else that is happening? What’s more important, vaccines or theater? But that’s a false premise. 

We have to remind people that free expression in the arts is the bellwether of whether you have a democracy or not. If we’re policing what artists can say, it’s already too late. That’s what authoritarianism looks like, and it starts with artists. 

This is where journalists being in conversation with people on the ground is really important. At the ground level, where the work gets produced, it’s a much messier conversation.

So, for example, the NEA putting a thing in their regulations that says no art by trans people—that’s just one piece of this conversation. The other piece is all the theater companies across America that are reviewing plays for next season, and they just quietly slide the ones by trans playwrights or featuring trans characters into the discard pile. It’s behind closed doors, and we’ll only notice it years from now. 

Holding the machinery accountable—that’s really important. 

How will you be looking for those pieces at ArtsWatch? 

I’m excited [to have] the conversation about where the money comes from. I think it’s important to admit that our funders have an enormous amount of control over the arts landscape—because new work is risky. As journalists, we have to keep our eye on the field. If you’re a journalist in a town with a small but vibrant arts and culture scene, it’s important that you’re in conversation with leaders of that community. How are they using their platform to champion the kind of voices that are being silenced elsewhere? 

If you notice come spring, when everyone is announcing their first full season in this Trump presidency, and there’s no mention of trans people, no mention of Gaza, no mention of immigrants—then that’s an important story. 

For my first article [for OAW], I really wanted to highlight how every step of the way, there were artists and arts organizations fighting back. I think it’s important for people to know that the arts community was on it right away. People were giving their grants back. That’s not normal. People were saying I’d rather reject a $40,000 grant than be associated with the stuff that’s happening. 

There was something really beautiful in that. It’s worth highlighting how artists have always been integral to the work of resistance. 

***

Britany Robinson is a travel, environment, and arts writer who spent the last decade in Portland, Oregon, covering and exploring the Pacific Northwest. She’s authored Lonely Planet guidebook chapters to Southern Oregon, Connecticut, and Rhode Island and recently relocated to Connecticut. Her work has been published in Atmos, Fast Company, The Washington Post, and many more. She also runs the newsletter Wild Writing where she publishes essays and resources on writing about place.

The post Writer Claire Willett on how Trump upended federal grants for the arts and journalism appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Oregon ArtsWatch

On February 6, Claire Willett was in the middle of writing an application for a National Endowment for the Arts grant on behalf of the Portland Opera when she received a press release that would completely upend her work. 

There were two big announcements from the NEA: First, the Challenge America program, which awarded $10,000 grants to smaller organizations, typically going to underserved communities, was canceled. Second, they were scrapping the first round of applications for the Grants for Arts Projects—in the middle of the open application cycle—pending new guidelines. While previous guidelines had a long list of suggested topics for applicants, the press release highlighted just one. 

“Under the updated guidelines, the NEA continues to encourage projects that celebrate the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity by honoring the semiquincentennial of the United States of America (America250).” 

Willett says she was shocked, worried, and confused. She recalls thinking: “They’re pushing us all towards patriotism theater. This is some shady shit.” 

Reading the fine print: 'Assurance of Compliance'

But the changes were even more insidious than they seemed, and at first, it was only grant writers working in the depths of the application who saw it. What eventually became public knowledge was new language added to the Assurance of Compliance page, which was not included in the press release but linked to text buried in the application. Through this new language, applicants would be required to comply with all presidential executive orders—not only within the project with which they sought funding but across the board. Organizations that engaged with any DEI efforts or “gender ideology” would not be considered. 

Grants for Arts Projects and Challenge America were the two programs highlighted in the press release, but this alignment and enforcement with executive orders seemed to apply to all NEA funding, including Creative Writing Fellowships, which are awarded to individual writers in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Through its variety of funding programs, the NEA awarded nearly $36.8 million in awards at the start of 2025. The National Endowment for the Humanities, which announced $22.6 million in funding for arts projects in January, also added compliance to executive orders to their application restrictions.

What the court battles mean for artists and journalists seeking grants

Willett urged writers seeking any kind of federal funding from the NEA or NEH to proceed with caution. She was planning on applying to a Creative Writing Fellowship for herself this year, but decided not to when she learned of the executive order restrictions.

The weekend following the press release, Willett emailed Oregon ArtsWatch about covering these changes. As a grant writer, Willett had deep knowledge of how restrictions against “gender ideology” and DEI could devastate arts and culture nationally, not only through these specific NEA grants but in how funding and ideologies trickle down to local organizations. 

On her blog, Willett detailed the complicated moral considerations that have always plagued funding in the arts. Regardless of how the new restrictions played out, it seemed that decision-makers at the highest level had complied with the notion that trans and queer stories and marginalized voices should not be supported. 

Oregon Arts Watch saw the urgency in the NEA story and the countless branching narratives about artists and arts organizations attempting (or not) to uphold inclusive values and meaningful art under the Trump administration. So they asked Willett to come on as a regular contributor. 

Outrage and opposition grows in the arts community

In the weeks following the initial press release, the news caught up. Outrage among artists and arts organizations spread quickly. On February 18, hundreds of artists signed a letter sent to the NEA, demanding rollbacks on the new restrictions. On March 6, the ACLU of Rhode Island filed a suit against the NEA on behalf of several community-based arts organizations, including Rhode Island Latino Arts and the National Queer Theater. The next day, the NEA and NEH removed the certification requirement regarding "gender ideology" while the case is pending. 

Even after the injunction on these new terms, Willett said she still wouldn't be applying for herself in this round. 

“Personally, I don’t feel comfortable as a queer writer throwing my hat in the ring until a judge definitively overturns it. And I would still caution particularly trans/nonbinary writers to approach this with extreme caution because things could change again at any time.” 

Electric Literature rejects NEA support, launches fundraising campaign

Similarly, Electric Literature, a nonprofit literary publication that has received NEA support since 2016, announced it would not be seeking further funding and launched a fundraising campaign to make up the gap. "Electric Literature stands with trans writers and readers, and will continue to fiercely advocate for their rights, protection, and the full expression of their humanity," Executive Director Halimah Marcus wrote.  

While there are many funding and career advancement opportunities available to writers and artists that are not tied to federal funding, Willett worries about the precedent this sets for decisions that are often made behind closed doors. It will take committed journalists following funding and philanthropy across the country to track the ripple effects. 

Willett’s first piece for Oregon ArtsWatch was a detailed timeline of the changes and the implications for writers, artists, and arts organizations across the country. I spoke to Willett about her work and the sudden urgency for more arts and philanthropy coverage as funders pull back from platforming the voices that most need to be heard right now. (Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.) 

***

Claire Willett

How did you first get involved  in arts philanthropy? 

My degree is in theater, and I’ve always been in the arts administration field. I fell into grant writing as a lot of artists do. For over twenty years, I’ve been writing grants. And I’ve really specialized in arts organizations. That’s where my heart is. 

How did covering this story about NEA changes evolve into this new role for Oregon ArtsWatch?

[The NEA changes] really landed in my lap when I was in the middle of an application that we now couldn't finish because it was for equity-centered projects. 

I know the staff at Oregon ArtsWatch pretty well. It was started by a coalition of folks who [wrote for] The Oregonian, back in the day when they had a phenomenally robust arts section, before local newspapers all got bought up and stripped for parts; everyone who left during that wave left to start this organization. 

So I reached out to the executive editor, Laura Grimes, and I said, “Hey, I think this is a story that needs a journalist on it. We’re past the point where people will answer questions for Claire, the grant writer.” 

Laura and I got together for coffee and talked for hours about the NEA and all of the potential impacts on arts organizations and nonprofits. And she was telling me how they get all these press releases and pitches that are in the philanthropy sector. She said I know there are stories we’re losing because none of us has a fundraising background. 

These [philanthropy] stories are important to me. When I was coming up in the ranks, no one ever talked about about the complicated ethics of fundraising. 

How do you decide when to say no to that check because it comes with strings attached, or because you don't want to be in business with the kind of person who is holding on to the purse strings? Or you take the money and you hold your nose, because what you're going to do with it is feels sufficiently important. The ethical math is different every time. 

So how do we hold the philanthropic sector accountable? As a grant writer, as a queer person in Trump’s America, it’s important to me across the board. 

What stories are you focused on right now? 

The NEA is the biggest, most time-sensitive story. But there’s a ton of stuff they want to cover at OAW. On the local level, there were big changes this year in Oregon’s arts funding. 

One thing I’m excited about, is how we’ve already found three private Oregon foundations that have made really intentional shifts in their grant making as a response to the Trump executive orders and the changes at the NEA. They’re basically saying we’re going to fund equity harder because we know that people we support are going to have a harder and harder time accessing the government grants they used to rely on for their programming. That’s important to cover, as a medicine against despair, but also so that people in the arts community know who are the funding entities who are on this journey with them. 

There have been so many details to keep up with as this NEA story has unfolded. It’s confusing, but it’s also a very emotional situation for a lot of people, especially for someone like you who has a connection to the arts from so many angles. What has this news felt like for you personally? 

I think why it made me so really deeply angry as a queer person, is for myself and for so many queer and trans people I know, the arts were what saved you. The arts are where you find yourself when you don't fit in anywhere else. And the arts are a way to really put an audience member into somebody else's shoes, whose life is totally different. And this is the total erasure of a whole category of people from access to resources. Meanwhile the NEA’s whole website is full of this lofty language about the arts being for all Americans. 

So now the NEA changes are being covered nationally. But it seems like what we need to worry about is the trickle-down impact on local organizations in places that no longer have an arts journalist at their local paper. Do you have any advice for journalists who maybe aren’t experts in the arts scene but see this as an urgent story that needs more coverage—what should we be looking for? 

I think the elephant in the room is that the arts are treated like a luxury thing—a trivial thing. The NEA is one of the government’s smallest agencies. We’re also watching healthcare stripped away and like, are we going to go to war with Europe? So how do we position the conversation about the arts as an important component of everything else that is happening? What’s more important, vaccines or theater? But that’s a false premise. 

We have to remind people that free expression in the arts is the bellwether of whether you have a democracy or not. If we’re policing what artists can say, it’s already too late. That’s what authoritarianism looks like, and it starts with artists. 

This is where journalists being in conversation with people on the ground is really important. At the ground level, where the work gets produced, it’s a much messier conversation.

So, for example, the NEA putting a thing in their regulations that says no art by trans people—that’s just one piece of this conversation. The other piece is all the theater companies across America that are reviewing plays for next season, and they just quietly slide the ones by trans playwrights or featuring trans characters into the discard pile. It’s behind closed doors, and we’ll only notice it years from now. 

Holding the machinery accountable—that’s really important. 

How will you be looking for those pieces at ArtsWatch? 

I’m excited [to have] the conversation about where the money comes from. I think it’s important to admit that our funders have an enormous amount of control over the arts landscape—because new work is risky. As journalists, we have to keep our eye on the field. If you’re a journalist in a town with a small but vibrant arts and culture scene, it’s important that you’re in conversation with leaders of that community. How are they using their platform to champion the kind of voices that are being silenced elsewhere? 

If you notice come spring, when everyone is announcing their first full season in this Trump presidency, and there’s no mention of trans people, no mention of Gaza, no mention of immigrants—then that’s an important story. 

For my first article [for OAW], I really wanted to highlight how every step of the way, there were artists and arts organizations fighting back. I think it’s important for people to know that the arts community was on it right away. People were giving their grants back. That’s not normal. People were saying I’d rather reject a $40,000 grant than be associated with the stuff that’s happening. 

There was something really beautiful in that. It’s worth highlighting how artists have always been integral to the work of resistance. 

***

Britany Robinson is a travel, environment, and arts writer who spent the last decade in Portland, Oregon, covering and exploring the Pacific Northwest. She’s authored Lonely Planet guidebook chapters to Southern Oregon, Connecticut, and Rhode Island and recently relocated to Connecticut. Her work has been published in Atmos, Fast Company, The Washington Post, and many more. She also runs the newsletter Wild Writing where she publishes essays and resources on writing about place.

The post Writer Claire Willett on how Trump upended federal grants for the arts and journalism appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Britany Robinson How to lobby for time and space to tell a story https://niemanstoryboard.org/2025/01/31/how-to-lobby-for-time-space-to-tell-a-story/ Fri, 31 Jan 2025 13:57:26 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=14034 Jan. 29, 2025: Celebrating Lunar New Year at Sara D. Roosevelt park in Manhattan's Chinatown. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Sign up for the Nieman Storyboard newsletter, delivered every Friday in your inbox.

***

Dear Storyboard community, 

It's official: I'm thrilled to be your new Storyboard editor. 

Thanks again to the Nieman Foundation team, and all of you, for the warm welcome over these past few weeks as guest editor.  

Many of you might know me from Longreads, but when I left a few years ago, I was eager to immerse myself in other forms of storytelling — including fiction, podcasting, songwriting, and (as it turned out) TikTok. With Ursa Story Company, authors Dawnie Walton and Deesha Philyaw and I wanted to introduce people to short stories through audio and short-form video. 

As with any industry, there's always a question of how to break in. Many fiction writers can make their name by writing short stories, which can lead to an agent, and then a book deal. For us, it's been gratifying to highlight both established writers and emerging voices who are publishing some of their first pieces. 

Which brings me to this question: 

Who gave you your first shot?

In the world of journalism, it can be just as tough to land a break, or find an editor or producer who will take a chance on you. Or, maybe, you took matters into your own hands and took a chance on yourself. (Ryan Teague Beckwith's newsletter, Your First Byline, is full of these stories.)

I'd like to ask the community: How did you land your first big reporting project or narrative feature? And what advice do you have for those starting out? 

Send me an email (mark_armstrong@harvard.edu) and I'll feature your answers in a future newsletter. 

How to convince an editor or producer to go long

Podcast cover art for KUOW's "Lost Patients."

Will James, an audio documentary producer for KUOW in Seattle, helped create serial podcasts including 2024's "Lost Patients," about the mental health care crisis in Washington state, in partnership with the Seattle Times. 

He wanted to find a way to give complicated stories more space, without having to create an entirely new podcast each time. So he and his colleagues are producing longform audio documentaries that can run as standalone episodes. Their latest is "The Housing First Approach," a 50-minute piece about homelessness that ran on KUOW's Soundside podcast. 

"The idea is that, in this environment, listeners are drowning in discrete bits of information and are looking for voices to guide them through it," James told me. 

He also shared advice for those who want to make a pitch for more space and time to work on a big project: 

Many editors have internalized the idea that long, deeply reported pieces are self-indulgent pursuits that mostly benefit the reporters. In many newsrooms, these projects are treated as “breaks” or “rewards” for reporters, as in “So-and-so has really been grinding on daily news and deserves a break to work on this passion project…” 

First of all: No! Long-term reporting and storytelling projects are difficult as hell and, if done right, will test the limits of any reporter’s skill, patience, and endurance.

To get these ideas past editors, reporters have to show how their project is not a fun diversion for them nor the fulfillment of a personal passion but something crafted to fill the needs of the audience. 

Reporters have to make the case that audiences already get so much information in discrete bites, they’re confused, and they’re crying out for reporting that helps them synthesize all of it. And the reporter needs to demonstrate that their project will fill that need — and that they have a plan to deliver.

Links of note 

Image from Edit Zimmerman's illustrated newsletter

• Vogue Party: Edith Zimmerman documents her life in illustrated stories. Some installments, like this one, talk about her journey from writer (The Hairpin, New York Times Magazine, GQ) to artist. I asked her how she writes and draws them: "I don’t decide much (or anything) beforehand. (It’s really a daily journal!) But then I’ll delete extraneous stuff if it starts to later look like something I might want to publish. And I ask my friend Logan [Sachon] to help me edit it too." Her advice for aspiring artists: "Just start! Sometimes 'bad' art is better than 'good' art. It can be funnier, among other things. So don’t be afraid!"

• Novelist Rebecca Makkai writes about the dangers of "withholding" in storytelling. In this case she's talking about fiction, but I think this raises important questions for narrative nonfiction as well: 

We can define narrative withholding as any time the reader is not filled in on important information known by the narrator or the point-of-view character, in a timely manner.

This absolutely does not mean that you need to fill us in endlessly on every possible detail. If you say that someone sat on the couch but don’t tell me the color of the couch, that is not withholding—largely because it doesn’t matter.

Here’s the litmus test: If two readers could come away with wildly different guesses for what’s happening, and if those guesses would change the meaning of the story, you’ve got a problem.

• “It was complicated at first just to reach people. Some sources were easier to contact than others, and with internet problems in Haiti, some days I couldn’t connect with anyone at all.” Fact-checker Jameson Francisque explained his process while working with reporter Jacob Kushner on Long Lead's feature story, "An Unnatural Disaster,” about the city of Canaan, which emerged after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

• ESPN's 30 for 30 Podcasts will be accepting story pitches at the upcoming On Air Fest in Brooklyn on Feb. 21. Preeti Varathan, head of 30 for 30 Audio, will also be conducting a virtual AMA on Feb. 6 on how to pitch and what they're looking for. 

• Over at Nieman Reports, Gabe Bullard (Nieman Fellow, Class of 2015) writes about the classic reporter’s notebook, which may be on the road to obsolescence. If you have a reporter’s notebook with a special history of its own, share your stories and photos with us.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard 
Bluesky: @niemanstoryboard.org

The post How to lobby for time and space to tell a story appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Jan. 29, 2025: Celebrating Lunar New Year at Sara D. Roosevelt park in Manhattan's Chinatown. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Sign up for the Nieman Storyboard newsletter, delivered every Friday in your inbox.

***

Dear Storyboard community, 

It's official: I'm thrilled to be your new Storyboard editor. 

Thanks again to the Nieman Foundation team, and all of you, for the warm welcome over these past few weeks as guest editor.  

Many of you might know me from Longreads, but when I left a few years ago, I was eager to immerse myself in other forms of storytelling — including fiction, podcasting, songwriting, and (as it turned out) TikTok. With Ursa Story Company, authors Dawnie Walton and Deesha Philyaw and I wanted to introduce people to short stories through audio and short-form video. 

As with any industry, there's always a question of how to break in. Many fiction writers can make their name by writing short stories, which can lead to an agent, and then a book deal. For us, it's been gratifying to highlight both established writers and emerging voices who are publishing some of their first pieces. 

Which brings me to this question: 

Who gave you your first shot?

In the world of journalism, it can be just as tough to land a break, or find an editor or producer who will take a chance on you. Or, maybe, you took matters into your own hands and took a chance on yourself. (Ryan Teague Beckwith's newsletter, Your First Byline, is full of these stories.)

I'd like to ask the community: How did you land your first big reporting project or narrative feature? And what advice do you have for those starting out? 

Send me an email (mark_armstrong@harvard.edu) and I'll feature your answers in a future newsletter. 

How to convince an editor or producer to go long

Podcast cover art for KUOW's "Lost Patients."

Will James, an audio documentary producer for KUOW in Seattle, helped create serial podcasts including 2024's "Lost Patients," about the mental health care crisis in Washington state, in partnership with the Seattle Times. 

He wanted to find a way to give complicated stories more space, without having to create an entirely new podcast each time. So he and his colleagues are producing longform audio documentaries that can run as standalone episodes. Their latest is "The Housing First Approach," a 50-minute piece about homelessness that ran on KUOW's Soundside podcast. 

"The idea is that, in this environment, listeners are drowning in discrete bits of information and are looking for voices to guide them through it," James told me. 

He also shared advice for those who want to make a pitch for more space and time to work on a big project: 

Many editors have internalized the idea that long, deeply reported pieces are self-indulgent pursuits that mostly benefit the reporters. In many newsrooms, these projects are treated as “breaks” or “rewards” for reporters, as in “So-and-so has really been grinding on daily news and deserves a break to work on this passion project…” 

First of all: No! Long-term reporting and storytelling projects are difficult as hell and, if done right, will test the limits of any reporter’s skill, patience, and endurance.

To get these ideas past editors, reporters have to show how their project is not a fun diversion for them nor the fulfillment of a personal passion but something crafted to fill the needs of the audience. 

Reporters have to make the case that audiences already get so much information in discrete bites, they’re confused, and they’re crying out for reporting that helps them synthesize all of it. And the reporter needs to demonstrate that their project will fill that need — and that they have a plan to deliver.

Links of note 

Image from Edit Zimmerman's illustrated newsletter

• Vogue Party: Edith Zimmerman documents her life in illustrated stories. Some installments, like this one, talk about her journey from writer (The Hairpin, New York Times Magazine, GQ) to artist. I asked her how she writes and draws them: "I don’t decide much (or anything) beforehand. (It’s really a daily journal!) But then I’ll delete extraneous stuff if it starts to later look like something I might want to publish. And I ask my friend Logan [Sachon] to help me edit it too." Her advice for aspiring artists: "Just start! Sometimes 'bad' art is better than 'good' art. It can be funnier, among other things. So don’t be afraid!"

• Novelist Rebecca Makkai writes about the dangers of "withholding" in storytelling. In this case she's talking about fiction, but I think this raises important questions for narrative nonfiction as well: 

We can define narrative withholding as any time the reader is not filled in on important information known by the narrator or the point-of-view character, in a timely manner.

This absolutely does not mean that you need to fill us in endlessly on every possible detail. If you say that someone sat on the couch but don’t tell me the color of the couch, that is not withholding—largely because it doesn’t matter.

Here’s the litmus test: If two readers could come away with wildly different guesses for what’s happening, and if those guesses would change the meaning of the story, you’ve got a problem.

• “It was complicated at first just to reach people. Some sources were easier to contact than others, and with internet problems in Haiti, some days I couldn’t connect with anyone at all.” Fact-checker Jameson Francisque explained his process while working with reporter Jacob Kushner on Long Lead's feature story, "An Unnatural Disaster,” about the city of Canaan, which emerged after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

• ESPN's 30 for 30 Podcasts will be accepting story pitches at the upcoming On Air Fest in Brooklyn on Feb. 21. Preeti Varathan, head of 30 for 30 Audio, will also be conducting a virtual AMA on Feb. 6 on how to pitch and what they're looking for. 

• Over at Nieman Reports, Gabe Bullard (Nieman Fellow, Class of 2015) writes about the classic reporter’s notebook, which may be on the road to obsolescence. If you have a reporter’s notebook with a special history of its own, share your stories and photos with us.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard 
Bluesky: @niemanstoryboard.org

The post How to lobby for time and space to tell a story appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Mark Armstrong Peek inside a successful book proposal https://niemanstoryboard.org/2023/11/17/book-proposal-nonfiction-narrative-literary-agents-publishing/ Fri, 17 Nov 2023 13:10:19 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/2023/11/17/book-proposal-nonfiction-narrative-literary-agents-publishing/ Promo for "In Light of All Darkness" on the website of author Kim Cross

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of two posts featuring Kim Cross on the successful pitch-and-proposal process that led to her new book, ‘In Light of All Darkness.’ In this post, Cross annotates the proposal that landed her a contract after previous pitches fell short. In a companion piece, Cross answers questions about agents, timing and money.

Annotation: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Cross’s comments in blue.

In Light of All Darkness

Inside the FBI Polly Klaas Investigation

By Kim Cross
New York Times Best-Selling Author of What Stands in a Storm
Represented by Leslie Meredith Dystel, Goderich & Bourret

OVERVIEW

On the night of October 1, 1993, a stranger with a kitchen knife abducted a twelve-year-old girl from her bedroom during a sleepover with two friends. It was the rarest of all kidnappings: a stranger abduction from the home.

The kidnapping of Polly Klaas is one of the most famous true-crime stories of our generation, a landmark case as significant in the history of the FBI as the Unabomber, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the World Trade Center attacks. The two-month search for “America’s Child” was every agent’s nightmare. Why did you decide to use bold text on and off throughout?That was my agent’s edit. I think it just makes the key points jump out for an editor who may be scanning. The desperate chase was riddled with red herrings, dead ends, and false summits, from bogus ransom calls to the SWAT team raid where FBI agents kicked in the doors of an empty house.

Not since the Lindbergh baby in 1932 had an abduction so engrossed America, compelling thousands of volunteers to help—then and now. The Klaas case also changed the FBI: Investigative methods tested and proven in this case would forever transform the bureau’s approach to crime scene investigation, forensics, behavioral science, rapid response, and kidnapping protocols. Many of those methods are still taught today, around the world, by the same pioneering agents who solved the case. And those agents have never shared their story in a comprehensive book.There are so many key threads to this story. Why was it important to introduce this particular point so early in your overview?It answers some key questions that an editor will be asking: “So what?” “Why now?” and “What’s new?”

Now, for the first time in three decades, key people at the heart of the case are willing to talk about it. They have refused all previous requests to participate in a book. Author Kim Cross has unprecedented access to inside sources and their files, including never-before-public crime scene photos, documents, and a videotaped murder confession.  Why did you choose to describe yourself in the third person (and then shift to first person in the next section, ‘The Case’)?The first page is a summary, much like book-jacket copy. When the proposal begins, I want to bring the reader into the story-world with a scene and a bit more voice.

Cross is the daughter-in-law of Eddie Freyer, the FBI agent who solved the case, and who has taught thousands of agents his crime-solving strategy over the years. (While Freyer has opened doors to key sources, he is not cowriting or editing the MS.) I thought it was important to state this outright. I was raised in an era when journalists were trained to avoid writing about family members or friends, so I was concerned that some readers might assume the familial relationship would compromise my credibility and ability to be objective.

In Light of All Darkness can be published in time for the 30th anniversary of the crime in 2023. It will be the book of record on the Polly Klaas case and its legacy: the insights, methods, and changes that have saved the lives of thousands of children. How did you come up with the framing “book of record?”There were two books written about this case around 1994, before the trial, and both are riddled with gaps and errors. I had unprecedented access to primary sources that would enable the most comprehensive account. What were the merits of stating that ouright up top, vs. letting the reader come to that conclusion throughout as your “proved” that to them?Editors must read a vast number of proposals and I always imagine them skimming and deciding within the first three pages whether it’s worth it to keep reading. Out of respect for their time, it’s important to get to the point quickly and clearly. It’s kind of like a nut graf.

THE CASE

One Sunday in July 2021, I ushered two retired FBI agents into my living room in Boise, Idaho. We’d never met, but I had been studying their professional legacy for more than six years. One of them had lifted an invisible palm print of the kidnapper from Polly Klaas’s bedroom—the pivotal break in the case—and his discovery of this hard evidence had opened the door to the perpetrator’s confession. The other agent had conducted the interview that elicited the confession. These two men were directly responsible for the conviction of a murderer in one of the most famous cases in true-crime history. But their names were missing from everything I’d read or heard about the murder. Why did you choose to open the summary of the case, in the proposal, with this scene?I almost always start with a scene that draws the reader into the story-world. This one (which I also included in the Author’s Note of the book) shows the intimate nature of the access I was given, and it offers transparency into my reporting process. Especially in true crime stories, I feel these two things are important.

We settled into my living room to watch a copy of the videotaped confession, which had been extremely difficult to come by. Not even the lead FBI agent on the case was able to obtain a copy. I appreciate you stating that it was difficult – I think so much of reporting is shrouded and kept from the reader, so it’s not always clear what kind of hoop-jumping journalists have to do to get information.Thanks! I told the whole story in the End Notes, which include a brief narrative that explains how each chapter was reported and written, plus a list of sources. I wanted the End Notes to be worth reading in and of themselves, like a story-behind-the-story.

Larry Taylor, the agent who appeared in the tape, was now 80 years old, a barrel-shaped Texan with a dry sense of humor and a Dallas drawl. He had not seen this tape in almost three decades. Tony Maxwell, the agent who lifted the print, was a spry, exuberantly kind, religious man of Spanish, Irish, and Native American descent. Even though he had been intimately involved in every step of this case, from fingerprinting Polly’s bedroom to participating in the autopsy, had never laid eyes on this tape.

I had been searching for Larry for years, but it was Tony who finally found him living a few miles from my house in Boise. Larry agreed to talk to me, but only if Tony were present. So, Tony bought himself a ticket from New Mexico to Boise. “Why are you so invested in this book?” I asked him. He thought for a minute and said, “I think it’s my last chance to tell the story. I’m over 70. My doctor says, ‘If you got COVID now, you wouldn’t last a week.’”

When I’d first interviewed Tony on Skype in 2015, he wept as he recalled the impact Polly Klaas had made on his profession, his career, and his heart. I like how you convey why this story matters to him — which can also serve as a conduit to persuade the reader why this story matters writ large.I interviewed about 50 FBI agents and detectives who worked on this case, and I’d say about half of them wept, sometimes surprising themselves with the magnitude of their emotions. I was touched by that and felt it was important for the reader to know how personal this story was for them. He remembered minute details and wanted to ensure that this story is told as comprehensively and accurately as possible. He spent hours actively locating other key sources in the case and vouching for me. “Tony, you’ve never talked to the press before,” I said one day. “Why are you talking to me?” He smiled. “Because you’re family.” Then he confessed that FBI habits die hard—he’d thoroughly vetted me and my work.

I’d watched the confession tape Every time I read this now, I hear Greg Jacobs in my head: It was technically an admission, not a confession. But no one ever calls it “the admission tape.” only once before, a couple years earlier, with my father-in-law, Eddie Freyer. Even though this was Eddie’s case, he hadn’t been able to get his hands on a copy of the tape. I myself had spent several years searching for a copy. I couldn’t find it anywhere online or in the possession of the FBI agents or cops who worked the case. Finally, through dogged reporting and sources outside the FBI, I obtained one.

This tape is not only rare, but unusual: longstanding FBI policy prohibited agents from recording or videotaping interviews. The culture of Hoover’s FBI held that an agent’s word should be enough to stand up in court. For decades, it was. This videotape only exists because the interview was conducted by an FBI agent and a Petaluma Police detective. Standard practice for local police was to record interviews, either by audio or video, preferably both. Yet Eddie had asked the Sonoma County District Attorney for a copy to use as a teaching tool in the 40-hour Interviewing and Interrogation course he teaches for the Behavioral Analysis Training Institute (BATI). The D.A. had declined. Even though the case is closed, and the murderer is on Death Row in San Quentin, the D.A. refused to release it for fear of future litigation.

When Eddie and I sat down to watch it, he had not seen the recording in more than two decades. Is it common to use footnotes in a proposal?I have no idea! I did use them, judiciously, in the book, so looking back I do think it shows the editor how I think and address little diversions that are ancillary to the main narrative, yet too interesting to leave out. With his commentary, it was like watching a Director’s Cut. He paused the tape to identify interviewing tactics and point out body language and behavioral cues used to detect lying. He explained the extraordinary sequence of events that led to this legally admissible confession—even after the suspect had invoked his Miranda rights. That’s just one of the parts of this story that has never been reported. How do you balance the insertion of bold text with a belief in trusting the reader to determine what’s most important to them?Ask my literary agent, Leslie Meredith! I think it’s a way to help a time-starved editor who is probably skimming. I obviously wouldn’t use such a treatment in a book, where the engaged reader has more time and is expecting nuanced storytelling.

When I watched the confession again with Tony and Larry, they added another layer of insight that has never been reported. Larry was a kidnapping specialist assigned to high-profile cases including Amber Swartz Garcia, and Ileane Mischeloff. He was the agent who, in 1992, opened a closet door to find Charles Geschke—the Adobe CEO who had been kidnapped at gunpoint and held for ransom—gagged and chained to the floor, alive.

As Larry watched the tape, it shook loose some long-forgotten memories of the moments before recording commenced. Suspect Richard Allen Davis, a repeat offender who had been in and out of prison for most of his adult life, had recognized the deputy who arrived to take his fingerprints. “The deputy had been a guard at Folsom Prison,” Taylor recalled. “And it was sort of like a class reunion. Davis lit up. He said, ‘Hey! Did you know so-and-so?’ It was like old lodge brothers coming together. He felt that comfortable within the prison system.”

Larry recalled driving the kidnapper to the body recovery site with Petaluma Detective Mike Meese, his partner in conducting the confession interview. Mike Meese is deceased, but he was a notorious hoarder of case files (including the confession tape). I’m working to track down his family and obtain a copy of the recording from the drive. I like how you show you’re doing your homework here, and have other means of obtaining more info in the works.Mike’s widow entrusted me with several of his hard drives and a very useful PowerPoint presentation with a few crime scene photos, facts and bits of info I didn’t find anywhere else.

Tony, in turn, recalled the behind-the-scenes drama never shared with the press. On the night that Polly was found, his supervisors ordered him to transport her body to the morgue before dawn, to keep it out of sight of the media. At the risk of losing his job, Tony refused. Too much trace evidence would be lost in the dark. Rushing felt not only risky but disrespectful, and he wanted to do it right, with care and dignity. On that cold night, he sat in the dark beside Polly’s body, praying and talking to her softly. “We found you, Polly,” he said. “We’re going to bring you home.”

In the six years I’ve spent researching this story, I’ve been struck, again and again, by the deeply personal nature of this case. “It’s one of the most significant things I’ve ever done in my life,” said Jay Silverberg, who lived in Petaluma and helped organize the volunteer center. “Aside from my kids, there’s nothing else I could do with that much impact, that kind of legacy.”

The emotional gravity touched every agent, every cop, every forensic technician who worked this case, no matter how seasoned. The pain still echoes today. Tony Maxwell still thinks about Polly Klaas “every single day.” District Attorney Greg Jacobs, who prosecuted her murderer, Richard Allen Davis, said this case is the reason “I’m still in therapy.”

Eddie Freyer and I have driven to Polly’s house, which looks today much as it did in 1993. The owner of the house invited us in to look around, and said her house is not haunted.

But Eddie is.

Eddie and I have also walked through the brambles of a vacant field outside Cloverdale, where the roar of semis on Highway 101 drowned out the birdsong. We stood by an oak tree and looked at the stones that strangers had placed there, the painted-on messages faded by sun and time. Eddie comes here from time to time, alone, to think. This is the spot where he stood, one December night, and lifted a piece of plywood. Underneath it lay a small body in a flannel nightgown, an answer to the 2-month-long search. The lights of media trucks lined the service road by the highway. The command post was on alert, the Evidence Response Team poised to act. Polly’s family was waiting.

On the night that Polly vanished, Eddie had sat down in the living room next to her mother and made a promise that echoes in his ears today. “Eve,” he said gently, “I promise you we’ll do everything humanly possible to find your daughter.” Everything he did in the following days was in the service of his word. Still, he wonders. Was there anything they could have done differently to find her alive? He goes through the events, yet again, in his mind, reviewing every juncture. He reevaluates the early clues. The decisions made with incomplete information. The flaws in the system. The errors they made. How tragically close they came to saving her. The lessons that changed everything.

He is ready, at last, to tell the whole story. You build this up in a quite propulsive way. What influenced your thought process here in terms of ending the intro on him?At this point in the reporting, I expected Eddie to be the central character. As I dove deeper into the documents, I realized—with considerable chagrin—that he wasn’t going to get as much airtime as I originally anticipated. As a supervisor, he didn’t leave as much of a paper trail as the agents and detectives doing the hands-on work. His role as Case Agent made him a sort of Wizard of Oz, orchestrating the massive investigation outside of the public eye. (He’s not mentioned in any press coverage from 1993.) Eddie’s job was to manage the agents and cops who were conducting interviews and writing reports. They were the ones who left the paper trail of records that contained the facts, details, and (most importantly) dialogue that allowed me to write in-scene. I had to rely on his memory of events from three decades earlier in order to write him into a scene.

THE STORY

On a Friday night in October 1993, three seventh-grade girls at Petaluma Junior High were planning a sleepover. The hostess, twelve-year-old Polly Klaas, a brown-eyed girl who still possessed the dimples and figure of a child, rushed home to clean the small house she shared with her mother and six-year-old sister. Her friends, Gillian Pelham and Kate McLean, arrived with sleeping bags and games, planning to stay up late. In a small room with a wooden bunk bed, they giggled as they put makeup on each other and played board games. Polly’s mother, Eve Nichol, told the girls to quiet down. Before going to bed, she checked the front door to make sure it was locked.

Eve closed both doors to the Jack-and-Jill bathroom that separated the two bedrooms, and crawled into bed next to Polly’s little sister, Annie. She could still hear muffled laughter through the walls. Eve took a sleeping pill, read for a while, and sank into a deep sleep.

Around 10:30 p.m. Polly stood up to get the sleeping bags from the living room. She opened her bedroom door to face a stranger in the hallway. Dressed all in black, he seemed over six feet tall. Black eyes. Black hair. Salt-and-pepper beard. In his right hand was a black bag. In his left, a kitchen knife.

“Don’t scream,” he said, “or I’ll slit your throats.” The dialogue in this scene (and subsequent book chapter) came from interviews detectives conducted with Kate and Gillian the night of the abduction and from trial transcripts of their testimony on the witness stand three years after the event. I read the chapters to Kate and Gillian to fact-check and make sure they were comfortable with how they were portrayed. If my memory serves, they made two factual corrections.

He made the three girls lie face down on the floor and he bound their hands behind their backs, first with torn strips of silky white cloth, and then with black cords he cut from a Nintendo game in the room and a strap he sliced from Polly’s purse. He pulled pillowcases over their heads.

“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you,” he said. “I’m just doing this for the money.”

Polly offered him thirty dollars stashed in a jewelry box, but he made no move to find it. Instead, he took Polly. He told Kate and Gillian to count to one thousand. By the time they were done, he promised them, Polly would be back.

When the screen door slammed, the girls stopped counting and struggled to untie themselves, biting the ligatures to work the knots loose. They ran to the next room and woke Polly’s mom. As Eve surfaced from sleep, a fog of disorientation gave way to panic. She grabbed the phone and dialed 911.

Six minutes later, a Petaluma Police deputy knocked on her door. Shortly after midnight, two FBI agents arrived. It was too late. Polly was gone.

***

The two-month search that followed remains one of the biggest manhunts in the history of California—and the FBI. It involved more than one hundred agents and dozens of local cops and detectives, who followed a non-stop stream of leads—tips that may or may not warrant investigative action. Their actions ranged from hour-long interviews to a full-blown investigation with surveillance teams, SWAT operations, and a grid search over many square miles. A “big” FBI case might involve 5,000 tips. The Klaas case had 60,000 tips and 12,000 actionable leads.

The public, outraged, came out in full force to help. Four thousand civilian volunteers beat the bushes along every creek and country road in Sonoma County. One of them was actress Winona Ryder, who grew up in Petaluma, had attended Polly’s junior high, and signed a check for a $200,000 reward.

“The nature of this case was so shocking, so bold on the part of the offender, it struck at the heart of every family in this country,” says FBI Senior Resident Agent Eddie Freyer. The first FBI agent to arrive on the scene, Freyer became the lead agent in charge of the Polly Klaas case.

Volunteers manning a twenty-four-hour telephone bank took calls and passed tips and leads to police. Eight million Missing Person fliers were distributed nationwide and abroad. The Polly Klaas Foundation, a 501(c)(3), was rushed through the IRS paperwork in just a few days to manage donations that topped $250,000 almost overnight. When, two months into the case, the overtime expense threatened to bankrupt the Petaluma Police Department, the Foundation offered the city $50,000 to keep the search going strong. These small details are super effective.I try to use specificity and telling details as a way to avoid cliches and platitudes.
Everyday citizens played a critical role in this case. They were instrumental in keeping the search—and just as importantly, the story—alive. The volunteers held the media’s interest, and the media, in turn, kept leads streaming in from the public. One of those leads helped to solve the case.

On the 59th day, a Sonoma County resident called in a tip that altered the course of the investigation. She had stumbled upon suspicious items on her property, key evidence that led quickly and directly to the identification of the kidnapper. This citizen might not have recognized the connection and called the cops had she not seen the media coverage. Were you worried about giving key details of the story away?Not so much here as in the book itself. I wrangled with the decision of when to let the reader know about a key event that transpired on the night of Polly’s abduction. Two sheriff’s deputies responded to a trespassing call from a woman named Dana Jaffe, who encountered a man whose car was stuck in a ditch on her property. The deputies freed the man’s car and sent him on his way. The trespasser turned out to be Polly’s kidnapper. But investigators didn’t know this until two months later, when Dana Jaffe found suspicious items on her property. She called the sheriff’s again and they linked the items to the trespasser. I had a tough choice to make: When do I tell the reader this? When the investigators find out? Or when it happens? I chose the latter, a form of dramatic irony used in Shakespearean plays and Greek tragedies, because it amped up the tension.

The first kidnapping to be publicized internationally, this unfolding drama dominated the news for months and etched itself in popular memory. It’s hard to find anyone alive in 1993 who doesn’t recognize Polly’s smiling face, so often was it flashed on TV and printed under the headlines.

That face reminded everyone of someone they cared about: a daughter, a sister, a student, a friend. Polly Klaas was the all-American girl next door, and her abduction signaled the end of a collective innocence. A woman in Bulgaria recalled that her mother took her bike away because of this case 6,500 miles away.

The bad guy—Richard Allen Davis—was the quintessential boogeyman. “He was a Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy type of offender,” Freyer said. “The worst of the worst.” Davis was a career criminal who had spent nearly his entire adult life in and out of prison. As a child, he set cats on fire and cut stray dogs with a knife. At 12, he was arrested for burglary, a crime he’d repeat more than 20 times. His crimes escalated. In his twenties, he attempted—and failed repeatedly—to kidnap or rape at least three different women. One ran away and flagged down a car that happened to contain a highway patrolman. Another pulled a gun and shot at Davis’s back as he fled. At the time of Polly’s kidnapping, Davis was on parole for his second 8-year prison sentence, convicted of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman. Experts characterized him as a frustrated sexual sadist who turned to younger and more vulnerable prey.

***

Everyone cared. Joan Baez sang “Amazing Grace” at the memorial. The church could only hold 1,500 people, so hundreds stood in the rain to watch the service, which was directed by a producer of the Grammys. Winona Ryder dedicated her film, “Little Women,” to Polly Klaas. Robin Williams made a surprise appearance at a benefit to help raise money for her search. Mark McGuire wore a special wristband honoring missing kids and wrote a $75,000 check to the Polly Klaas Foundation.

People still care.

“At the twenty-year remembrance, I made the comment, ‘Why us? Why did this happen to us?’” says Jay Silverberg, a former journalist who became the media liaison for the Polly Klaas Foundation as the search began, served as a founding board member, and remains an advisor to the board today. “But look at what we did with it. My grandkids may be safer because of this.” It was a case that changed America.

It was also a case that changed the FBI.

WHAT’S NEW? Why did you decide to make this a header? It’s the number one question editors will be asking about a 30-year-old story. What new information will this book reveal? The tricky part about answering this question in a proposal is that you haven’t done the years of research that will uncover all the answers. But that’s why I do a ton of pre-reporting before every story pitch or book proposal. (As a result, I have a pretty good batting average.) The “What’s new?” also comes into play during the marketing and publicity phase of publishing. When my publicist pitched a 20/20 producer the two-hour documentary, I started with the list from the proposal and added insights I discovered later in the reporting of the book.

Featuring a cast of investigators working ceaselessly—FBI agents, detectives, and forensic technicians sharing never-before-published details—this book will be the first narrative to take readers through every beat of the case through the Go-Pro point of view of the people who lived it. I love the term “Go-Pro point of view.” So vivid!Full disclosure: Pretty sure I borrowed/stole that phrase from my friend and fellow investigative reporter Bronwen Dickey, who supported me throughout this book project. With Eddie Freyer at the helm, central characters include a FBI’s behavioral science expert who conducted key interviews, a pioneering police sketch artist who rendered the suspect’s face with stunning accuracy, the forensic specialist who lifted the palm print that led to a confession, and the agent who elicited the confession that led to a conviction and a death penalty sentence.

Written with the cinematic scenes and suspense of a thriller, and fact-checked with primary sources, the search is a narrative vehicle for a more expansive story: How the Polly Klaas kidnapping was a proving ground for investigative tools, procedures, and people who forever changed how the FBI gathers evidence and solves crimes. The history and science of CSI methods will be woven throughout the story, adding narrative pacing, depth, and insider details that true crime readers obsess about. (I used a similar approach in What Stands in a Storm, which laced the fast-paced narrative tornado narrative with bits of exposition about the history and science of severe weather; the book is now required reading in high schools and colleges in at least four states.)

No podcast, TV show, or story has ever delivered so much unique information or demonstrated why this case was so pivotal in the history of the FBI. To me, these paragraphs feel like the most important, and urgent, yet in the proposal.Maybe I should have moved them up higher! It’s part of the “What’s new” answer, and the more I dug, the more specific information I found to support this theme. In the book, several chapters contain historical asides that document insider FBI history I wasn’t able to find written elsewhere. It marked a major turning point when the bureau was forced to change how it responded to the most urgent and time-sensitive of all crimes. Kidnapping statistics paint a grim picture: 44 percent of abducted children die within the first hour; 74 percent die within the first three hours; 1 percent survive more than one day. Sadly, 40 percent are dead by the time they’re even reported missing. It’s worth noting that the kidnapping statistics were one of the hardest things to report and fact-check. Exact numbers of stranger abductions have always been controversial (and sometimes dramatically inflated as a result of multiple reporting systems). The numbers I used here came from a presentation given by one of the FBI agents who worked on the case. The ones that made it into the book survived rounds of fact-checking with various sources and consultation with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

When Polly went missing in October 1993, the nation was plagued with a string of unsolved stranger abductions, many of which took place in Northern California. Amber Swartz-Garcia. Ileane Mischeloff. Kevin Collins. Jaycee Dugard.

“These children were in their homes or playing in their front yards or walking home from ice skating practice a few blocks away,” Eddie Freyer says. “They vanished from the face of the earth. They were unsolved.”

The community was demanding to know: When are you going to stop this? What are you going to do about these unsolved cases? I like how you zoom out to paint the broader historical context here that was influencing this time.I think it’s important to “zoom out” and paint the bigger picture framing the story-world. What else was happening in the world at the time? What pressures were unique to this moment in time? It provides important context and anchors the narrative in time and history.

FBI kidnapping protocol required dispatching forensic experts from the lab in Quantico to conduct crime scene investigations. But during the time it took to get them there—24 hours or more in some cases—trace evidence could deteriorate, disappear, or become contaminated inadvertently. Even more urgently, the first 24 hours after an abduction are the most critical. Odds of survival decline with each minute.

A different approach was bubbling up from the ranks, who saw the need for “a new way of doing business.” Outside FBI headquarters, agents in field offices were assembling local teams that could arrive at a crime scene within hours or even minutes. This had led to the creation of the San Francisco FBI Evidence Response Team (ERT), among the first of its kind in the nation in 1991. I don’t know if it comes out clearly here, but this was one of the most pivotal ways in which this case “changed the way the FBI does business.” I wasn’t able to find a good written history of the ERT. Then I realized I was talking to the primary sources who wrote that chapter of history.

These ERT mavericks were considered rogues, at the time. Breaking protocol and outside the chain of command, they were experimenting with new forensic tools and methods. Many of their previously untested methods concerned the recovery of trace evidence: hair and fibers, fingerprints and DNA, “the evidence we can’t see,” says Senior Team Leader Tony Maxwell, the FBI’s lead forensic investigator on the Polly Klaas case. “Before, you’d want the gun. Now you want the smoke from the gun.”

Maxwell, who has never before spoken to the press, is a forensic pioneer who would change how crime scene investigators gather trace evidence and protect it on its journey to the lab in Quantico. Oops! As I corrected in the book, the FBI lab was located in Washington D.C. at the time of this case. (It was later moved to Quantico, Virginia.)

“There are only two ways a guy goes to jail: witnesses and evidence,” Maxwell told me. “If witnesses are compromised, it all comes down to evidence.”

Committed to telling this story, Maxwell actively tracked down and recruited other characters central to the investigation, including Frank Doyle, a 33-year FBI veteran who co-founded the ERT program and went on to teach forensic investigation classes with Maxwell in more than 25 countries. This is striking. Do you have a sense of why Maxwell was motivated to do this?I think he may have felt the same imperative that Eddie and I did: If this story is to be told accurately and thoroughly, we need help from everyone who lived it—while they’re still alive and able to remember. Doyle also served as the explosives expert for 56 episodes of the Mythbusters TV show. Sadly, Frank Doyle died a few months ago. I attended his funeral with Eddie and FBI SWAT team leader Tom LaFreniere. The next day, we lost Lillian Zilius, who supervised Frank and Tony and the ERT. I was sad, and grateful I had recorded their interviews, which I shared with their families. Maxwell and Doyle introduced me to Mike Stapleton, their FBI colleague and founder of Forensics R Us, a consulting firm through which he currently conducts fingerprint identification courses. Maxwell, Doyle, and Stapleton all say that what they learned from the Polly Klaas case would be crucial to their subsequent work on the Oklahoma City bombing, the Unabomber, the Olympic bombing in Atlanta, and the World Trade Center attacks in 1993 and 2001. “This case was the most instrumental model used in all our case responses thereafter,” Maxwell says.

The Polly Klaas case marked the FBI’s first application of techniques such as cyanoacrylate fuming—aka “Supergluing”—a method in which a fine mist of superglue is sprayed on an object to permanently affix fragile, perishable fingerprints that can be destroyed by conventional dusting. Electrostatic dust collectors were used to gather hairs, fibers, and microscopic particles from every inch of Polly’s room.

This was also the FBI’s first use of fluorescent powder and alternate light source (ALS) to detect latent fingerprints invisible to the human eye. In the months before Polly’s disappearance, Maxwell came home from work and practiced using fluorescent powder and a borrowed ALS—which the FBI didn’t yet own—in his living room, where his wife ran a children’s daycare. A day of Mrs. Maxwell’s business as usual generated all sorts of trace evidence: DNA-rich body fluids, the finest human hair, and children’s fingerprints, which are smaller, harder to find, and more perishable than those of adults. One hundred times more sensitive than traditional black powder treatments, fluorescent powder could pick up prints missed by an everyday fingerprint dusting. In Polly’s room, Maxwell and his team would use this new technique to lift 48 fingerprints missed by the Petaluma Police. One of them would be the palm print that linked the killer to the crime scene, prompted his confession, and led to his conviction.

But even as these teams were making forensic history, they faced considerable resistance within their own organization. “This new team concept was not received warmly by either the Laboratory Division or the agents in the field,” Maxwell says. “We had to win the support of our colleagues one by one, case by case.” Once they did, the San Francisco ERT would become a model for other such teams across the nation. Today, the bureau employs 1,000 trained ERT agents nationwide, and every local office has a dedicated team.

Concurrently emerging in the FBI was the use of behavioral science in criminal investigations, particularly those involving threats or acts of violence. The Polly Klaas case marked the first time a profiler was embedded within the forensic team, which sped up the investigation. It marked the merging of forensic science and behavioral science for the first time in the FBI. From a fact-checking perspective, how did you verify all of these “firsts” to make these assertions with confidence?I interviewed an FBI historian and also emailed Louis Freeh, who was the Director of the FBI at the time. Both of them said I knew more about this case than they did. So I corroborated the assertions made in separate interviews by Tony Maxwell, Frank Doyle, David Alford, Mike Stapleton, and Mary Ellen O’Toole—all pioneers who most likely would have been aware of all the precedents. Special Agent Mary Ellen O’Toole, an expert in criminal profiling and psychopathy, worked closely with the Evidence Response Team throughout the entire case—and beyond. “Mary Ellen would sit across from me,” Maxwell says. “I would do the forensic side. She would do the ‘voodoo’ side. She has worked almost every kidnapping since.” O’Toole used new profiling methods to get inside the mind of the killer, including an approach called “victimology,” which involved analyzing Polly’s artwork to characterize what kind of child she was, and then deduce what kind of criminal might prey on such a child.

Paired with forensic evidence, behavioral analysis helped focus the investigation and support the prosecution. “Tony and I worked side by side,” O’Toole said. “Now, it’s clear you have to blend the empirical and behavioral sciences.” But in 1993, that concept broke new ground. After Polly’s case, O’Toole went on to work for the FBI’s new Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU), which became the focus of the hit crime serious “Criminal Minds.” She later worked on the Elizabeth Smart and Natalee Holloway disappearances, the Columbine shootings, and many other high-profile cases. A Fellow with the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, she continues to lecture at the FBI Academy, the FBI’s Leadership Development Institute, and the Smithsonian Institute. She is the director of the Foresnic Science Program at George Mason University, where she is heading up the creation of the nation’s second “Body Farm,” where forensic scientists use donated corpses to study the decomposition of bodies. (The first Body Farm, run by the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, was featured in Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Lives of Cadavers.)

After the Polly Klaas case, O’Toole went on to write the Child Abduction Response protocols for the entire Bureau. The ERT techniques and protocols established in this case would be rolled out nationwide, and eventually internationally, when FBI technicians (including Maxwell and his colleagues) began training foreign governments to respond to bombings and terrorism attacks. At this point, you’ve spent quite a bulk of space detailing FBI/investigative methods. How did you think about keeping the reader’s attention?I did enough research on successful true crime books to appreciate that avid readers of this genre love the nitty-gritty details of forensic science and investigative tools. I also saw expository asides as a means of narrative pacing. Many of the scenes are fast-paced and extremely emotionally intense, so these asides give readers a moment to catch their breath.

“All that comes from Polly,” Maxwell says.

***

Outside the FBI, independent forensic artist Jeanne Boylan was developing new methods of cognitive interviewing to elicit the faces of criminals, images buried deep within the subconscious of a traumatized witness. Trauma affects the mind’s ability to encode—and retrieve—a memory, and Boylan understood that the act of trying to remember a traumatic memory could inadvertently distort that memory. She explained that, after witnessing a traumatic crime, “the mind, as a survival measure, acts with determination to protect the victim from reexperiencing the event by repressing the image that induced the trauma.” In this post-traumatic state, eyewitnesses’ memories were very fragile, highly susceptible to suggestions that could overwrite the memory and compromise its accuracy. What an effective, clear and compelling way in which you described how trauma affects memory. I appreciate the precision of your language while still putting this explanation in layman’s terms.If I learned anything in this project, it’s the extent to which memory is susceptible to suggestion, distorted by trauma, and eroded by the passage of time. For the book, I interviewed a scientist who studies the impact of trauma on memory, and he offered a theory about why one of the two 12-year-old girls who witnessed Polly’s abduction recalled the kidnapper wearing neon yellow bandana across his forehead, and the other did not.

Boylan’s insight, supported by research by University of Washington psychology professor Dr. Elizabeth Loftus on the fallibility of eyewitness recall, unearthed flaws in the longstanding approach of forensic artists. The standard procedure was to show the eyewitness a selection of noses, eyes, chins (et cetera) from which they could select features, which an artist would then combine in a sketch that purported to resemble the perpetrator’s face. This method often produced sketches that eyewitnesses declared “not right.” Even worse, Boylan said, it could potentially “damage the evidence” by “handing to the eyewitness—at the very height of that person’s vulnerability to suggestion and influence—the visual tools to effectively discard, distort, or further entomb the actual image that created the trauma.”

Boylan’s techniques defied convention, which caused law enforcement officials to mistrust and criticize them. The officials tended to view any success on her part as an indication of failure on theirs. Boylan was summoned to Petaluma by the FBI at the insistence of an ABC Television producer named Debbie Alpert, who became interested in the Polly Klaas case and remembered Boylan from a previous story. Boylan’s reception in the command center was lukewarm, at best. By the time she arrived, thousands of fliers had already been disseminated with the sketch of a local police artist, who had used the old techniques.

“The girls say the sketch is wrong,” Polly’s mother, Eve, told Boylan. “Did they tell you that?”

It wasn’t a bad sketch, Boylan thought, but it looked like it could be anyone. The height mentioned in the flyer—six-foot-three—also bothered her. What does six feet three inches mean to a twelve-year-old child seated on a bedroom floor looking up at a man with a weapon?

“I’ll bet he’s a shorter man,” Boylan said. “I think we’re going to need to open that up.”

At first, Mark Mershon, the same FBI agent who had been pressured to have Boylan join the team told her that she would not be permitted to interview the eyewitnesses. After flying home to Washington—and back a day later—she was finally allowed to interview Kate and Gillian. That’s when she realized how much damage had been done. The girls had been interviewed together. When this happens, the dominant witness often influences the recollection of the less-dominant personality. Minor discrepancies trigger suspicion in the minds of the investigators, and that suspicion erodes the confidence of both witnesses. From there, things tend to go downhill, which is precisely what had already happened. Minor inconsistencies in the girls’ perceptions—which should have validated their honesty—were treated as lies by the investigators.

It was one of their biggest mistakes, admits FBI agent Eddie Freyer. “We roughed them up,” he says, almost thirty years later, to every class of new investigators. “We almost lost them, as witnesses, as we dug into the weeds. There were minor inconsistencies. We thought those differences meant lying.”

Eddie Freyer knows every mistake, every red herring, and every small step in the right direction, because he was the FBI agent in charge of the Polly Klaas case. When you were interviewing him, what signaled to you that he would be honest, as a source, about his personal mistakes and oversights?Before I wrote the proposal, I sat in on his Interviewing and Interrogation class for the Behavioral Analysis Training Institute (when he made the remarks noted above). He was frank with his students about those mistakes. I told him at the outset of the project that the book would have to acknowledge what went wrong as well as what went right in the case. He agreed. I needed to avoid writing an FBI puff piece, or what some journalists call “copaganda.” So I made sure to fact-check his memories as thoroughly as I did every other source. As Senior Resident Agent (SRA) in Santa Rosa, he oversaw the efforts of Tony Maxwell, Mary Ellen O’Toole, Jeanne Boylan, and more than one hundred agents—a team that worked in concert (and sometimes at odds) with local police toward a common goal: Find Polly. For 61 straight days, many of them sleepless, Freyer called in the polygraphers, green-lighted the SWAT raids, and made sure key evidence was hand-delivered to the FBI lab in Quantico.

In charge of the command post—the brain of the investigation—he orchestrated its transformation from the “old way of doing business” (butcher paper hung in a break room, scribbled with hand-written leads) to the brand-new Rapid Start system, an electronic lead-tracking database that enabled Freyer to prioritize 60,000 tips and investigate 12,000 actionable leads over two relentless months. Rapid Start was pulled off the Unabomber case, its first application, and reassigned to Polly Klaas, operated by data analysts nicknamed “the mushroom heads” by their colleagues.

Behind the scenes, invisible to media, Freyer was making thousands of decisions in a case that would profoundly change the way we search for and find missing children. Throughout the entire investigation Freyer kept a low profile, insulated from the press by supervisors like FBI ASAC Mark Mershon, who became the official spokesperson, but was not as intimately involved in the day-to-day decisions that made this case so complex. Everyone who worked the Polly Klaas case says Freyer’s leadership was the grease that kept the investigation running twenty-four hours a day. As Mary Ellen O’Toole said years later, “I think one of the reasons we all worked together so well and solved the case is because working for Eddie was wonderful. He is probably one of the best FBI agents I've ever worked for. He was low key. He listened. he was thoughtful, but very decisive. He always seemed to know exactly what to do. I haven't seen that kind of competence since.”

But it wasn’t cold competence that set Eddie Freyer apart from the ranks of lead investigators. It was his humanity. When he realized how badly Kate and Gillian had been traumatized by the mistrust of early interviewers, he brought the girls flowers and, on bended knee, apologized for how they had been treated. As he learned how forensic artist Jeanne Boylan had helped the girls recover not only the face of the killer, but also their trust and confidence, he asked Boylan to please stay, because the girls needed her. Three years later, when Kate and Gillian were called to testify in the murder trial of the man who had bound and gagged them, each girl was allowed to choose one adult to accompany her on the witness stand. Both chose Jeanne Boylan. Why did you choose to delve into the story so extensively in this section vs. leaning more on the sample chapters? How did you balance what extent of detail and context to disclose?I wanted the sample chapters to showcase the writing, the storytelling, and specifically my ability to stay “in-scene” as much as possible, which makes a narrative read like fiction. But it’s also essential in a proposal to convey to the editor what I call “the smart layer” of nonfiction – the expository asides that add meaning, context, and insight to each scene.

WHY NOW?

I love that this is a header.I think about the ‘why now’ in every story pitch I craft and make sure to include a line acknowledging that, but I never state it quite so directly. I might take a leaf from your book!) KC: It’s a key question every proposal must answer, along with “Why are you the best writer to tackle this book?”

Nearly three decades years after her abduction, people are still talking about Polly Klaas.  And true crime stories are more popular than ever across media.

At least twenty-seven true crime podcasts have dedicated an episode to the Polly Klaas kidnapping. Netflix is filming an episode on the case for the upcoming series “Crimes That Changed America.” In her newest suspense novel, When the Stars Go Dark (April 2021), New York Times bestselling author Paula McLain writes about a detective obsessed with the search for a kidnapped girl. Set in Northern California in 1993, the story features fictional characters whose paths intersect with real-life kidnapping cases—including Polly Klaas. McClain says her protagonist, a female detective, was shaped by research that she conducted on the Polly Klaas investigation.

This case has been covered extensively—in newspapers, true crime TV shows, podcasts, and books. All of these stories lack the details known only to deep insiders—the color of the powder that picked up the palm print, the moonless night a SWAT team member fell into a ravine, the way the kidnapper wiped his mouth every time he told a lie. True crime fans who think they know everything about this case will find plenty of new information in this book. It will also fascinate anyone interested in the history and evolution of crime scene investigation.

In Light of All Darkness can be delivered 12-18 months after contract signing. The hope is that it will be published in 2023, the 30th year since Polly’s death. How did you determine how long the delivery would take you?I had reported and written three books (one of which I can’t name, because of a non-disclosure agreement) so I knew what I could handle in that time frame. Plus, I had to work backward from the date of the 30-year anniversary of the crime, which gave the book a natural target pub date and a natural news-hook that would be useful for marketing and publicity. It takes readers deep inside the FBI investigation of one of the most famous—and perhaps the most pivotal—kidnapping in the world. This case was the training ground for the people, methods, and procedures used to solve crimes today—not only kidnapping cases, but also sex trafficking cases, serial murders, and terrorist bombings. “It changed the course of history,” said Greg Jacobs, the district attorney who prosecuted Polly’s kidnapper and murderer, Richard Allen Davis.

Polly’s case led to the Three-Strikes law and improved collaboration between Federal and local law enforcement. It informed the Amber Alert system now used in forty-eight states and responsible for saving 800 abducted children. It sparked the development of child abduction protocols taught nationwide. The Polly Klaas Foundation, a nonprofit founded by search volunteers, continues to work an average of 300 missing-child cases each year, helping families and law enforcement teams act quickly to respond to kidnappings. It is the only such organization assigned cases by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Since its inception, the Polly Klaas Foundation has searched for nearly 10,000 missing kids. It has a 97 percent recovery rate. 

Eddie Freyer uses the case to train the next generation of investigators. He has given his Polly Klaas presentation hundreds of times around the nation and the world: at FBI headquarters in Quantico; at more than ten agencies in Iraq; and at the Crimes Against Children Conference in Dallas (the nation’s largest conference on child safety), and for classes he instructs for the Institute of Criminal Investigation and POST (California’s Commission for Police Officer Standards and Training). For the past three decades, he has been asked to give this presentation, on average, once a month.

The Polly Klaas case is still that relevant. At this point in the proposal, did you think (or hope) that you’d convinced the reader of this?Yes, but a proposal is a sales document, so it’s a good place to avoid erring on the side of subtlety!

“It’s time,” Freyer says. “This story needs to be told before the people who can tell it are all gone.”

EXCLUSIVE ACCESS

Polly Klaas: The Murder of America’s Child (Pinnacle Books, 1995) and Who Killed Polly? (Monterey Press, 1995) are the only two books published about the Polly Klaas case. Both rely heavily on widely known facts reported in the press and a handful of superficial interviews with FBI and police spokespersons, most of them supervisors who disclosed more platitudes than substance. Eddie Freyer’s name is absent from both books. Mary Ellen O’Toole, Jeanne Boylan, and other inside players are mentioned superficially, but the details and insights of their work have never been documented in a comprehensive book. No book, no TV show, no podcast has ever captured the inner workings of the entire investigation.

This book will.

I have confirmed access to virtually all of the investigative insiders—within the FBI as well as Petaluma Police Department—who lived and breathed this case. Eddie Freyer has turned down all previous requests to participate in a book. Now, he is ready to tell the full story—but only to me, as a journalist and historian. Your exclusive access and groundwork already done feels like a key selling point. Why did you choose to put the access section lower down, after others?I heard someone (Tom French or Kelley Benham French, I believe) call a story “a promise that the end is worth waiting for.” In the summary, I made a promise of “unprecedented access.” I hoped that promise would keep the editor reading. Freyer does not expect to have narrative control, and he knows this will not be a puff piece that glosses over the many errors and problems in the investigation.

Freyer has helped me forge relationships with other insiders who have been inaccessible to the media. ERT member Tony Maxwell, has declined all journalist requests for interviews about the Polly Klaas case. Maxwell has agreed to be a character in this book, and he is actively opening doors to other FBI insiders. Jay Silverberg, a former journalist who was the liaison between the volunteers and the media, is also connecting me with key leaders in the volunteer effort.

In addition to exclusive interviews with insiders, I have obtained access to case files, crime scene photographs, internal FBI documents, and never-before-heard recordings of 1993 interviews conducted by profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole. Maxwell has given me crime scene photos, evidence recovery logs, and other primary documents. District Attorney Greg Jacobs, the winning prosecutor in the three-year trial, has entrusted me with his personal records: 12,000 pages of court transcripts from the murder trial.

In my preliminary research to confirm access and establish the main beats of the case, I conducted more than 50 interviews with more than a dozen characters, including FBI SWAT team leaders who conducted major raids, Petaluma police sergeants and detectives who canvassed the neighborhood and interviewed witnesses, and volunteers who were active in the community search effort and the Polly Klaas Foundation. More than 50 is a lot! In your estimate, how much time had you spent on the reporting by this point?I keep track of my interviews, documents and sources on a huge spreadsheet, so I don’t have to estimate. Before submitting the proposal the first time in 2016, I’d conducted 28 interviews for a total of 24 hours. When I decided to double down and revise the proposal in 2021, my tally ran up to 69 interviews and a total of 57 hours.

In addition to Eddie Freyer, the central character, the following individuals have agreed to participate in the book: This is another key element the editor is looking for: Characters. And access to these characters.

  • Tony Maxwell, Senior Team Leader, FBI Evidence Recovery Team

  • Mary Ellen O’Toole, FBI criminal profiler and behavioral analyst

  • Vail Bello, Petaluma PD detective; Freyer’s first partner on the case

  • Tom LaFreniere, FBI SWAT team leader who conducted several raids in the case

  • Danny Fish, first Petaluma Police officer to arrive on scene; former president of the Polly Klaas Foundation

  • Frank Doyle, FBI agent, bomb tech, founder of the Evidence Recovery Team, explosives expert consulted on the show Myth Busters

  • Mike Stapleton, FBI agent and ERT member who collected trace evidence and now leads training classes in fingerprinting with fluorescent powder

  • Mary Nolte, forensic specialist who loaned the first alternate light source (forensic light) to the FBI in 1993

  • Larry Taylor, FBI agent, profiler, and kidnapping specialist, who conducted the Richard Allen Davis confession interview with Petaluma PD detective Mike Meese (deceased)

  • Ron Homer, FBI polygrapher (called “one of the best in the Bureau”)

  • Jay Silverberg, liaison between the volunteers and the media, and later a board member of the Polly Klaas Foundation

  • Joanna Gardner, former producer of the Grammy Awards; a Petaluma resident and mother who led the volunteer response and later produced Polly’s memorial

  • Gaynell Rogers, wife of blues musician Roy Rogers, who was another Petaluma mother of a daughter Polly’s age and worked closely with Joanna Gardner, her friend, to spearhead the volunteer efforts (Joanna and Gaynell will be characters who represent the face of the volunteers)

  • Raine Howe, director of the Polly Klaas Foundation and liaison with many of the volunteers and sources (including Polly’s family)

  • Cindy Rudometkin, director of the Programs and Response department at the Polly Klaas Foundation

  • Jenni Thompson, Director of Public Affairs at the Polly Klaas Foundation

  • Gary Judd, Petaluma resident, one of the first volunteers, and former president of the Polly Klaas Foundation

  • Carolina Spence, former Development Director for the Polly Klaas Foundation

  • Carol Evans Treu, Petaluma High School teacher in 1993

The following individuals may be available for interviews:

  • Larry Pelton, Petaluma Police detective; gathered evidence at Pythian Road

  • Gene Wallace, Petaluma Police officer; responded to leads

  • Mike McManis, Sonoma County Sheriff’s deputy; gathered evidence at Pythian Road

  • Chris Allen, hair and fibers specialist at FBI lab in Quantico; matched fibers from bedroom and body recovery site

  • Ron Hilley, FBI polygrapher

  • Dave Alford, FBI Evidence Recovery Team

  • Gary Joseph, FBI Rapid Start team

  • Steve Donohue, FBI Rapid Start team

  • Joe Davidson, SWAT team member

  • Louis Free, then-director of the FBI, who asked for daily briefings on Polly

  • Brian Bianco, jury foreman of the Richard Allen Davis murder trial

  • Park Dietz, forensic psychiatrist who classified Davis as a sexual sadist and testified in the murder trial of kidnapper Richard Allen Davis

  • Richard Allen Davis, currently on Death Row in San Quentin. Eddie Freyer is on a short list of people authorized to attend his execution. Freyer and Cross will reach out to him to request an interview. If he consents, they will go together to San Quentin to talk to him in person. It would be the first time the agent and criminal have ever spoken face to face.

PHOTO PERMISSIONS

Should a publisher desire that photos be included, I will obtain permissions. I’ve identified a photographer who documented pivotal moments of the volunteer search and the investigation, and the Polly Klaas Foundation, which supports the book, will assist in gathering publishable photos. A large file of FBI forensic and crime-scene photos is being sent to me. Many of these photos may be releasable and publishable, at Eddie Freyer’s discretion. One thing I never anticipated at this point is how instrumental these photos would be in the publicity phase. When my publicist, Roxanne Jones, pitched a producer at 20/20 a two-hour documentary on the case, these photos would be an important part of the production. The other thing I didn’t anticipate, however, was that 20/20 would also ask for documents, which were trickier. I had to run every request through Eddie and D.A. Greg Jacobs. Ultimately they decided not to share any federal documents with 20/20, and said that any police reports had to be released by the originating agency. Petaluma PD denied 20/20 requests. I had what they needed, but they were not “mine” to give away — I was only the temporary custodian. Telling 20/20 “no” was stressful but I had to protect my sources.

AUDIENCE

This book will be written for readers of meticulously reported narrative nonfiction—the same readers who loved titles such as Columbine, Under the Banner of Heaven, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Stranger Beside Me. It will appeal particularly to those with an interest in forensics, behavioral science and profiling, and FBI investigations, but it will be accessible to readers who may not be true crime obsessives, but who enjoy a well-crafted story with the elements of good fiction. I’m very impressed by this whole audience section. It really effectively hammers home the commercialization potential of your book.The sum and substance of a proposal adds up to this: Will this book sell? Who will buy it? How big is the potential audience? These are not the reasons I write books. But these are the reasons publishers buy them.

The story’s mass market potential is suggested by the number of podcast episodes about Polly Klass (more than 30 at last count) as well as the TV treatment of the story, then and now. Polly Klaas was featured in the premier episode of the Discovery Channel’s FBI Files (Season one, Episode one, 1998). Investigation Discovery revisited the case again for a 2014 episode of Motives and Murders: Cracking the Case (Season four, Episode four). The national audience includes viewers who liked The Forensic Files, Blood, Lies, and Alibis, 48 Hours, The Cold Case Files, Kidnapped, and America’s Most Wanted. As previously mentioned, Netflix is filming a new series called “Crimes That Changed America,” (expected to air in 2022 or 2023) and Polly Klass will be one of the featured cases.

Because the Polly Klaas investigation has been a case study taught internationally for nearly three decades, the book should have a strong niche market among people who work in law enforcement and other fields that protect children. It is very possible that this book could become a text used in training classes (Freyer remembers being assigned Helter Skelter as required reading at the  FBI Academy in Quantico). The Crimes Against Children Conference is an annual 5-day conference held by the Dallas Children’s Advocacy Center, which provides training to government and nonprofit employees fighting crimes against children and helping them heal. Attended by law enforcement officials, social workers, child protective services agents, therapists, and medical workers, the conference drew 6,900 attendees in 2020.

Clearly, it will also appeal to true crime fans, an audience that has grown exponentially in the past few years, as shown by the proliferation of podcasts, TV shows, and other narrative treatments, such as Unbelievable, American Murder: The Family Next Door, and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. True crime fans are voracious consumers of the genre, and Polly Klaas is one of the cases that most fascinates them.

COMPARABLE TITLES

How did you decide which titles to include here?I have to credit my agent, Leslie Meredith, for this. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara.

Based on deep and detailed research, this well-paced narrative takes readers inside an investigation, and inside the minds of investigators trying to solve it.

HarperCollins             Hardcover       Feb 2018         352 pp             $27.99

HarperCollins              Paperback        Feb 2019         368 pp             $17.99

 

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

This story about the 1920s organized killings of the oil-rich Osage Indians reveals that this case was a catalyst for the growth of the FBI.

Doubleday                   Hardcover       April 2017        352 pp             $32.50

Vintage                        Paperback        Jan 2018          400 pp             $17.00

 

Columbine by Dave Cullen

Written with cinematic scenes and novelistic drama, this book alternately recounts the pivotal moments of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre and shows the impact of the tragedy on survivors and America.

Twelve                         Hardcover       April 2009        432 pp             $37.00

Riverrun                      Paperback        Feb 2019         496 pp             $22.15

 

Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas

Now a Netflix original series, this book takes readers behind the scenes of some of the most fascinating and challenging FBI cases, delving into the criminal profiling techniques used to catch the country’s most notorious criminals and serial killers.

Scribner                       Hardcover       Jan 1995          384 pp             $24.00

Gallery Books              Paperback        Oct 2017         448 pp             $18.00

MULTI-MEDIA STORYTELLING & MARKETING

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Michelle McNamara’s search for the Golden State Killer, proves that the true crime audience is hungry to engage with the same story across multiple media, including a book, a podcast, and a documentary. These products do not tell the same story in different media but were designed to be complementary and interconnected, and complete enough that each could also stand alone. Many true crime fans consumed all three. The Polly Klaas story has such a following among true crime obsessives that it begs a similar treatment.

I have created a successful model for multi-media storytelling with my forthcoming book, The Stahl House: Case Study House #22: The Making of a Modernist Icon (Chronicle/Chroma, November 2021). The book publication will be followed by a documentary in 2022, co-produced as complementary products. The book blends reportage, historical research, and storytelling in a deeply reported narrative with a visually stunning layout: full-color photographs and historical documents from private archives. The book tells a broader story, weaving in the historical context of the Case Study House Program. The hour-long documentary focuses on the little-known family story of Case Study House #22, supported by never-before-seen family footage of the family who called the Stahl House “home.”

I am marketing the book and building an audience for the documentary through strategic live and online events that feature a multi-media slide show, a live talk, and a screening of the 2-minute film trailer. It’s super helpful that you have a robust track record you can point to, and that you can replicate the marketing efforts and approaches that have worked well for you with previous books. How would you instruct writers working on their debut book?Think creatively about ways to engage your audience in a way that adds value beyond a book-launch party. For “In Light of All Darkness,” I envisioned a series of ticketed events to raise money for non-profit organizations that support victims and to encourage social discourse in some meaningful way. In Boise, my hometown, I planned a moderated talk called “Making Sense of the Senseless: Exploring the Ethical Quandaries of True Crime.” It was a conversation with J. Reuben Appelman, author of “While Idaho Slept,” the first book about the 2022 University of Idaho murders. We talked about all the ethical dilemmas we faced in the reporting and writing of our books, from the risk of re-traumatizing sources to the fact-checking of memories distorted by trauma. By design, we made no money from the event, but sold tickets to raise around $1,000 for Faces of Hope, a local nonprofit that helps victims of violent crimes. In Petaluma, where Polly was kidnapped, I curated a 2.5-hour symposium about the legacy of the case. I wanted the audience to hear directly from 20 primary sources—FBI agents, forensic technicians, detectives, witnesses and leaders of the volunteer search center—what happened 30 years ago and how it changed their lives. I had a budget of zero from my publisher, so putting on the event was like making Stone Soup. The panelists flew in (on their own dime) from New Mexico, Virginia, Montana and Oregon. The Polly Klaas Foundation rented the venue. Copperfield’s Books (a local book shop housed in the very downtown storefront that served as the Polly Klaas Volunteer Search Center in 1993) planned and promoted the event. Michela O’Connor Abrams, my former boss, donated a case of wine for the VIP reception. We raised around $12,000 for the Polly Klaas Foundation, including a generous donation from the family of a late FBI agent who participated in the case and the book. At the end of the event, everyone got to meet a woman who was kidnapped as a 12-year-old girl, by a stranger, six months after Polly Klaas was found. She spoke alongside the police chief who saved her life by applying the lessons he had learned directly from Polly Klaas investigators. Afterward, people who had been traumatized by the kidnapping in 1993 said that learning about the legacy had facilitated some healing.  The first live event was hosted by the Palm Springs Art Museum in May 2021. A two-hour program will be held in Boise in mid-September. All ticket buyers will receive a copy of the book when it comes out in November.

I’ve leveraged my personal journalistic network to seek publicity. An 8-page story on the book appeared online and in the July/August 2021 issue of Vanity Fair (https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/07/inside-la-ultimate-mid-century-modern-home). An excerpt will be published in the January 2022 issue of Veranda. I’ve invited key media to VIP events at the Stahl House in Hollywood and at other venues in other cities with the same book-selling model. I will be promoting the book as a speaker at live events at the Palm Springs Art Museum in October 2021 and February 2022, which will build a market for the documentary, which will premier in 2022. At documentary screenings, the book will be promoted.

PLATFORM AND PUBLICITY

Eddie Freyer and I are willing to make appearances, independently or together, to promote the book. Whenever a child abduction or human trafficking case hits the national news, Eddie Freyer is interviewed by the media as an expert. One of the world’s leading experts on kidnapping, he has made live TV appearances on Fox News, the Bill O’Reilly Show, and many regional and local stations. Well-known in law enforcement circles nationwide, Freyer teaches classes for the Institute of Criminal Investigation as well as training courses for the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST), the institution responsible for training California’s 80,000 police officers.

I have a solid network within the media, with friends and contacts at newspapers, magazines, and radio stations across the country. I’ve been a speaker at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, the American Society of Journalists and Authors conference, and at book festivals and literary events. I’ve been interviewed by NPR member stations in Dallas, Atlanta, Birmingham, and Tuscaloosa. My work has been featured by Nieman Storyboard, Longreads, Longform, Apple News, Apple News Audio, Yahoo News, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, and Gangrey: the Podcast. Through my author website—kimhcross.com—and newsletter mailing list, I regularly engage with readers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (@kimhcross). I personally answer reader emails and social media messages and regularly speak to book clubs in person or by Skype.

Tony Maxwell, Frank Doyle, and other members of the central “cast” may also be available to participate and speak, depending on their schedule. Public relations professional Jay Silverberg, founder of Petaluma-based Silverberg Communications, LLC, has offered to help with promotion pro bono.

Polly Klaas Foundation has helped more than 10,000 families and hundreds of law enforcement teams across the country. The foundation will benefit from the book, which tells the story that inspired its mission and inception. Several characters in the book, including Eddie, Danny Fish, and Jay Silverberg, are either on the foundation’s board of directors or still actively involved with the Foundation. The Foundation supports the book.

One of my editors has agreed to introduce me to the founder of CrimeCon, a true crime conference that draws an audience of 4,000 true crime fans in a typical year and also conducts themed cruises for lovers of the genre. Eddie and I would be willing to speak and give a multimedia presentation at this and other such gatherings, including Crimes Against Children, the annual conference in Dallas that drew nearly 7,000 attendees in 2020.

THE AUTHOR

[caption id="attachment_177654" align="alignleft" width="183"]Photo of nonfiction writer Kim Cross, author of "In Light of All Darkness" Kim Cross[/caption]Kim Cross is a New York Times best-selling author and journalist known for meticulously reported narrative nonfiction. Her work has been recognized in “Best of” lists by The New York Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, The Sunday Longread, Longform, and Apple News Audio. Three of her stories have been anthologized in Best American Sports Writing and The Year’s Best Sports Writing and have received three gold Lowell Thomas Awards. Her 2020 narrative, “Noel + Leon: What Happens When Two Strangers Trust the Rides of Their Lives to the Magic of the Universe,” was analyzed on Harvard’s Nieman Storyboard and noted in The New York Times Sidney Awards. The story is a finalist for the Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sports Writing.

Kim’s first book, What Stands in a Storm (Atria, 2015), a New York Times bestseller, chronicles the biggest tornado outbreak in history, the April 2011 storm that unleashed 349 tornadoes on 21 states, killing at least 324 people. The book won the Fitzgerald Museum Literary Prize for Excellence in Writing and the American Society of Journalists and Authors nonfiction book award. A Barnes & Noble Discover pick, it was named one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2015 and was a finalist in the GoodReads Choice Awards. A starred review in Publisher’s Weekly noted its “detail-oriented reporting anchors a novelist’s flair for drama.” It has been selected for by two community-wide reading programs and is taught in high schools and colleges in at least four states.

Kim’s forthcoming book, The Stahl House: Case Study House #22—The Making of a Modernist Icon (Chroma Chronicle, November 2021) tells the inside family story of the most famous home in the Case Study House Program, with never-before-published photographs and historical documents. The book is featured in the July/August issue of Vanity Fair and will be excerpted in the January issue of Veranda.

A lifelong athlete, Kim has competed in at least ten sports, three nationally and one internationally. She lives in Idaho.

Read news and stories at kimhcross.com and sign up for her monthly author newsletter.

* * *

Carly Stern is a freelance reporter based in San Francisco who covers housing, disability policy, urban life and economic inequality.

The post Peek inside a successful book proposal appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Promo for "In Light of All Darkness" on the website of author Kim Cross

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of two posts featuring Kim Cross on the successful pitch-and-proposal process that led to her new book, ‘In Light of All Darkness.’ In this post, Cross annotates the proposal that landed her a contract after previous pitches fell short. In a companion piece, Cross answers questions about agents, timing and money.

Annotation: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Cross’s comments in blue.

In Light of All Darkness

Inside the FBI Polly Klaas Investigation

By Kim Cross
New York Times Best-Selling Author of What Stands in a Storm
Represented by Leslie Meredith Dystel, Goderich & Bourret

OVERVIEW

On the night of October 1, 1993, a stranger with a kitchen knife abducted a twelve-year-old girl from her bedroom during a sleepover with two friends. It was the rarest of all kidnappings: a stranger abduction from the home.

The kidnapping of Polly Klaas is one of the most famous true-crime stories of our generation, a landmark case as significant in the history of the FBI as the Unabomber, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the World Trade Center attacks. The two-month search for “America’s Child” was every agent’s nightmare. Why did you decide to use bold text on and off throughout?That was my agent’s edit. I think it just makes the key points jump out for an editor who may be scanning. The desperate chase was riddled with red herrings, dead ends, and false summits, from bogus ransom calls to the SWAT team raid where FBI agents kicked in the doors of an empty house.

Not since the Lindbergh baby in 1932 had an abduction so engrossed America, compelling thousands of volunteers to help—then and now. The Klaas case also changed the FBI: Investigative methods tested and proven in this case would forever transform the bureau’s approach to crime scene investigation, forensics, behavioral science, rapid response, and kidnapping protocols. Many of those methods are still taught today, around the world, by the same pioneering agents who solved the case. And those agents have never shared their story in a comprehensive book.There are so many key threads to this story. Why was it important to introduce this particular point so early in your overview?It answers some key questions that an editor will be asking: “So what?” “Why now?” and “What’s new?”

Now, for the first time in three decades, key people at the heart of the case are willing to talk about it. They have refused all previous requests to participate in a book. Author Kim Cross has unprecedented access to inside sources and their files, including never-before-public crime scene photos, documents, and a videotaped murder confession.  Why did you choose to describe yourself in the third person (and then shift to first person in the next section, ‘The Case’)?The first page is a summary, much like book-jacket copy. When the proposal begins, I want to bring the reader into the story-world with a scene and a bit more voice.

Cross is the daughter-in-law of Eddie Freyer, the FBI agent who solved the case, and who has taught thousands of agents his crime-solving strategy over the years. (While Freyer has opened doors to key sources, he is not cowriting or editing the MS.) I thought it was important to state this outright. I was raised in an era when journalists were trained to avoid writing about family members or friends, so I was concerned that some readers might assume the familial relationship would compromise my credibility and ability to be objective.

In Light of All Darkness can be published in time for the 30th anniversary of the crime in 2023. It will be the book of record on the Polly Klaas case and its legacy: the insights, methods, and changes that have saved the lives of thousands of children. How did you come up with the framing “book of record?”There were two books written about this case around 1994, before the trial, and both are riddled with gaps and errors. I had unprecedented access to primary sources that would enable the most comprehensive account. What were the merits of stating that ouright up top, vs. letting the reader come to that conclusion throughout as your “proved” that to them?Editors must read a vast number of proposals and I always imagine them skimming and deciding within the first three pages whether it’s worth it to keep reading. Out of respect for their time, it’s important to get to the point quickly and clearly. It’s kind of like a nut graf.

THE CASE

One Sunday in July 2021, I ushered two retired FBI agents into my living room in Boise, Idaho. We’d never met, but I had been studying their professional legacy for more than six years. One of them had lifted an invisible palm print of the kidnapper from Polly Klaas’s bedroom—the pivotal break in the case—and his discovery of this hard evidence had opened the door to the perpetrator’s confession. The other agent had conducted the interview that elicited the confession. These two men were directly responsible for the conviction of a murderer in one of the most famous cases in true-crime history. But their names were missing from everything I’d read or heard about the murder. Why did you choose to open the summary of the case, in the proposal, with this scene?I almost always start with a scene that draws the reader into the story-world. This one (which I also included in the Author’s Note of the book) shows the intimate nature of the access I was given, and it offers transparency into my reporting process. Especially in true crime stories, I feel these two things are important.

We settled into my living room to watch a copy of the videotaped confession, which had been extremely difficult to come by. Not even the lead FBI agent on the case was able to obtain a copy. I appreciate you stating that it was difficult – I think so much of reporting is shrouded and kept from the reader, so it’s not always clear what kind of hoop-jumping journalists have to do to get information.Thanks! I told the whole story in the End Notes, which include a brief narrative that explains how each chapter was reported and written, plus a list of sources. I wanted the End Notes to be worth reading in and of themselves, like a story-behind-the-story.

Larry Taylor, the agent who appeared in the tape, was now 80 years old, a barrel-shaped Texan with a dry sense of humor and a Dallas drawl. He had not seen this tape in almost three decades. Tony Maxwell, the agent who lifted the print, was a spry, exuberantly kind, religious man of Spanish, Irish, and Native American descent. Even though he had been intimately involved in every step of this case, from fingerprinting Polly’s bedroom to participating in the autopsy, had never laid eyes on this tape.

I had been searching for Larry for years, but it was Tony who finally found him living a few miles from my house in Boise. Larry agreed to talk to me, but only if Tony were present. So, Tony bought himself a ticket from New Mexico to Boise. “Why are you so invested in this book?” I asked him. He thought for a minute and said, “I think it’s my last chance to tell the story. I’m over 70. My doctor says, ‘If you got COVID now, you wouldn’t last a week.’”

When I’d first interviewed Tony on Skype in 2015, he wept as he recalled the impact Polly Klaas had made on his profession, his career, and his heart. I like how you convey why this story matters to him — which can also serve as a conduit to persuade the reader why this story matters writ large.I interviewed about 50 FBI agents and detectives who worked on this case, and I’d say about half of them wept, sometimes surprising themselves with the magnitude of their emotions. I was touched by that and felt it was important for the reader to know how personal this story was for them. He remembered minute details and wanted to ensure that this story is told as comprehensively and accurately as possible. He spent hours actively locating other key sources in the case and vouching for me. “Tony, you’ve never talked to the press before,” I said one day. “Why are you talking to me?” He smiled. “Because you’re family.” Then he confessed that FBI habits die hard—he’d thoroughly vetted me and my work.

I’d watched the confession tape Every time I read this now, I hear Greg Jacobs in my head: It was technically an admission, not a confession. But no one ever calls it “the admission tape.” only once before, a couple years earlier, with my father-in-law, Eddie Freyer. Even though this was Eddie’s case, he hadn’t been able to get his hands on a copy of the tape. I myself had spent several years searching for a copy. I couldn’t find it anywhere online or in the possession of the FBI agents or cops who worked the case. Finally, through dogged reporting and sources outside the FBI, I obtained one.

This tape is not only rare, but unusual: longstanding FBI policy prohibited agents from recording or videotaping interviews. The culture of Hoover’s FBI held that an agent’s word should be enough to stand up in court. For decades, it was. This videotape only exists because the interview was conducted by an FBI agent and a Petaluma Police detective. Standard practice for local police was to record interviews, either by audio or video, preferably both. Yet Eddie had asked the Sonoma County District Attorney for a copy to use as a teaching tool in the 40-hour Interviewing and Interrogation course he teaches for the Behavioral Analysis Training Institute (BATI). The D.A. had declined. Even though the case is closed, and the murderer is on Death Row in San Quentin, the D.A. refused to release it for fear of future litigation.

When Eddie and I sat down to watch it, he had not seen the recording in more than two decades. Is it common to use footnotes in a proposal?I have no idea! I did use them, judiciously, in the book, so looking back I do think it shows the editor how I think and address little diversions that are ancillary to the main narrative, yet too interesting to leave out. With his commentary, it was like watching a Director’s Cut. He paused the tape to identify interviewing tactics and point out body language and behavioral cues used to detect lying. He explained the extraordinary sequence of events that led to this legally admissible confession—even after the suspect had invoked his Miranda rights. That’s just one of the parts of this story that has never been reported. How do you balance the insertion of bold text with a belief in trusting the reader to determine what’s most important to them?Ask my literary agent, Leslie Meredith! I think it’s a way to help a time-starved editor who is probably skimming. I obviously wouldn’t use such a treatment in a book, where the engaged reader has more time and is expecting nuanced storytelling.

When I watched the confession again with Tony and Larry, they added another layer of insight that has never been reported. Larry was a kidnapping specialist assigned to high-profile cases including Amber Swartz Garcia, and Ileane Mischeloff. He was the agent who, in 1992, opened a closet door to find Charles Geschke—the Adobe CEO who had been kidnapped at gunpoint and held for ransom—gagged and chained to the floor, alive.

As Larry watched the tape, it shook loose some long-forgotten memories of the moments before recording commenced. Suspect Richard Allen Davis, a repeat offender who had been in and out of prison for most of his adult life, had recognized the deputy who arrived to take his fingerprints. “The deputy had been a guard at Folsom Prison,” Taylor recalled. “And it was sort of like a class reunion. Davis lit up. He said, ‘Hey! Did you know so-and-so?’ It was like old lodge brothers coming together. He felt that comfortable within the prison system.”

Larry recalled driving the kidnapper to the body recovery site with Petaluma Detective Mike Meese, his partner in conducting the confession interview. Mike Meese is deceased, but he was a notorious hoarder of case files (including the confession tape). I’m working to track down his family and obtain a copy of the recording from the drive. I like how you show you’re doing your homework here, and have other means of obtaining more info in the works.Mike’s widow entrusted me with several of his hard drives and a very useful PowerPoint presentation with a few crime scene photos, facts and bits of info I didn’t find anywhere else.

Tony, in turn, recalled the behind-the-scenes drama never shared with the press. On the night that Polly was found, his supervisors ordered him to transport her body to the morgue before dawn, to keep it out of sight of the media. At the risk of losing his job, Tony refused. Too much trace evidence would be lost in the dark. Rushing felt not only risky but disrespectful, and he wanted to do it right, with care and dignity. On that cold night, he sat in the dark beside Polly’s body, praying and talking to her softly. “We found you, Polly,” he said. “We’re going to bring you home.”

In the six years I’ve spent researching this story, I’ve been struck, again and again, by the deeply personal nature of this case. “It’s one of the most significant things I’ve ever done in my life,” said Jay Silverberg, who lived in Petaluma and helped organize the volunteer center. “Aside from my kids, there’s nothing else I could do with that much impact, that kind of legacy.”

The emotional gravity touched every agent, every cop, every forensic technician who worked this case, no matter how seasoned. The pain still echoes today. Tony Maxwell still thinks about Polly Klaas “every single day.” District Attorney Greg Jacobs, who prosecuted her murderer, Richard Allen Davis, said this case is the reason “I’m still in therapy.”

Eddie Freyer and I have driven to Polly’s house, which looks today much as it did in 1993. The owner of the house invited us in to look around, and said her house is not haunted.

But Eddie is.

Eddie and I have also walked through the brambles of a vacant field outside Cloverdale, where the roar of semis on Highway 101 drowned out the birdsong. We stood by an oak tree and looked at the stones that strangers had placed there, the painted-on messages faded by sun and time. Eddie comes here from time to time, alone, to think. This is the spot where he stood, one December night, and lifted a piece of plywood. Underneath it lay a small body in a flannel nightgown, an answer to the 2-month-long search. The lights of media trucks lined the service road by the highway. The command post was on alert, the Evidence Response Team poised to act. Polly’s family was waiting.

On the night that Polly vanished, Eddie had sat down in the living room next to her mother and made a promise that echoes in his ears today. “Eve,” he said gently, “I promise you we’ll do everything humanly possible to find your daughter.” Everything he did in the following days was in the service of his word. Still, he wonders. Was there anything they could have done differently to find her alive? He goes through the events, yet again, in his mind, reviewing every juncture. He reevaluates the early clues. The decisions made with incomplete information. The flaws in the system. The errors they made. How tragically close they came to saving her. The lessons that changed everything.

He is ready, at last, to tell the whole story. You build this up in a quite propulsive way. What influenced your thought process here in terms of ending the intro on him?At this point in the reporting, I expected Eddie to be the central character. As I dove deeper into the documents, I realized—with considerable chagrin—that he wasn’t going to get as much airtime as I originally anticipated. As a supervisor, he didn’t leave as much of a paper trail as the agents and detectives doing the hands-on work. His role as Case Agent made him a sort of Wizard of Oz, orchestrating the massive investigation outside of the public eye. (He’s not mentioned in any press coverage from 1993.) Eddie’s job was to manage the agents and cops who were conducting interviews and writing reports. They were the ones who left the paper trail of records that contained the facts, details, and (most importantly) dialogue that allowed me to write in-scene. I had to rely on his memory of events from three decades earlier in order to write him into a scene.

THE STORY

On a Friday night in October 1993, three seventh-grade girls at Petaluma Junior High were planning a sleepover. The hostess, twelve-year-old Polly Klaas, a brown-eyed girl who still possessed the dimples and figure of a child, rushed home to clean the small house she shared with her mother and six-year-old sister. Her friends, Gillian Pelham and Kate McLean, arrived with sleeping bags and games, planning to stay up late. In a small room with a wooden bunk bed, they giggled as they put makeup on each other and played board games. Polly’s mother, Eve Nichol, told the girls to quiet down. Before going to bed, she checked the front door to make sure it was locked.

Eve closed both doors to the Jack-and-Jill bathroom that separated the two bedrooms, and crawled into bed next to Polly’s little sister, Annie. She could still hear muffled laughter through the walls. Eve took a sleeping pill, read for a while, and sank into a deep sleep.

Around 10:30 p.m. Polly stood up to get the sleeping bags from the living room. She opened her bedroom door to face a stranger in the hallway. Dressed all in black, he seemed over six feet tall. Black eyes. Black hair. Salt-and-pepper beard. In his right hand was a black bag. In his left, a kitchen knife.

“Don’t scream,” he said, “or I’ll slit your throats.” The dialogue in this scene (and subsequent book chapter) came from interviews detectives conducted with Kate and Gillian the night of the abduction and from trial transcripts of their testimony on the witness stand three years after the event. I read the chapters to Kate and Gillian to fact-check and make sure they were comfortable with how they were portrayed. If my memory serves, they made two factual corrections.

He made the three girls lie face down on the floor and he bound their hands behind their backs, first with torn strips of silky white cloth, and then with black cords he cut from a Nintendo game in the room and a strap he sliced from Polly’s purse. He pulled pillowcases over their heads.

“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you,” he said. “I’m just doing this for the money.”

Polly offered him thirty dollars stashed in a jewelry box, but he made no move to find it. Instead, he took Polly. He told Kate and Gillian to count to one thousand. By the time they were done, he promised them, Polly would be back.

When the screen door slammed, the girls stopped counting and struggled to untie themselves, biting the ligatures to work the knots loose. They ran to the next room and woke Polly’s mom. As Eve surfaced from sleep, a fog of disorientation gave way to panic. She grabbed the phone and dialed 911.

Six minutes later, a Petaluma Police deputy knocked on her door. Shortly after midnight, two FBI agents arrived. It was too late. Polly was gone.

***

The two-month search that followed remains one of the biggest manhunts in the history of California—and the FBI. It involved more than one hundred agents and dozens of local cops and detectives, who followed a non-stop stream of leads—tips that may or may not warrant investigative action. Their actions ranged from hour-long interviews to a full-blown investigation with surveillance teams, SWAT operations, and a grid search over many square miles. A “big” FBI case might involve 5,000 tips. The Klaas case had 60,000 tips and 12,000 actionable leads.

The public, outraged, came out in full force to help. Four thousand civilian volunteers beat the bushes along every creek and country road in Sonoma County. One of them was actress Winona Ryder, who grew up in Petaluma, had attended Polly’s junior high, and signed a check for a $200,000 reward.

“The nature of this case was so shocking, so bold on the part of the offender, it struck at the heart of every family in this country,” says FBI Senior Resident Agent Eddie Freyer. The first FBI agent to arrive on the scene, Freyer became the lead agent in charge of the Polly Klaas case.

Volunteers manning a twenty-four-hour telephone bank took calls and passed tips and leads to police. Eight million Missing Person fliers were distributed nationwide and abroad. The Polly Klaas Foundation, a 501(c)(3), was rushed through the IRS paperwork in just a few days to manage donations that topped $250,000 almost overnight. When, two months into the case, the overtime expense threatened to bankrupt the Petaluma Police Department, the Foundation offered the city $50,000 to keep the search going strong. These small details are super effective.I try to use specificity and telling details as a way to avoid cliches and platitudes.
Everyday citizens played a critical role in this case. They were instrumental in keeping the search—and just as importantly, the story—alive. The volunteers held the media’s interest, and the media, in turn, kept leads streaming in from the public. One of those leads helped to solve the case.

On the 59th day, a Sonoma County resident called in a tip that altered the course of the investigation. She had stumbled upon suspicious items on her property, key evidence that led quickly and directly to the identification of the kidnapper. This citizen might not have recognized the connection and called the cops had she not seen the media coverage. Were you worried about giving key details of the story away?Not so much here as in the book itself. I wrangled with the decision of when to let the reader know about a key event that transpired on the night of Polly’s abduction. Two sheriff’s deputies responded to a trespassing call from a woman named Dana Jaffe, who encountered a man whose car was stuck in a ditch on her property. The deputies freed the man’s car and sent him on his way. The trespasser turned out to be Polly’s kidnapper. But investigators didn’t know this until two months later, when Dana Jaffe found suspicious items on her property. She called the sheriff’s again and they linked the items to the trespasser. I had a tough choice to make: When do I tell the reader this? When the investigators find out? Or when it happens? I chose the latter, a form of dramatic irony used in Shakespearean plays and Greek tragedies, because it amped up the tension.

The first kidnapping to be publicized internationally, this unfolding drama dominated the news for months and etched itself in popular memory. It’s hard to find anyone alive in 1993 who doesn’t recognize Polly’s smiling face, so often was it flashed on TV and printed under the headlines.

That face reminded everyone of someone they cared about: a daughter, a sister, a student, a friend. Polly Klaas was the all-American girl next door, and her abduction signaled the end of a collective innocence. A woman in Bulgaria recalled that her mother took her bike away because of this case 6,500 miles away.

The bad guy—Richard Allen Davis—was the quintessential boogeyman. “He was a Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy type of offender,” Freyer said. “The worst of the worst.” Davis was a career criminal who had spent nearly his entire adult life in and out of prison. As a child, he set cats on fire and cut stray dogs with a knife. At 12, he was arrested for burglary, a crime he’d repeat more than 20 times. His crimes escalated. In his twenties, he attempted—and failed repeatedly—to kidnap or rape at least three different women. One ran away and flagged down a car that happened to contain a highway patrolman. Another pulled a gun and shot at Davis’s back as he fled. At the time of Polly’s kidnapping, Davis was on parole for his second 8-year prison sentence, convicted of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman. Experts characterized him as a frustrated sexual sadist who turned to younger and more vulnerable prey.

***

Everyone cared. Joan Baez sang “Amazing Grace” at the memorial. The church could only hold 1,500 people, so hundreds stood in the rain to watch the service, which was directed by a producer of the Grammys. Winona Ryder dedicated her film, “Little Women,” to Polly Klaas. Robin Williams made a surprise appearance at a benefit to help raise money for her search. Mark McGuire wore a special wristband honoring missing kids and wrote a $75,000 check to the Polly Klaas Foundation.

People still care.

“At the twenty-year remembrance, I made the comment, ‘Why us? Why did this happen to us?’” says Jay Silverberg, a former journalist who became the media liaison for the Polly Klaas Foundation as the search began, served as a founding board member, and remains an advisor to the board today. “But look at what we did with it. My grandkids may be safer because of this.” It was a case that changed America.

It was also a case that changed the FBI.

WHAT’S NEW? Why did you decide to make this a header? It’s the number one question editors will be asking about a 30-year-old story. What new information will this book reveal? The tricky part about answering this question in a proposal is that you haven’t done the years of research that will uncover all the answers. But that’s why I do a ton of pre-reporting before every story pitch or book proposal. (As a result, I have a pretty good batting average.) The “What’s new?” also comes into play during the marketing and publicity phase of publishing. When my publicist pitched a 20/20 producer the two-hour documentary, I started with the list from the proposal and added insights I discovered later in the reporting of the book.

Featuring a cast of investigators working ceaselessly—FBI agents, detectives, and forensic technicians sharing never-before-published details—this book will be the first narrative to take readers through every beat of the case through the Go-Pro point of view of the people who lived it. I love the term “Go-Pro point of view.” So vivid!Full disclosure: Pretty sure I borrowed/stole that phrase from my friend and fellow investigative reporter Bronwen Dickey, who supported me throughout this book project. With Eddie Freyer at the helm, central characters include a FBI’s behavioral science expert who conducted key interviews, a pioneering police sketch artist who rendered the suspect’s face with stunning accuracy, the forensic specialist who lifted the palm print that led to a confession, and the agent who elicited the confession that led to a conviction and a death penalty sentence.

Written with the cinematic scenes and suspense of a thriller, and fact-checked with primary sources, the search is a narrative vehicle for a more expansive story: How the Polly Klaas kidnapping was a proving ground for investigative tools, procedures, and people who forever changed how the FBI gathers evidence and solves crimes. The history and science of CSI methods will be woven throughout the story, adding narrative pacing, depth, and insider details that true crime readers obsess about. (I used a similar approach in What Stands in a Storm, which laced the fast-paced narrative tornado narrative with bits of exposition about the history and science of severe weather; the book is now required reading in high schools and colleges in at least four states.)

No podcast, TV show, or story has ever delivered so much unique information or demonstrated why this case was so pivotal in the history of the FBI. To me, these paragraphs feel like the most important, and urgent, yet in the proposal.Maybe I should have moved them up higher! It’s part of the “What’s new” answer, and the more I dug, the more specific information I found to support this theme. In the book, several chapters contain historical asides that document insider FBI history I wasn’t able to find written elsewhere. It marked a major turning point when the bureau was forced to change how it responded to the most urgent and time-sensitive of all crimes. Kidnapping statistics paint a grim picture: 44 percent of abducted children die within the first hour; 74 percent die within the first three hours; 1 percent survive more than one day. Sadly, 40 percent are dead by the time they’re even reported missing. It’s worth noting that the kidnapping statistics were one of the hardest things to report and fact-check. Exact numbers of stranger abductions have always been controversial (and sometimes dramatically inflated as a result of multiple reporting systems). The numbers I used here came from a presentation given by one of the FBI agents who worked on the case. The ones that made it into the book survived rounds of fact-checking with various sources and consultation with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

When Polly went missing in October 1993, the nation was plagued with a string of unsolved stranger abductions, many of which took place in Northern California. Amber Swartz-Garcia. Ileane Mischeloff. Kevin Collins. Jaycee Dugard.

“These children were in their homes or playing in their front yards or walking home from ice skating practice a few blocks away,” Eddie Freyer says. “They vanished from the face of the earth. They were unsolved.”

The community was demanding to know: When are you going to stop this? What are you going to do about these unsolved cases? I like how you zoom out to paint the broader historical context here that was influencing this time.I think it’s important to “zoom out” and paint the bigger picture framing the story-world. What else was happening in the world at the time? What pressures were unique to this moment in time? It provides important context and anchors the narrative in time and history.

FBI kidnapping protocol required dispatching forensic experts from the lab in Quantico to conduct crime scene investigations. But during the time it took to get them there—24 hours or more in some cases—trace evidence could deteriorate, disappear, or become contaminated inadvertently. Even more urgently, the first 24 hours after an abduction are the most critical. Odds of survival decline with each minute.

A different approach was bubbling up from the ranks, who saw the need for “a new way of doing business.” Outside FBI headquarters, agents in field offices were assembling local teams that could arrive at a crime scene within hours or even minutes. This had led to the creation of the San Francisco FBI Evidence Response Team (ERT), among the first of its kind in the nation in 1991. I don’t know if it comes out clearly here, but this was one of the most pivotal ways in which this case “changed the way the FBI does business.” I wasn’t able to find a good written history of the ERT. Then I realized I was talking to the primary sources who wrote that chapter of history.

These ERT mavericks were considered rogues, at the time. Breaking protocol and outside the chain of command, they were experimenting with new forensic tools and methods. Many of their previously untested methods concerned the recovery of trace evidence: hair and fibers, fingerprints and DNA, “the evidence we can’t see,” says Senior Team Leader Tony Maxwell, the FBI’s lead forensic investigator on the Polly Klaas case. “Before, you’d want the gun. Now you want the smoke from the gun.”

Maxwell, who has never before spoken to the press, is a forensic pioneer who would change how crime scene investigators gather trace evidence and protect it on its journey to the lab in Quantico. Oops! As I corrected in the book, the FBI lab was located in Washington D.C. at the time of this case. (It was later moved to Quantico, Virginia.)

“There are only two ways a guy goes to jail: witnesses and evidence,” Maxwell told me. “If witnesses are compromised, it all comes down to evidence.”

Committed to telling this story, Maxwell actively tracked down and recruited other characters central to the investigation, including Frank Doyle, a 33-year FBI veteran who co-founded the ERT program and went on to teach forensic investigation classes with Maxwell in more than 25 countries. This is striking. Do you have a sense of why Maxwell was motivated to do this?I think he may have felt the same imperative that Eddie and I did: If this story is to be told accurately and thoroughly, we need help from everyone who lived it—while they’re still alive and able to remember. Doyle also served as the explosives expert for 56 episodes of the Mythbusters TV show. Sadly, Frank Doyle died a few months ago. I attended his funeral with Eddie and FBI SWAT team leader Tom LaFreniere. The next day, we lost Lillian Zilius, who supervised Frank and Tony and the ERT. I was sad, and grateful I had recorded their interviews, which I shared with their families. Maxwell and Doyle introduced me to Mike Stapleton, their FBI colleague and founder of Forensics R Us, a consulting firm through which he currently conducts fingerprint identification courses. Maxwell, Doyle, and Stapleton all say that what they learned from the Polly Klaas case would be crucial to their subsequent work on the Oklahoma City bombing, the Unabomber, the Olympic bombing in Atlanta, and the World Trade Center attacks in 1993 and 2001. “This case was the most instrumental model used in all our case responses thereafter,” Maxwell says.

The Polly Klaas case marked the FBI’s first application of techniques such as cyanoacrylate fuming—aka “Supergluing”—a method in which a fine mist of superglue is sprayed on an object to permanently affix fragile, perishable fingerprints that can be destroyed by conventional dusting. Electrostatic dust collectors were used to gather hairs, fibers, and microscopic particles from every inch of Polly’s room.

This was also the FBI’s first use of fluorescent powder and alternate light source (ALS) to detect latent fingerprints invisible to the human eye. In the months before Polly’s disappearance, Maxwell came home from work and practiced using fluorescent powder and a borrowed ALS—which the FBI didn’t yet own—in his living room, where his wife ran a children’s daycare. A day of Mrs. Maxwell’s business as usual generated all sorts of trace evidence: DNA-rich body fluids, the finest human hair, and children’s fingerprints, which are smaller, harder to find, and more perishable than those of adults. One hundred times more sensitive than traditional black powder treatments, fluorescent powder could pick up prints missed by an everyday fingerprint dusting. In Polly’s room, Maxwell and his team would use this new technique to lift 48 fingerprints missed by the Petaluma Police. One of them would be the palm print that linked the killer to the crime scene, prompted his confession, and led to his conviction.

But even as these teams were making forensic history, they faced considerable resistance within their own organization. “This new team concept was not received warmly by either the Laboratory Division or the agents in the field,” Maxwell says. “We had to win the support of our colleagues one by one, case by case.” Once they did, the San Francisco ERT would become a model for other such teams across the nation. Today, the bureau employs 1,000 trained ERT agents nationwide, and every local office has a dedicated team.

Concurrently emerging in the FBI was the use of behavioral science in criminal investigations, particularly those involving threats or acts of violence. The Polly Klaas case marked the first time a profiler was embedded within the forensic team, which sped up the investigation. It marked the merging of forensic science and behavioral science for the first time in the FBI. From a fact-checking perspective, how did you verify all of these “firsts” to make these assertions with confidence?I interviewed an FBI historian and also emailed Louis Freeh, who was the Director of the FBI at the time. Both of them said I knew more about this case than they did. So I corroborated the assertions made in separate interviews by Tony Maxwell, Frank Doyle, David Alford, Mike Stapleton, and Mary Ellen O’Toole—all pioneers who most likely would have been aware of all the precedents. Special Agent Mary Ellen O’Toole, an expert in criminal profiling and psychopathy, worked closely with the Evidence Response Team throughout the entire case—and beyond. “Mary Ellen would sit across from me,” Maxwell says. “I would do the forensic side. She would do the ‘voodoo’ side. She has worked almost every kidnapping since.” O’Toole used new profiling methods to get inside the mind of the killer, including an approach called “victimology,” which involved analyzing Polly’s artwork to characterize what kind of child she was, and then deduce what kind of criminal might prey on such a child.

Paired with forensic evidence, behavioral analysis helped focus the investigation and support the prosecution. “Tony and I worked side by side,” O’Toole said. “Now, it’s clear you have to blend the empirical and behavioral sciences.” But in 1993, that concept broke new ground. After Polly’s case, O’Toole went on to work for the FBI’s new Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU), which became the focus of the hit crime serious “Criminal Minds.” She later worked on the Elizabeth Smart and Natalee Holloway disappearances, the Columbine shootings, and many other high-profile cases. A Fellow with the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, she continues to lecture at the FBI Academy, the FBI’s Leadership Development Institute, and the Smithsonian Institute. She is the director of the Foresnic Science Program at George Mason University, where she is heading up the creation of the nation’s second “Body Farm,” where forensic scientists use donated corpses to study the decomposition of bodies. (The first Body Farm, run by the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, was featured in Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Lives of Cadavers.)

After the Polly Klaas case, O’Toole went on to write the Child Abduction Response protocols for the entire Bureau. The ERT techniques and protocols established in this case would be rolled out nationwide, and eventually internationally, when FBI technicians (including Maxwell and his colleagues) began training foreign governments to respond to bombings and terrorism attacks. At this point, you’ve spent quite a bulk of space detailing FBI/investigative methods. How did you think about keeping the reader’s attention?I did enough research on successful true crime books to appreciate that avid readers of this genre love the nitty-gritty details of forensic science and investigative tools. I also saw expository asides as a means of narrative pacing. Many of the scenes are fast-paced and extremely emotionally intense, so these asides give readers a moment to catch their breath.

“All that comes from Polly,” Maxwell says.

***

Outside the FBI, independent forensic artist Jeanne Boylan was developing new methods of cognitive interviewing to elicit the faces of criminals, images buried deep within the subconscious of a traumatized witness. Trauma affects the mind’s ability to encode—and retrieve—a memory, and Boylan understood that the act of trying to remember a traumatic memory could inadvertently distort that memory. She explained that, after witnessing a traumatic crime, “the mind, as a survival measure, acts with determination to protect the victim from reexperiencing the event by repressing the image that induced the trauma.” In this post-traumatic state, eyewitnesses’ memories were very fragile, highly susceptible to suggestions that could overwrite the memory and compromise its accuracy. What an effective, clear and compelling way in which you described how trauma affects memory. I appreciate the precision of your language while still putting this explanation in layman’s terms.If I learned anything in this project, it’s the extent to which memory is susceptible to suggestion, distorted by trauma, and eroded by the passage of time. For the book, I interviewed a scientist who studies the impact of trauma on memory, and he offered a theory about why one of the two 12-year-old girls who witnessed Polly’s abduction recalled the kidnapper wearing neon yellow bandana across his forehead, and the other did not.

Boylan’s insight, supported by research by University of Washington psychology professor Dr. Elizabeth Loftus on the fallibility of eyewitness recall, unearthed flaws in the longstanding approach of forensic artists. The standard procedure was to show the eyewitness a selection of noses, eyes, chins (et cetera) from which they could select features, which an artist would then combine in a sketch that purported to resemble the perpetrator’s face. This method often produced sketches that eyewitnesses declared “not right.” Even worse, Boylan said, it could potentially “damage the evidence” by “handing to the eyewitness—at the very height of that person’s vulnerability to suggestion and influence—the visual tools to effectively discard, distort, or further entomb the actual image that created the trauma.”

Boylan’s techniques defied convention, which caused law enforcement officials to mistrust and criticize them. The officials tended to view any success on her part as an indication of failure on theirs. Boylan was summoned to Petaluma by the FBI at the insistence of an ABC Television producer named Debbie Alpert, who became interested in the Polly Klaas case and remembered Boylan from a previous story. Boylan’s reception in the command center was lukewarm, at best. By the time she arrived, thousands of fliers had already been disseminated with the sketch of a local police artist, who had used the old techniques.

“The girls say the sketch is wrong,” Polly’s mother, Eve, told Boylan. “Did they tell you that?”

It wasn’t a bad sketch, Boylan thought, but it looked like it could be anyone. The height mentioned in the flyer—six-foot-three—also bothered her. What does six feet three inches mean to a twelve-year-old child seated on a bedroom floor looking up at a man with a weapon?

“I’ll bet he’s a shorter man,” Boylan said. “I think we’re going to need to open that up.”

At first, Mark Mershon, the same FBI agent who had been pressured to have Boylan join the team told her that she would not be permitted to interview the eyewitnesses. After flying home to Washington—and back a day later—she was finally allowed to interview Kate and Gillian. That’s when she realized how much damage had been done. The girls had been interviewed together. When this happens, the dominant witness often influences the recollection of the less-dominant personality. Minor discrepancies trigger suspicion in the minds of the investigators, and that suspicion erodes the confidence of both witnesses. From there, things tend to go downhill, which is precisely what had already happened. Minor inconsistencies in the girls’ perceptions—which should have validated their honesty—were treated as lies by the investigators.

It was one of their biggest mistakes, admits FBI agent Eddie Freyer. “We roughed them up,” he says, almost thirty years later, to every class of new investigators. “We almost lost them, as witnesses, as we dug into the weeds. There were minor inconsistencies. We thought those differences meant lying.”

Eddie Freyer knows every mistake, every red herring, and every small step in the right direction, because he was the FBI agent in charge of the Polly Klaas case. When you were interviewing him, what signaled to you that he would be honest, as a source, about his personal mistakes and oversights?Before I wrote the proposal, I sat in on his Interviewing and Interrogation class for the Behavioral Analysis Training Institute (when he made the remarks noted above). He was frank with his students about those mistakes. I told him at the outset of the project that the book would have to acknowledge what went wrong as well as what went right in the case. He agreed. I needed to avoid writing an FBI puff piece, or what some journalists call “copaganda.” So I made sure to fact-check his memories as thoroughly as I did every other source. As Senior Resident Agent (SRA) in Santa Rosa, he oversaw the efforts of Tony Maxwell, Mary Ellen O’Toole, Jeanne Boylan, and more than one hundred agents—a team that worked in concert (and sometimes at odds) with local police toward a common goal: Find Polly. For 61 straight days, many of them sleepless, Freyer called in the polygraphers, green-lighted the SWAT raids, and made sure key evidence was hand-delivered to the FBI lab in Quantico.

In charge of the command post—the brain of the investigation—he orchestrated its transformation from the “old way of doing business” (butcher paper hung in a break room, scribbled with hand-written leads) to the brand-new Rapid Start system, an electronic lead-tracking database that enabled Freyer to prioritize 60,000 tips and investigate 12,000 actionable leads over two relentless months. Rapid Start was pulled off the Unabomber case, its first application, and reassigned to Polly Klaas, operated by data analysts nicknamed “the mushroom heads” by their colleagues.

Behind the scenes, invisible to media, Freyer was making thousands of decisions in a case that would profoundly change the way we search for and find missing children. Throughout the entire investigation Freyer kept a low profile, insulated from the press by supervisors like FBI ASAC Mark Mershon, who became the official spokesperson, but was not as intimately involved in the day-to-day decisions that made this case so complex. Everyone who worked the Polly Klaas case says Freyer’s leadership was the grease that kept the investigation running twenty-four hours a day. As Mary Ellen O’Toole said years later, “I think one of the reasons we all worked together so well and solved the case is because working for Eddie was wonderful. He is probably one of the best FBI agents I've ever worked for. He was low key. He listened. he was thoughtful, but very decisive. He always seemed to know exactly what to do. I haven't seen that kind of competence since.”

But it wasn’t cold competence that set Eddie Freyer apart from the ranks of lead investigators. It was his humanity. When he realized how badly Kate and Gillian had been traumatized by the mistrust of early interviewers, he brought the girls flowers and, on bended knee, apologized for how they had been treated. As he learned how forensic artist Jeanne Boylan had helped the girls recover not only the face of the killer, but also their trust and confidence, he asked Boylan to please stay, because the girls needed her. Three years later, when Kate and Gillian were called to testify in the murder trial of the man who had bound and gagged them, each girl was allowed to choose one adult to accompany her on the witness stand. Both chose Jeanne Boylan. Why did you choose to delve into the story so extensively in this section vs. leaning more on the sample chapters? How did you balance what extent of detail and context to disclose?I wanted the sample chapters to showcase the writing, the storytelling, and specifically my ability to stay “in-scene” as much as possible, which makes a narrative read like fiction. But it’s also essential in a proposal to convey to the editor what I call “the smart layer” of nonfiction – the expository asides that add meaning, context, and insight to each scene.

WHY NOW?

I love that this is a header.I think about the ‘why now’ in every story pitch I craft and make sure to include a line acknowledging that, but I never state it quite so directly. I might take a leaf from your book!) KC: It’s a key question every proposal must answer, along with “Why are you the best writer to tackle this book?”

Nearly three decades years after her abduction, people are still talking about Polly Klaas.  And true crime stories are more popular than ever across media.

At least twenty-seven true crime podcasts have dedicated an episode to the Polly Klaas kidnapping. Netflix is filming an episode on the case for the upcoming series “Crimes That Changed America.” In her newest suspense novel, When the Stars Go Dark (April 2021), New York Times bestselling author Paula McLain writes about a detective obsessed with the search for a kidnapped girl. Set in Northern California in 1993, the story features fictional characters whose paths intersect with real-life kidnapping cases—including Polly Klaas. McClain says her protagonist, a female detective, was shaped by research that she conducted on the Polly Klaas investigation.

This case has been covered extensively—in newspapers, true crime TV shows, podcasts, and books. All of these stories lack the details known only to deep insiders—the color of the powder that picked up the palm print, the moonless night a SWAT team member fell into a ravine, the way the kidnapper wiped his mouth every time he told a lie. True crime fans who think they know everything about this case will find plenty of new information in this book. It will also fascinate anyone interested in the history and evolution of crime scene investigation.

In Light of All Darkness can be delivered 12-18 months after contract signing. The hope is that it will be published in 2023, the 30th year since Polly’s death. How did you determine how long the delivery would take you?I had reported and written three books (one of which I can’t name, because of a non-disclosure agreement) so I knew what I could handle in that time frame. Plus, I had to work backward from the date of the 30-year anniversary of the crime, which gave the book a natural target pub date and a natural news-hook that would be useful for marketing and publicity. It takes readers deep inside the FBI investigation of one of the most famous—and perhaps the most pivotal—kidnapping in the world. This case was the training ground for the people, methods, and procedures used to solve crimes today—not only kidnapping cases, but also sex trafficking cases, serial murders, and terrorist bombings. “It changed the course of history,” said Greg Jacobs, the district attorney who prosecuted Polly’s kidnapper and murderer, Richard Allen Davis.

Polly’s case led to the Three-Strikes law and improved collaboration between Federal and local law enforcement. It informed the Amber Alert system now used in forty-eight states and responsible for saving 800 abducted children. It sparked the development of child abduction protocols taught nationwide. The Polly Klaas Foundation, a nonprofit founded by search volunteers, continues to work an average of 300 missing-child cases each year, helping families and law enforcement teams act quickly to respond to kidnappings. It is the only such organization assigned cases by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Since its inception, the Polly Klaas Foundation has searched for nearly 10,000 missing kids. It has a 97 percent recovery rate. 

Eddie Freyer uses the case to train the next generation of investigators. He has given his Polly Klaas presentation hundreds of times around the nation and the world: at FBI headquarters in Quantico; at more than ten agencies in Iraq; and at the Crimes Against Children Conference in Dallas (the nation’s largest conference on child safety), and for classes he instructs for the Institute of Criminal Investigation and POST (California’s Commission for Police Officer Standards and Training). For the past three decades, he has been asked to give this presentation, on average, once a month.

The Polly Klaas case is still that relevant. At this point in the proposal, did you think (or hope) that you’d convinced the reader of this?Yes, but a proposal is a sales document, so it’s a good place to avoid erring on the side of subtlety!

“It’s time,” Freyer says. “This story needs to be told before the people who can tell it are all gone.”

EXCLUSIVE ACCESS

Polly Klaas: The Murder of America’s Child (Pinnacle Books, 1995) and Who Killed Polly? (Monterey Press, 1995) are the only two books published about the Polly Klaas case. Both rely heavily on widely known facts reported in the press and a handful of superficial interviews with FBI and police spokespersons, most of them supervisors who disclosed more platitudes than substance. Eddie Freyer’s name is absent from both books. Mary Ellen O’Toole, Jeanne Boylan, and other inside players are mentioned superficially, but the details and insights of their work have never been documented in a comprehensive book. No book, no TV show, no podcast has ever captured the inner workings of the entire investigation.

This book will.

I have confirmed access to virtually all of the investigative insiders—within the FBI as well as Petaluma Police Department—who lived and breathed this case. Eddie Freyer has turned down all previous requests to participate in a book. Now, he is ready to tell the full story—but only to me, as a journalist and historian. Your exclusive access and groundwork already done feels like a key selling point. Why did you choose to put the access section lower down, after others?I heard someone (Tom French or Kelley Benham French, I believe) call a story “a promise that the end is worth waiting for.” In the summary, I made a promise of “unprecedented access.” I hoped that promise would keep the editor reading. Freyer does not expect to have narrative control, and he knows this will not be a puff piece that glosses over the many errors and problems in the investigation.

Freyer has helped me forge relationships with other insiders who have been inaccessible to the media. ERT member Tony Maxwell, has declined all journalist requests for interviews about the Polly Klaas case. Maxwell has agreed to be a character in this book, and he is actively opening doors to other FBI insiders. Jay Silverberg, a former journalist who was the liaison between the volunteers and the media, is also connecting me with key leaders in the volunteer effort.

In addition to exclusive interviews with insiders, I have obtained access to case files, crime scene photographs, internal FBI documents, and never-before-heard recordings of 1993 interviews conducted by profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole. Maxwell has given me crime scene photos, evidence recovery logs, and other primary documents. District Attorney Greg Jacobs, the winning prosecutor in the three-year trial, has entrusted me with his personal records: 12,000 pages of court transcripts from the murder trial.

In my preliminary research to confirm access and establish the main beats of the case, I conducted more than 50 interviews with more than a dozen characters, including FBI SWAT team leaders who conducted major raids, Petaluma police sergeants and detectives who canvassed the neighborhood and interviewed witnesses, and volunteers who were active in the community search effort and the Polly Klaas Foundation. More than 50 is a lot! In your estimate, how much time had you spent on the reporting by this point?I keep track of my interviews, documents and sources on a huge spreadsheet, so I don’t have to estimate. Before submitting the proposal the first time in 2016, I’d conducted 28 interviews for a total of 24 hours. When I decided to double down and revise the proposal in 2021, my tally ran up to 69 interviews and a total of 57 hours.

In addition to Eddie Freyer, the central character, the following individuals have agreed to participate in the book: This is another key element the editor is looking for: Characters. And access to these characters.

  • Tony Maxwell, Senior Team Leader, FBI Evidence Recovery Team

  • Mary Ellen O’Toole, FBI criminal profiler and behavioral analyst

  • Vail Bello, Petaluma PD detective; Freyer’s first partner on the case

  • Tom LaFreniere, FBI SWAT team leader who conducted several raids in the case

  • Danny Fish, first Petaluma Police officer to arrive on scene; former president of the Polly Klaas Foundation

  • Frank Doyle, FBI agent, bomb tech, founder of the Evidence Recovery Team, explosives expert consulted on the show Myth Busters

  • Mike Stapleton, FBI agent and ERT member who collected trace evidence and now leads training classes in fingerprinting with fluorescent powder

  • Mary Nolte, forensic specialist who loaned the first alternate light source (forensic light) to the FBI in 1993

  • Larry Taylor, FBI agent, profiler, and kidnapping specialist, who conducted the Richard Allen Davis confession interview with Petaluma PD detective Mike Meese (deceased)

  • Ron Homer, FBI polygrapher (called “one of the best in the Bureau”)

  • Jay Silverberg, liaison between the volunteers and the media, and later a board member of the Polly Klaas Foundation

  • Joanna Gardner, former producer of the Grammy Awards; a Petaluma resident and mother who led the volunteer response and later produced Polly’s memorial

  • Gaynell Rogers, wife of blues musician Roy Rogers, who was another Petaluma mother of a daughter Polly’s age and worked closely with Joanna Gardner, her friend, to spearhead the volunteer efforts (Joanna and Gaynell will be characters who represent the face of the volunteers)

  • Raine Howe, director of the Polly Klaas Foundation and liaison with many of the volunteers and sources (including Polly’s family)

  • Cindy Rudometkin, director of the Programs and Response department at the Polly Klaas Foundation

  • Jenni Thompson, Director of Public Affairs at the Polly Klaas Foundation

  • Gary Judd, Petaluma resident, one of the first volunteers, and former president of the Polly Klaas Foundation

  • Carolina Spence, former Development Director for the Polly Klaas Foundation

  • Carol Evans Treu, Petaluma High School teacher in 1993


The following individuals may be available for interviews:

  • Larry Pelton, Petaluma Police detective; gathered evidence at Pythian Road

  • Gene Wallace, Petaluma Police officer; responded to leads

  • Mike McManis, Sonoma County Sheriff’s deputy; gathered evidence at Pythian Road

  • Chris Allen, hair and fibers specialist at FBI lab in Quantico; matched fibers from bedroom and body recovery site

  • Ron Hilley, FBI polygrapher

  • Dave Alford, FBI Evidence Recovery Team

  • Gary Joseph, FBI Rapid Start team

  • Steve Donohue, FBI Rapid Start team

  • Joe Davidson, SWAT team member

  • Louis Free, then-director of the FBI, who asked for daily briefings on Polly

  • Brian Bianco, jury foreman of the Richard Allen Davis murder trial

  • Park Dietz, forensic psychiatrist who classified Davis as a sexual sadist and testified in the murder trial of kidnapper Richard Allen Davis

  • Richard Allen Davis, currently on Death Row in San Quentin. Eddie Freyer is on a short list of people authorized to attend his execution. Freyer and Cross will reach out to him to request an interview. If he consents, they will go together to San Quentin to talk to him in person. It would be the first time the agent and criminal have ever spoken face to face.

PHOTO PERMISSIONS

Should a publisher desire that photos be included, I will obtain permissions. I’ve identified a photographer who documented pivotal moments of the volunteer search and the investigation, and the Polly Klaas Foundation, which supports the book, will assist in gathering publishable photos. A large file of FBI forensic and crime-scene photos is being sent to me. Many of these photos may be releasable and publishable, at Eddie Freyer’s discretion. One thing I never anticipated at this point is how instrumental these photos would be in the publicity phase. When my publicist, Roxanne Jones, pitched a producer at 20/20 a two-hour documentary on the case, these photos would be an important part of the production. The other thing I didn’t anticipate, however, was that 20/20 would also ask for documents, which were trickier. I had to run every request through Eddie and D.A. Greg Jacobs. Ultimately they decided not to share any federal documents with 20/20, and said that any police reports had to be released by the originating agency. Petaluma PD denied 20/20 requests. I had what they needed, but they were not “mine” to give away — I was only the temporary custodian. Telling 20/20 “no” was stressful but I had to protect my sources.

AUDIENCE

This book will be written for readers of meticulously reported narrative nonfiction—the same readers who loved titles such as Columbine, Under the Banner of Heaven, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Stranger Beside Me. It will appeal particularly to those with an interest in forensics, behavioral science and profiling, and FBI investigations, but it will be accessible to readers who may not be true crime obsessives, but who enjoy a well-crafted story with the elements of good fiction. I’m very impressed by this whole audience section. It really effectively hammers home the commercialization potential of your book.The sum and substance of a proposal adds up to this: Will this book sell? Who will buy it? How big is the potential audience? These are not the reasons I write books. But these are the reasons publishers buy them.

The story’s mass market potential is suggested by the number of podcast episodes about Polly Klass (more than 30 at last count) as well as the TV treatment of the story, then and now. Polly Klaas was featured in the premier episode of the Discovery Channel’s FBI Files (Season one, Episode one, 1998). Investigation Discovery revisited the case again for a 2014 episode of Motives and Murders: Cracking the Case (Season four, Episode four). The national audience includes viewers who liked The Forensic Files, Blood, Lies, and Alibis, 48 Hours, The Cold Case Files, Kidnapped, and America’s Most Wanted. As previously mentioned, Netflix is filming a new series called “Crimes That Changed America,” (expected to air in 2022 or 2023) and Polly Klass will be one of the featured cases.

Because the Polly Klaas investigation has been a case study taught internationally for nearly three decades, the book should have a strong niche market among people who work in law enforcement and other fields that protect children. It is very possible that this book could become a text used in training classes (Freyer remembers being assigned Helter Skelter as required reading at the  FBI Academy in Quantico). The Crimes Against Children Conference is an annual 5-day conference held by the Dallas Children’s Advocacy Center, which provides training to government and nonprofit employees fighting crimes against children and helping them heal. Attended by law enforcement officials, social workers, child protective services agents, therapists, and medical workers, the conference drew 6,900 attendees in 2020.

Clearly, it will also appeal to true crime fans, an audience that has grown exponentially in the past few years, as shown by the proliferation of podcasts, TV shows, and other narrative treatments, such as Unbelievable, American Murder: The Family Next Door, and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. True crime fans are voracious consumers of the genre, and Polly Klaas is one of the cases that most fascinates them.

COMPARABLE TITLES

How did you decide which titles to include here?I have to credit my agent, Leslie Meredith, for this.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara.

Based on deep and detailed research, this well-paced narrative takes readers inside an investigation, and inside the minds of investigators trying to solve it.

HarperCollins             Hardcover       Feb 2018         352 pp             $27.99

HarperCollins              Paperback        Feb 2019         368 pp             $17.99

 

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

This story about the 1920s organized killings of the oil-rich Osage Indians reveals that this case was a catalyst for the growth of the FBI.

Doubleday                   Hardcover       April 2017        352 pp             $32.50

Vintage                        Paperback        Jan 2018          400 pp             $17.00

 

Columbine by Dave Cullen

Written with cinematic scenes and novelistic drama, this book alternately recounts the pivotal moments of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre and shows the impact of the tragedy on survivors and America.

Twelve                         Hardcover       April 2009        432 pp             $37.00

Riverrun                      Paperback        Feb 2019         496 pp             $22.15

 

Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas

Now a Netflix original series, this book takes readers behind the scenes of some of the most fascinating and challenging FBI cases, delving into the criminal profiling techniques used to catch the country’s most notorious criminals and serial killers.

Scribner                       Hardcover       Jan 1995          384 pp             $24.00

Gallery Books              Paperback        Oct 2017         448 pp             $18.00

MULTI-MEDIA STORYTELLING & MARKETING

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Michelle McNamara’s search for the Golden State Killer, proves that the true crime audience is hungry to engage with the same story across multiple media, including a book, a podcast, and a documentary. These products do not tell the same story in different media but were designed to be complementary and interconnected, and complete enough that each could also stand alone. Many true crime fans consumed all three. The Polly Klaas story has such a following among true crime obsessives that it begs a similar treatment.

I have created a successful model for multi-media storytelling with my forthcoming book, The Stahl House: Case Study House #22: The Making of a Modernist Icon (Chronicle/Chroma, November 2021). The book publication will be followed by a documentary in 2022, co-produced as complementary products. The book blends reportage, historical research, and storytelling in a deeply reported narrative with a visually stunning layout: full-color photographs and historical documents from private archives. The book tells a broader story, weaving in the historical context of the Case Study House Program. The hour-long documentary focuses on the little-known family story of Case Study House #22, supported by never-before-seen family footage of the family who called the Stahl House “home.”

I am marketing the book and building an audience for the documentary through strategic live and online events that feature a multi-media slide show, a live talk, and a screening of the 2-minute film trailer. It’s super helpful that you have a robust track record you can point to, and that you can replicate the marketing efforts and approaches that have worked well for you with previous books. How would you instruct writers working on their debut book?Think creatively about ways to engage your audience in a way that adds value beyond a book-launch party. For “In Light of All Darkness,” I envisioned a series of ticketed events to raise money for non-profit organizations that support victims and to encourage social discourse in some meaningful way. In Boise, my hometown, I planned a moderated talk called “Making Sense of the Senseless: Exploring the Ethical Quandaries of True Crime.” It was a conversation with J. Reuben Appelman, author of “While Idaho Slept,” the first book about the 2022 University of Idaho murders. We talked about all the ethical dilemmas we faced in the reporting and writing of our books, from the risk of re-traumatizing sources to the fact-checking of memories distorted by trauma. By design, we made no money from the event, but sold tickets to raise around $1,000 for Faces of Hope, a local nonprofit that helps victims of violent crimes. In Petaluma, where Polly was kidnapped, I curated a 2.5-hour symposium about the legacy of the case. I wanted the audience to hear directly from 20 primary sources—FBI agents, forensic technicians, detectives, witnesses and leaders of the volunteer search center—what happened 30 years ago and how it changed their lives. I had a budget of zero from my publisher, so putting on the event was like making Stone Soup. The panelists flew in (on their own dime) from New Mexico, Virginia, Montana and Oregon. The Polly Klaas Foundation rented the venue. Copperfield’s Books (a local book shop housed in the very downtown storefront that served as the Polly Klaas Volunteer Search Center in 1993) planned and promoted the event. Michela O’Connor Abrams, my former boss, donated a case of wine for the VIP reception. We raised around $12,000 for the Polly Klaas Foundation, including a generous donation from the family of a late FBI agent who participated in the case and the book. At the end of the event, everyone got to meet a woman who was kidnapped as a 12-year-old girl, by a stranger, six months after Polly Klaas was found. She spoke alongside the police chief who saved her life by applying the lessons he had learned directly from Polly Klaas investigators. Afterward, people who had been traumatized by the kidnapping in 1993 said that learning about the legacy had facilitated some healing.  The first live event was hosted by the Palm Springs Art Museum in May 2021. A two-hour program will be held in Boise in mid-September. All ticket buyers will receive a copy of the book when it comes out in November.

I’ve leveraged my personal journalistic network to seek publicity. An 8-page story on the book appeared online and in the July/August 2021 issue of Vanity Fair (https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/07/inside-la-ultimate-mid-century-modern-home). An excerpt will be published in the January 2022 issue of Veranda. I’ve invited key media to VIP events at the Stahl House in Hollywood and at other venues in other cities with the same book-selling model. I will be promoting the book as a speaker at live events at the Palm Springs Art Museum in October 2021 and February 2022, which will build a market for the documentary, which will premier in 2022. At documentary screenings, the book will be promoted.

PLATFORM AND PUBLICITY

Eddie Freyer and I are willing to make appearances, independently or together, to promote the book. Whenever a child abduction or human trafficking case hits the national news, Eddie Freyer is interviewed by the media as an expert. One of the world’s leading experts on kidnapping, he has made live TV appearances on Fox News, the Bill O’Reilly Show, and many regional and local stations. Well-known in law enforcement circles nationwide, Freyer teaches classes for the Institute of Criminal Investigation as well as training courses for the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST), the institution responsible for training California’s 80,000 police officers.

I have a solid network within the media, with friends and contacts at newspapers, magazines, and radio stations across the country. I’ve been a speaker at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, the American Society of Journalists and Authors conference, and at book festivals and literary events. I’ve been interviewed by NPR member stations in Dallas, Atlanta, Birmingham, and Tuscaloosa. My work has been featured by Nieman Storyboard, Longreads, Longform, Apple News, Apple News Audio, Yahoo News, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, and Gangrey: the Podcast. Through my author website—kimhcross.com—and newsletter mailing list, I regularly engage with readers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (@kimhcross). I personally answer reader emails and social media messages and regularly speak to book clubs in person or by Skype.

Tony Maxwell, Frank Doyle, and other members of the central “cast” may also be available to participate and speak, depending on their schedule. Public relations professional Jay Silverberg, founder of Petaluma-based Silverberg Communications, LLC, has offered to help with promotion pro bono.

Polly Klaas Foundation has helped more than 10,000 families and hundreds of law enforcement teams across the country. The foundation will benefit from the book, which tells the story that inspired its mission and inception. Several characters in the book, including Eddie, Danny Fish, and Jay Silverberg, are either on the foundation’s board of directors or still actively involved with the Foundation. The Foundation supports the book.

One of my editors has agreed to introduce me to the founder of CrimeCon, a true crime conference that draws an audience of 4,000 true crime fans in a typical year and also conducts themed cruises for lovers of the genre. Eddie and I would be willing to speak and give a multimedia presentation at this and other such gatherings, including Crimes Against Children, the annual conference in Dallas that drew nearly 7,000 attendees in 2020.

THE AUTHOR

[caption id="attachment_177654" align="alignleft" width="183"]Photo of nonfiction writer Kim Cross, author of "In Light of All Darkness" Kim Cross[/caption]Kim Cross is a New York Times best-selling author and journalist known for meticulously reported narrative nonfiction. Her work has been recognized in “Best of” lists by The New York Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, The Sunday Longread, Longform, and Apple News Audio. Three of her stories have been anthologized in Best American Sports Writing and The Year’s Best Sports Writing and have received three gold Lowell Thomas Awards. Her 2020 narrative, “Noel + Leon: What Happens When Two Strangers Trust the Rides of Their Lives to the Magic of the Universe,” was analyzed on Harvard’s Nieman Storyboard and noted in The New York Times Sidney Awards. The story is a finalist for the Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sports Writing.

Kim’s first book, What Stands in a Storm (Atria, 2015), a New York Times bestseller, chronicles the biggest tornado outbreak in history, the April 2011 storm that unleashed 349 tornadoes on 21 states, killing at least 324 people. The book won the Fitzgerald Museum Literary Prize for Excellence in Writing and the American Society of Journalists and Authors nonfiction book award. A Barnes & Noble Discover pick, it was named one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2015 and was a finalist in the GoodReads Choice Awards. A starred review in Publisher’s Weekly noted its “detail-oriented reporting anchors a novelist’s flair for drama.” It has been selected for by two community-wide reading programs and is taught in high schools and colleges in at least four states.

Kim’s forthcoming book, The Stahl House: Case Study House #22—The Making of a Modernist Icon (Chroma Chronicle, November 2021) tells the inside family story of the most famous home in the Case Study House Program, with never-before-published photographs and historical documents. The book is featured in the July/August issue of Vanity Fair and will be excerpted in the January issue of Veranda.

A lifelong athlete, Kim has competed in at least ten sports, three nationally and one internationally. She lives in Idaho.

Read news and stories at kimhcross.com and sign up for her monthly author newsletter.

* * *

Carly Stern is a freelance reporter based in San Francisco who covers housing, disability policy, urban life and economic inequality.

The post Peek inside a successful book proposal appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Carly Stern Nonfiction author Kim Cross breaks down how to sell a book proposal https://niemanstoryboard.org/2023/11/17/book-proposal-publishing-nonfiction-narrative-kim-cross/ Fri, 17 Nov 2023 13:00:55 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/2023/11/17/book-proposal-publishing-nonfiction-narrative-kim-cross/ A child holds a photo of 12-year-old Polly Klaas at a memorial in Petaluma, California, a year after her kidnapping and murder.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of two posts featuring Kim Cross on the successful pitch-and-proposal process that led to her new book, ‘In Light of All Darkness.’ In a companion post, Cross annotates the proposal that landed the book contract.

A book project is no pursuit for impatient writers. Bringing a book from the page to stores requires a blend of timing, stamina and alchemy: a ripe idea, relevance in the zeitgeist, a confluence of favorable market conditions and editorial partners who have the determination — and means — to help sell it. Journalist Kim Cross waited nearly eight years for these factors to converge before “In Light of All Darkness” would live in the world.

Cross, who is based in Idaho, began nursing the idea of filling in reporting gaps of an infamous true crime case in 2015. She spent the next year or so tracking down archival material, interviewing subjects and mapping out the arc of a propulsive story about the kidnapping of Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old who lived in Petaluma, California, in 1993.

Cross initially pitched the book in 2015 — shortly after the publication of her first book, “What Stands in a Storm” — but didn’t land a deal. After a potential offer fell through, she shifted her attention to other projects. Then, in 2021, Cross found an editor and publisher who felt like a good fit and were committed to publishing the book “with muscle,” as she puts it.

Storyboard talked with Cross about what nonfiction writers need to know about the book publishing process, how a book proposal mirrors and diverges from a magazine pitch, and the roles that each editorial partner plays. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I‘m super fascinated by the pitch process behind finding a publisher. Can you walk me through the big-picture, prerequisite steps that it takes to land a book deal?
With fiction, you write the book and then find an agent. That agent serves as your first editor and then shops the whole book. With nonfiction, that’s almost the sign of a nonprofessional. Generally speaking, you write a book proposal, which is a document that can range from 25 to maybe 75 pages. It’s like a business proposal where the outcome is not a business, but a book. Think of it like a big nut graph. There’s a whole section that explains ‘this is what the story is.’ Then, ‘This is what has been written on the topic, and this is how this book will be different.’ Another section:‘Here’s why I am the best writer to do this book.’ And finally: ‘Here’s the market — why it will sell — and how I plan to sell it.’

Photo of author Kim Cross
Kim Cross

How did you approach doing that market research?
When I first pitched this book, the deal fell through because there weren’t multiple offers and the original publisher who made an offer got cold feet. The market was in a really different place — it was before the true crime explosion we’re seeing today. This was a story of a child kidnapping and murder, a story that doesn’t end well. The rejections I got at that time were, ‘Why would anyone read a book that ends badly and you already know it’s going to end?’ But with the advent of podcasts like “Serial,” Michelle MacNamara’s book, “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” and the related documentary and podcast, the true crime market changed. Suddenly, stories that were a little too sensitive or taboo became more acceptable. I looked at what books were out there and who was reading them, and I spoke to that.

I wanted to approach it as a meticulously reported narrative nonfiction story that happens to be about a true crime. As a journalist and historian, I wanted to write the book of record about a case that has been written about a lot with many inaccuracies, errors and gaps. I thought there was a place for this in the world of historians and investigators, for whom this story could continue to be an educational tool. I wasn’t thinking about it just being of interest to the people who listen to true crime podcasts, but also investigators, law enforcement officials and maybe even first responders.

I’m struck by how useful it is that people in the publishing industry told you what wasn’t working for them. What did those rejections from the first pitch tell you, and what information did you glean from them? As a plea to editors everywhere, why is it so important for writers to get feedback not just about why something works, but why it doesn’t?
The rejection letters that I get, and have gotten for three books now, have been some of the most useful criticism that I’ve gotten in my career. Instead of feeling hurt by it, I thought, ‘Oh, wow, they took the time to tell me exactly what wasn’t working. And that can actually help me make the book better when it does find a home.’

The rejection letters that I… have gotten for three books now have been some of the most useful constructive criticism that I’ve gotten in my career.

When I first pitched my earlier book, “What Stands in a Storm,” I hadn’t done what I call the ‘casting process’ to figure out who my central characters were. Everyone who rejected it said, ‘We love the writing and topic, but we don’t see a central cast of characters that the reader is going to invest in and care about.’ I knew the next time around, I would have that process done.

The rejections for the Polly Klaas book cited different reasons and were contradictory. Some thought it was too dramatic — better for TV or a movie — while others wanted more drama. I knew something was off here because they’re all saying no for different reasons. When I got the final rejection, I read it thinking, ‘I should feel really devastated that I’ve put all this work and all this time into this, and it’s not going anywhere.’ Instead, I had a really strong gut instinct that it simply was not the right time. You can’t force a story to be ready; the story will let you know when it’s ready. So I set it aside, worked on a couple of other books and came back to it. A friend later read the proposal and said, ‘I think you were ahead of the (true crime) market. I think the time is now.’

I think a lot about story form — how different components of a story can be told in a magazine treatment versus a news story versus a podcast or documentary — and how much story shape depends on the creator’s vision for it. How and when did you first know that the subject you had on your hands warranted a book? Which signals made that clear to you?
The investigation itself was so big and complex, it was way too much for a magazine piece. All of the long-form treatments about the Klaas case that I had seen, whether TV or print, basically told what happened in the beginning and then skipped to two months later. So much was going on inside the investigation in a way that was invisible to the public. I realized that a lot of things that happened in the middle spoke to those bigger, ‘so-what’ questions.

I love structure and obsess about it. But I decided the best structure for this was a pretty simple chronology, with a few deviations when things are happening simultaneously. I didn’t get fancy. I started with a timeline tracking exactly what happened minute by minute and color-coded it by point-of-view, which helped me determine which point-of-view each chapter would be written from.

What was the process like for finding an agent who was the right fit?
So much of it is networking and talking to several people. Ideally, you have a writer friend who can make a connection so you’re a known entity and not just a cold call or blind email that’s going into the pile. For my first agent, I was invited to speak at a literary conference; the hotel bar afterward was filled with writers from the conference. He was standing with some other agents and I’d seen him on a panel. I walked up and started talking. He listened to me talk for 45 minutes about a book idea about nuns. He didn’t look over my shoulder to see who else was coming in. He was very engaged. I just kind of had a sense, ‘you get me.’ Nuns ultimately were not the right topic for my first book, but we stayed in touch and he was my agent for “What Stands in a Storm.”

When it comes to the agent, publisher and editor, can you break down the division of labor and order of operations? Who does what?
Your agent is there to help you get the proposal in shape and make sure you have a focused idea that is a viable, sellable book option. They’re not going to let you write a proposal about something they think there’s no market for, has already been done or that they can’t sell. They serve as your first editor and help you get the proposal in tip-top shape. Along with the research, you figure out the title, subtitle and angle, as well as distill it into a one-breath pitch.  If you can say what your book in one breath, then you have a focused idea. Your agent is a bit of a cheerleader, counselor and sounding board. They also read the fine print of contracts. Agents are there to help protect you and give you advice.

The editor pretty much represents the publisher, makes sure you’re on track and can help if you hit a snag or need to talk something through while you’re writing.

My publicist came in when the manuscript was in the final stages of editing. Later, you’ll hear from sales, marketing and publicity departments.

Why is finding the right match for each of those respective roles important?
Your editor is whoever decides to bid on your book. You have more control over who your agent is and you need good chemistry — someone who you instinctively trust, loves your work, knows how to leverage your strengths and sees what you’re worth.

A good time to reach out to an agency is when you have a proposal. If you don’t have a proposal, they don’t really have much to react to other than your portfolio. One tip for knowing who to reach out to is go to a physical bookstore and spend some time browsing the shelf where the book that you want to write would exist. Look at the other books on that shelf, open them up and look at the acknowledgments, because everyone always thanks their agent in the acknowledgments. You can see which agents cover these topics.

The financial returns of a book — whether it’s the advance after the proposal sells, or the sales of the actual book — come a long time down the road, many years after you’ve spent the time to do all that reporting. From a financial perspective, how do you manage making enough time to write the book while doing other work that pays the bills?
Cash flow is the freelancer’s nightmare. The majority of successful freelancers probably have a second gig that provides some income stability; it might not be as fun and sexy, but evens out the peaks and valleys. Books are my main source of income, supplemented by other freelance income and teaching. A lot of people teach, have a PR or marketing job or some other situation where that’s the primary income, and then they carve out time to write. I think that can be really successful because it’s pretty hard to write for more than a few hours a day, after which point your productivity goes down.

Can you walk us through the nuts and bolts of those numbers?
What people don’t realize is that a book advance is not paid out in advance. I’m going to be tacky and talk about money because I think it’s helpful for aspiring authors to know how the publishing business works. Let’s say you get a $100,000 book advance. Six figures! Sounds great, right? In reality, you get 25% of that upon signing your contract. Your agent takes the standard 15% cut, so deduct $3,750, and you have $21,250 in gross income.

Now set 30% of that number aside for quarterly estimated taxes. Now you have $14,875. But you need to stretch that out for 18 months, because your next quarter of the advance isn’t paid until the book is not only written, but edited, revised, and accepted by the publisher. So that’s $826.39 a month of net income. Which explains why you need a second job, a breadwinner spouse, or a steady amount of freelance work on top of the book.

The last portion of the advance comes well after your publication date when the paperback comes out.

I quit my job to write my first book because my husband had a great job. Then he lost it. In the 18 months of writing and editing “What Stands in a Storm,” I also wrote 50 other freelance stories and 7,000 words for a coffee table book about Christmas in the South.

What insights do you know now about the book selling or writing process that you didn’t know your first time around and have learned along the way?
If you can find stories that allow you to do research that eventually builds into your book, it subsidizes that research. But if you write anything in those paid stories that you want to use in the book, read your contracts to make sure that you retain the copyright. Second, take pictures and file them away. At some point, that can be valuable material for the book itself or social media promotion. And third, get ready for the fact that you are not done once you turn the book in. When it goes to press, you have to switch into marketing and promotion mode. This is very uncomfortable for the majority of writers because we want the writing to speak for itself. They don’t train you in J-school on how to read in front of a few hundred people or conduct an event that’s not just a book party. Those things have been really important.

* * *

Carly Stern is a freelance reporter based in San Francisco who covers housing, disability policy, urban life and economic inequality.

The post Nonfiction author Kim Cross breaks down how to sell a book proposal appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> A child holds a photo of 12-year-old Polly Klaas at a memorial in Petaluma, California, a year after her kidnapping and murder.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of two posts featuring Kim Cross on the successful pitch-and-proposal process that led to her new book, ‘In Light of All Darkness.’ In a companion post, Cross annotates the proposal that landed the book contract.

A book project is no pursuit for impatient writers. Bringing a book from the page to stores requires a blend of timing, stamina and alchemy: a ripe idea, relevance in the zeitgeist, a confluence of favorable market conditions and editorial partners who have the determination — and means — to help sell it. Journalist Kim Cross waited nearly eight years for these factors to converge before “In Light of All Darkness” would live in the world.

Cross, who is based in Idaho, began nursing the idea of filling in reporting gaps of an infamous true crime case in 2015. She spent the next year or so tracking down archival material, interviewing subjects and mapping out the arc of a propulsive story about the kidnapping of Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old who lived in Petaluma, California, in 1993.

Cross initially pitched the book in 2015 — shortly after the publication of her first book, “What Stands in a Storm” — but didn’t land a deal. After a potential offer fell through, she shifted her attention to other projects. Then, in 2021, Cross found an editor and publisher who felt like a good fit and were committed to publishing the book “with muscle,” as she puts it.

Storyboard talked with Cross about what nonfiction writers need to know about the book publishing process, how a book proposal mirrors and diverges from a magazine pitch, and the roles that each editorial partner plays. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I‘m super fascinated by the pitch process behind finding a publisher. Can you walk me through the big-picture, prerequisite steps that it takes to land a book deal?
With fiction, you write the book and then find an agent. That agent serves as your first editor and then shops the whole book. With nonfiction, that’s almost the sign of a nonprofessional. Generally speaking, you write a book proposal, which is a document that can range from 25 to maybe 75 pages. It’s like a business proposal where the outcome is not a business, but a book. Think of it like a big nut graph. There’s a whole section that explains ‘this is what the story is.’ Then, ‘This is what has been written on the topic, and this is how this book will be different.’ Another section:‘Here’s why I am the best writer to do this book.’ And finally: ‘Here’s the market — why it will sell — and how I plan to sell it.’

Photo of author Kim Cross
Kim Cross

How did you approach doing that market research?
When I first pitched this book, the deal fell through because there weren’t multiple offers and the original publisher who made an offer got cold feet. The market was in a really different place — it was before the true crime explosion we’re seeing today. This was a story of a child kidnapping and murder, a story that doesn’t end well. The rejections I got at that time were, ‘Why would anyone read a book that ends badly and you already know it’s going to end?’ But with the advent of podcasts like “Serial,” Michelle MacNamara’s book, “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” and the related documentary and podcast, the true crime market changed. Suddenly, stories that were a little too sensitive or taboo became more acceptable. I looked at what books were out there and who was reading them, and I spoke to that.

I wanted to approach it as a meticulously reported narrative nonfiction story that happens to be about a true crime. As a journalist and historian, I wanted to write the book of record about a case that has been written about a lot with many inaccuracies, errors and gaps. I thought there was a place for this in the world of historians and investigators, for whom this story could continue to be an educational tool. I wasn’t thinking about it just being of interest to the people who listen to true crime podcasts, but also investigators, law enforcement officials and maybe even first responders.

I’m struck by how useful it is that people in the publishing industry told you what wasn’t working for them. What did those rejections from the first pitch tell you, and what information did you glean from them? As a plea to editors everywhere, why is it so important for writers to get feedback not just about why something works, but why it doesn’t?
The rejection letters that I get, and have gotten for three books now, have been some of the most useful criticism that I’ve gotten in my career. Instead of feeling hurt by it, I thought, ‘Oh, wow, they took the time to tell me exactly what wasn’t working. And that can actually help me make the book better when it does find a home.’

The rejection letters that I… have gotten for three books now have been some of the most useful constructive criticism that I’ve gotten in my career.

When I first pitched my earlier book, “What Stands in a Storm,” I hadn’t done what I call the ‘casting process’ to figure out who my central characters were. Everyone who rejected it said, ‘We love the writing and topic, but we don’t see a central cast of characters that the reader is going to invest in and care about.’ I knew the next time around, I would have that process done.

The rejections for the Polly Klaas book cited different reasons and were contradictory. Some thought it was too dramatic — better for TV or a movie — while others wanted more drama. I knew something was off here because they’re all saying no for different reasons. When I got the final rejection, I read it thinking, ‘I should feel really devastated that I’ve put all this work and all this time into this, and it’s not going anywhere.’ Instead, I had a really strong gut instinct that it simply was not the right time. You can’t force a story to be ready; the story will let you know when it’s ready. So I set it aside, worked on a couple of other books and came back to it. A friend later read the proposal and said, ‘I think you were ahead of the (true crime) market. I think the time is now.’

I think a lot about story form — how different components of a story can be told in a magazine treatment versus a news story versus a podcast or documentary — and how much story shape depends on the creator’s vision for it. How and when did you first know that the subject you had on your hands warranted a book? Which signals made that clear to you?
The investigation itself was so big and complex, it was way too much for a magazine piece. All of the long-form treatments about the Klaas case that I had seen, whether TV or print, basically told what happened in the beginning and then skipped to two months later. So much was going on inside the investigation in a way that was invisible to the public. I realized that a lot of things that happened in the middle spoke to those bigger, ‘so-what’ questions.

I love structure and obsess about it. But I decided the best structure for this was a pretty simple chronology, with a few deviations when things are happening simultaneously. I didn’t get fancy. I started with a timeline tracking exactly what happened minute by minute and color-coded it by point-of-view, which helped me determine which point-of-view each chapter would be written from.

What was the process like for finding an agent who was the right fit?
So much of it is networking and talking to several people. Ideally, you have a writer friend who can make a connection so you’re a known entity and not just a cold call or blind email that’s going into the pile. For my first agent, I was invited to speak at a literary conference; the hotel bar afterward was filled with writers from the conference. He was standing with some other agents and I’d seen him on a panel. I walked up and started talking. He listened to me talk for 45 minutes about a book idea about nuns. He didn’t look over my shoulder to see who else was coming in. He was very engaged. I just kind of had a sense, ‘you get me.’ Nuns ultimately were not the right topic for my first book, but we stayed in touch and he was my agent for “What Stands in a Storm.”

When it comes to the agent, publisher and editor, can you break down the division of labor and order of operations? Who does what?
Your agent is there to help you get the proposal in shape and make sure you have a focused idea that is a viable, sellable book option. They’re not going to let you write a proposal about something they think there’s no market for, has already been done or that they can’t sell. They serve as your first editor and help you get the proposal in tip-top shape. Along with the research, you figure out the title, subtitle and angle, as well as distill it into a one-breath pitch.  If you can say what your book in one breath, then you have a focused idea. Your agent is a bit of a cheerleader, counselor and sounding board. They also read the fine print of contracts. Agents are there to help protect you and give you advice.

The editor pretty much represents the publisher, makes sure you’re on track and can help if you hit a snag or need to talk something through while you’re writing.

My publicist came in when the manuscript was in the final stages of editing. Later, you’ll hear from sales, marketing and publicity departments.

Why is finding the right match for each of those respective roles important?
Your editor is whoever decides to bid on your book. You have more control over who your agent is and you need good chemistry — someone who you instinctively trust, loves your work, knows how to leverage your strengths and sees what you’re worth.

A good time to reach out to an agency is when you have a proposal. If you don’t have a proposal, they don’t really have much to react to other than your portfolio. One tip for knowing who to reach out to is go to a physical bookstore and spend some time browsing the shelf where the book that you want to write would exist. Look at the other books on that shelf, open them up and look at the acknowledgments, because everyone always thanks their agent in the acknowledgments. You can see which agents cover these topics.

The financial returns of a book — whether it’s the advance after the proposal sells, or the sales of the actual book — come a long time down the road, many years after you’ve spent the time to do all that reporting. From a financial perspective, how do you manage making enough time to write the book while doing other work that pays the bills?
Cash flow is the freelancer’s nightmare. The majority of successful freelancers probably have a second gig that provides some income stability; it might not be as fun and sexy, but evens out the peaks and valleys. Books are my main source of income, supplemented by other freelance income and teaching. A lot of people teach, have a PR or marketing job or some other situation where that’s the primary income, and then they carve out time to write. I think that can be really successful because it’s pretty hard to write for more than a few hours a day, after which point your productivity goes down.

Can you walk us through the nuts and bolts of those numbers?
What people don’t realize is that a book advance is not paid out in advance. I’m going to be tacky and talk about money because I think it’s helpful for aspiring authors to know how the publishing business works. Let’s say you get a $100,000 book advance. Six figures! Sounds great, right? In reality, you get 25% of that upon signing your contract. Your agent takes the standard 15% cut, so deduct $3,750, and you have $21,250 in gross income.

Now set 30% of that number aside for quarterly estimated taxes. Now you have $14,875. But you need to stretch that out for 18 months, because your next quarter of the advance isn’t paid until the book is not only written, but edited, revised, and accepted by the publisher. So that’s $826.39 a month of net income. Which explains why you need a second job, a breadwinner spouse, or a steady amount of freelance work on top of the book.

The last portion of the advance comes well after your publication date when the paperback comes out.

I quit my job to write my first book because my husband had a great job. Then he lost it. In the 18 months of writing and editing “What Stands in a Storm,” I also wrote 50 other freelance stories and 7,000 words for a coffee table book about Christmas in the South.

What insights do you know now about the book selling or writing process that you didn’t know your first time around and have learned along the way?
If you can find stories that allow you to do research that eventually builds into your book, it subsidizes that research. But if you write anything in those paid stories that you want to use in the book, read your contracts to make sure that you retain the copyright. Second, take pictures and file them away. At some point, that can be valuable material for the book itself or social media promotion. And third, get ready for the fact that you are not done once you turn the book in. When it goes to press, you have to switch into marketing and promotion mode. This is very uncomfortable for the majority of writers because we want the writing to speak for itself. They don’t train you in J-school on how to read in front of a few hundred people or conduct an event that’s not just a book party. Those things have been really important.

* * *

Carly Stern is a freelance reporter based in San Francisco who covers housing, disability policy, urban life and economic inequality.

The post Nonfiction author Kim Cross breaks down how to sell a book proposal appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Carly Stern The Pitch: Landing a “definitive narrative” in The Atavist Magazine https://niemanstoryboard.org/2022/08/18/the-pitch-story-pitches-narratives-atavist-editing/ Thu, 18 Aug 2022 12:00:25 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/2022/08/18/the-pitch-story-pitches-narratives-atavist-editing/ Facebook profile page of The Atavist Magazine

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of two posts about how the pitching, reporting and editing of a complex story about crime, assumptions and mental health. Today, Storyboard talks with Atavist editor Seyward Darby about essential story elements and annotates the pitch that led to the assignment. Previously, writer Katia Savhuk answered questions about how she found and reported the story.

It can be hard to find an editor who gives a writer free rein to dig deep, immerse in a single story and convey all the wonders they find on their reporting journey. Complex stories are streamlined for space and to accommodate short attention spans. Along the way, nuance can be lost and fascinating material ends up on the cutting room floor.

The Atavist Magazine offers an oasis in this landscape, where thorny plots of twists and turns are not only tolerated, but welcomed. For editor-in-chief Seyward Darby, working to tease a story out of this thicket is part of the appeal.

Author and Atavist editor Seyward Darby
Atavist editor Seyward Darby

After Darby graduated from Duke University — where she oversaw the campus newspaper during the Duke lacrosse case — she began her professional journalism career as an assistant editor at Transitions Online in the Czech Republic. In addition to editing other writers, she did research about media needs in post-Communist countries and reported her own stories, on everything from the economics of coffee in Poland to LGBTQ rights in Croatia. She has since served as the deputy editor of Foreign Policy and assistant managing editor of The New Republic, freelanced for a variety of national publications and written a book about women in the white nationalist movement.

Darby found her way to The Atavist in 2018, where she dove into editing long, cinematic features. “With The Atavist pieces, we are trying to tell the definitive story about something,” she told me.

One such story is “A Crime Beyond Belief,” by Katia Savchuk. It’s an example of what can emerge when a writer has the time, space and passion to dig beneath headlines. The story revisited a bizarre series of home invasions in the San Francisco Bay Area and a kidnapping that was first dismissed as a “Gone Girl” style hoax. A reconsideration of the case provided the scaffolding for a profile of one man’s experience with psychosis. “No stone went unturned, no angle went unexamined,” Darby said. “I like working on stories where it’s possible to do that.”

Storyboard reached out to Darby to ask what piques her interest in pitches and how she helps writers find a narrative spine. Readers can also check out The Atavist’s submission guidelines. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity, and is followed by an annotation with Darby about the pitch that landed “A Crime Beyond Belief.”

What are some of the key ingredients you consider essential to an Atavist story?
Having a strong sense of the story’s narrative arc is crucial. We are always looking for a plotline. That can be a direct ‘Who done it?’ but it can also be subtler than that. You want to feel like you’re getting from point A all the way to point Z, and that there’s a clear, deliberate story being told along the way. As an example, we ran a beautiful reported essay about the monarch butterfly migration, which at first glance seems like an issue story. The writer and I talked about how we could form this into something with narrative propulsion. The spine of the story is about the migration of a particular butterfly. Essentially, ‘Is he going to make it?’ We used his journey as the anchor.

People pitch us all the time with great ideas, but they’re not narratives. They might have narrative elements, and we do run nut graphs occasionally. But we’re really looking for stories that you keep reading because they keep unfolding and you want to know what’s going to happen next.

We’re also looking for a sense of why a writer who pitches us should be the person to tell this story. Maybe you’ve done the legwork. Maybe you have a personal connection. Maybe you went into your grandmother’s attic and found a whole box full of documents. We like to see that you’re already thinking about things like nuance and character development. The pitch doesn’t necessarily have to be very long or detailed, but we want to feel that a writer has already started to dig beneath the surface to really understand the story.

You mentioned that Atavist stories strive to be “definitive.” What does that mean to you?
I don’t feel like I’m left with questions about the action of the story. Every stone has been turned or the writer has tried to turn it, and I do not feel like things have been left untouched. Much of Katia’s story was in the earlier news headlines, but if you wanted to understand the entire story —  the definitive story — you had to piece all of those things together. And even then, you probably wouldn’t have gotten the full picture. One of the things that I found really striking was that after Katia’s piece was published several people said to me, ‘All I remember (about the original case) is that it was a hoax.’ There are so many people who never even heard that it was not a hoax, but that it was connected to these other crimes. 

Every story is infinite in its own way. You can tell a story in any direction and just keep going. But I like Atavist stories to feel like the writer gave me a very clear sense of what the story is, what the frame is and that they have filled it out. 

I’ve often wondered how to pitch a story that’s plot-driven but isn’t in past tense. Are the stories you green-light often about past events, when the writer knows where the plot begins and ends? Or is that something you and the writer figure out as they report?
If you pitch a story but say ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen,’ we’re almost certain not to assign it because of the very specific nature of what we do. That piece would make a ton of sense for a place that runs more traditional magazine features — which I love — where you go see what happens and a story comes out of that. But for The Atavist, a portion of the story needs to be known. It can be recent past; it can be distant past.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t elements where things are yet to be seen or understood. With Katia’s case, based on the initial news headlines about the the kidnapping, she could say, ‘I can tell you the story: This is what happened, this is how it got unraveled, here are the people who made errors.’ But what was to be determined was the fleshing out of Matt Muller as a character and trying to understand what drove him to commit the crimes he did. It was also about trying to understand the ways in which a lot of people lost grasp of reality. These were all things that Katia wanted to dig into, but it wasn’t like digging into them would make or break the narrative itself. 

Can you walk me through the questions you ask when you read a pitch that piques your interest?
Sometimes we think we see a narrative but need a writer to push aside some of crazy details they’ve found and take us through how this story unfolds. Another question we come back with a lot is, ‘Tell us about your access. Tell us about what your reporting strategy has been or will be.’ And increasingly, we ask, ‘Do you have exclusive access to the subject?’ A person can always talk to whoever they want to talk to, but we really want to get a sense of whether the writer feels like they have this source’s trust and there aren’t other reporters sniffing around.

Sometimes we say, ‘You know what, there’s a narrative here, but I don’t necessarily think it’s the one the writer put at the forefront.’ We might read a sentence and see an interesting narrative thread. But then the question for the writer is: ‘Can you pull it?’ We’ll run our reaction by them: ‘Have you thought about this? Would you feel comfortable with that? Is this the kind of story you would want to tell?’ We feel out how willing they would be to shift gears on their approach. I never want people to write stories that they don’t want to write. So if it’s a square-peg-in-a-round-hole situation for them, that’s no problem. No harm, no foul, and please pitch us again.

The Atavist’s stories are long. How do you decide whether a fascinating story idea can sustain 3,000 words vs. 5,000 vs. 15,000?
Running minimum 8,000-word stories is arbitrary, but it’s also our brand. It’s not because we think stories of a certain length are better; it’s literally just that this is what we do. I feel very lucky to be in a job where our rejection may be of an idea I’d love to read as a person who consumes magazines, but doesn’t quite fit our niche. We’re always thinking not just about whether it can get up to a certain length but, at key moments over the course of that length, does it feel like readers are still going to be getting something new? If we see that there’s going to be a plateau, we don’t need those extra 5,000 words. Belaboring a story just because you can is not worth it to us.

​​One thing writers ask all the time is, ‘I’ve never written anything longer than 3,000 words. Is that a problem?’ As far as I’m concerned, no. If there’s an extraordinary story that somebody wants to tell and they really want to sink their teeth into it and spend time on it and put all these words into it, that’s what we as editors love to help figure out. It’s much more about, ‘Do you have the goods? Are you committed?’ I rarely Google a writer to see if they’ve written a piece of a certain length. That’s not interesting to me.

Part of this also is recognizing what the freelance landscape looks like. Often people want to take a big swing but institutions can’t support it. One of the really lovely things about our small-scale model is that we don’t spread our resources out so wide that they’re thin. We can take time with people who want to take a big swing. Having the goods and access is so much more important to us than if you’ve written for The New Yorker four times before.

How important is the chemistry between editor and writer when considering a pitch?
The most important thing for me is somebody who is going to be communicative and collaborative, and who believes the magazine has the best interests of their story at heart. Those things are pretty easy to pick up on in the pitch or a phone call or longer correspondence.

There are some writers who just want to send you something and get an edit, which is totally fine. We’ve had a few instances where people are like, ‘Whoa! This editing is really deep and hands-on, and almost too much for me.’ I definitely want people who are willing to strip a story down to its basics and figure out how to build it back up. 

I don’t think I’m smarter than anybody. If anything, I have an inferiority complex. What I do believe is that for this kind of storytelling, two brains are better than one. It’s great when writers are willing to bounce ideas around and take direction but also challenge me —  people who are willing to get into it with an editor. That vibe is important. 

What struck you as most exciting about the story that Katia pitched?
It’s like a Russian nesting doll, right? It’s like, ‘There’s this one thing. But then oh my god, there’s this other thing! And then another thing!’ It all kind of compounds into this big mess. So many screw-ups at every turn. But another thing that really drew me to it was the meta aspect  — about assumptions that people have about how crime happens, who commits crimes, what a crime looks like.

This story really was about people’s assumptions and expectations, how they’ve been shaped, what has shaped them and how bad assumptions can have profound real-world impacts. There was so much to unpack. There was an incredible story to tell here — scenes, twists, cliffhangers, plot points — but also all of these fascinating thematic pieces. It was clear that Katia saw all of those. 

A messy, complicated, dense situation can make a story narratively interesting. But are there times where you read something and think it’s just too messy or there’s no real through-line?
I can’t think of an example where I’ve read something and thought I can’t find the through-line or see what the plot is. It’s more the case that sometimes those things don’t exist.’ That’s not because a writer has failed; it’s just because the story just did not lend itself in the way that we had hoped for. 

I’m going to regret saying this because people are going to start sending me big messes, but I actually really enjoy big messes sometimes. Because I’m like, alright, crack my knuckles, let’s go. Let’s put this puzzle together.

Annotation: Katia Savchuk’s pitch for the story that became “A Crime Beyond Belief” is used with her permission. Storyboard’s questions to Seyward Darby are in red; Darby’s responses in blue.

***


Hi Seyward,

Nice to meet you! (Name omitted) mentioned that you might be interested in the story I've been reporting on the so-called "Gone Girl" kidnapping that took place in Vallejo, California, a couple of years ago. 

I'm including a pitch below…

A bit more about me: I'm a freelance magazine writer based in Oakland and a former reporter at Forbes. I've also written for Mother Jones, Pacific Standard, The Washington Post, The Guardian, San Francisco Magazine, and other publications. You can see some of my clips on my website. 

 Thanks for taking a look!

Best,
Katia

 

An Unbelievable Crime

How did a former Marine and Harvard-trained lawyer become a convicted kidnapper? And why wouldn't anyone believe his victims?

Around three o’clock in the morning on March 23, 2015, Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn were awakened by a blinding flash. A man wearing a black wetsuit stood at the foot of their bed. He held an assault pistol that beamed light into their eyes and tracked a red dot across their foreheads. In the dark, they couldn’t tell the weapon was actually a Nerf Super Soaker painted black, with a flashlight and laser pointer tacked on with duct tape. What were your initial impressions after reading this opening paragraph?The first thing I thought was that I hadn’t heard mention of Nerf Super Soakers since I was a kid. They still make those things!? That thought was followed by: What on earth is happening here? I needed to know. 

The young couple, both physical therapists, had been dating for seven months. That night, Huskins was staying over at Quinn’s eggshell yellow house on Mare Island, a placid bedroom community carved out of the city of Vallejo, an hour north of San Francisco. They’d spent Sunday evening watching television and sipping beer and whiskey before going to bed. What effect did these details have?Katia was demonstrating her ability to incorporate colorful details into storytelling and bring readers close to the characters and their interactions. There’s also a hint of how she would approach pacing: She would take her time, build scenes. Pacing matters a lot in Atavist stories, since we’re so narrative-forward. A writer flexing their muscles in a pitch to show their ability to build tension is never a bad thing.

The intruder told Quinn to turn over, calling him by his first name. He ordered Huskins to bind her boyfriend’s hands and feet behind his back with zip ties, like a trussed chicken. It conjures a haunting image, but the phrase “trussed chicken” is so vivid and evocative. He tied up Huskins himself, then told the pair to hop to the bedroom closet, where he covered their eyes with blacked-out swim goggles and placed headphones over their ears. Soothing music gave way to a pre-recorded male voice: Please remain calm. The recording instructed the couple to drink a dose of Nyquil laced with diazepam, a sedative, and they felt the man take their blood pressure. We’re a professional group here to collect debts, the voice said. If you don’t cooperate, your partner will be hurt. Why was including this dialogue effective as part of the pitch?The dialogue helped establish what the tone of the story would be — chilling! — while also hinting at some of the piece’s central questions, including what the perpetrator was trying to achieve with the crime, and whether or not he acted alone.

 When Quinn came to, he was on his living room couch, and his girlfriend was gone. He cut himself free with scissors the intruder had left out. When he checked his phone, he found an email demanding two payments of $8,500 for Huskins’ safe return. He stood behind a thin strip of red tape the kidnapper had stuck on the floor and eyed a camera mounted on the ceiling to monitor his movements. If Quinn crossed the line or called the cops, the man had threatened to kill Huskins and harm his family. For more than eight hours, Quinn agonized over what to do. Finally, he called the police.

Vallejo authorities corralled nearly 150 officers from local and federal agencies to mount an around-the-clock search for Huskins. But her boyfriend soon realized the cops weren’t also hunting for a kidnapper. Instead, they made Quinn, who is doe-eyed with boy-band good looks, change into a prison jumpsuit and interrogated him for 18 hours in a room without windows or clocks. They drew blood and DNA samples, asked him to take a polygraph and wouldn’t let him see his family for hours. “We know you’re lying and that you killed Denise,” he remembers detectives telling him. “If you continue telling us this crazy story, we’re going to paint you as a cold, calculating monster.” 

Two days after the home invasion, around 10 in the morning, Huskins turned up near her mother’s home in Huntington Beach, a seven-hour drive south of Vallejo. She told police that an intruder had thrown her in the trunk of a car, with her overnight bag and purse, and driven her to a quiet house with blacked-out windows. The man bound her to a bed with zip ties and a bike lock, she recalled, and raped her twice on tape, claiming his boss was forcing him to for blackmail. He let her bathe and brush her teeth and offered her pizza and wine. “I admire your strength and wish we’d met under different circumstances,” he told her. Eventually, the kidnapper drove her to her hometown in Southern California.

Vallejo police didn’t buy her story, either. They thought it was strange that a kidnapper would drop Huskins off at her mother’s doorstep with sunglasses and a backpack. The ransom had been paltry, and it hadn’t been paid. Officers noted that she had no visible injuries, aside from “darker impression circles” around her eyes, and she wasn’t crying or shaking. Are you ok with seeing direct quotes without the source attributed in a pitch? Do you want to know where these details came from?I am OK with it, so long as when I follow up with the question — "Where did this quote come from”  — the writer has the answer. Tales of a wetsuit-clad visitor wielding lights and lasers sounded straight out of science fiction. In a press conference 10 hours after Huskins’ reappearance, Vallejo Police Lt. Kenny Park, called the incident “an orchestrated event.” He claimed the couple had “plundered valuable resources away from our community” and vowed to explore grounds for criminal charges. The press nicknamed Huskins the “Gone Girl,” after the heroine in Gillian Flynn’s bestselling thriller who faked her own disappearance to frame her husband. “Gone Girl” is what first made headlines after this crime was committed, but Katia waits until several paragraphs into the pitch to mention it. How did you think about where this reference was placed in the pitch, and why did or didn’t this choice work for you?I’m not sure I even thought about the placement, to be honest. The information stood out in the way I think Katia intended — it’s grabby, the kind of thing that would almost certainly be in the elevator pitch of the story, and possibly even in the dek. In retrospect, though, the fact that it comes deeper in the pitch I think also signals that Katia knew the story was bigger than the “Gone Girl” framing so many media outlets had latched onto. It’s one wild fact in a story full of them. It’s not even the wildest! The film version had come out five months earlier, and Huskins, with her long blonde hair, strongly resembled the lead actress, Rosamund Pike.

A strange source came to the couple’s defense. The day after Vallejo police called the kidnapping a hoax, Henry Lee, a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, got an email from “denisehuskinskidnapping@hotmail.com.” The writer claimed to speak for a group of “professional thieves...a sort of Ocean’s Eleven, gentleman criminals” who had stolen cars before a foray into abduction for ransom. “Ms. Huskins was absolutely kidnapped. We did it,” the letter said. The writer said he deeply regretted his actions and had developed a case of “reverse Stockholm syndrome” after spending time with Huskins. This is a fascinating line — intriguing, and also confusing — about the kidnapper’s mindset. As proof, the sender attached a photo of the fake gun he said was used in the crime. Two days later, Lee received another email describing more details of the kidnapping and expressing a desire to defend “two good people thrown under the bus by the police and media.” Vallejo police didn’t budge. At this point in the pitch, what did you think this story was about? And who did you think would be the main characters?I thought it was about a crime that didn’t make much sense to anyone who experienced it or observed it — and it was possible that even the perpetrator didn’t understand what they were doing or why. I also thought the story was likely in part about people making bad, short-sighted assumptions, and why they did so. 

Two months after Huskins’ return, 37-year-old Misty Carausu got a call from her boss. “Pack a bag,” he told her. So far, we’ve been introduced to a handful of different subjects in this pitch. How many people do you like to see in a pitch, and how many is too much? At any point did you find it difficult to keep track of how these subjects related to different plot points?It really depends on the story, but introducing characters for the sake of saying “hey look, there are lots of characters here” isn’t a great idea. In any pitch, information should be included for a reason, because it serves a purpose. In this case, I think Katia was signaling that this wasn’t a story with a clear protagonist, or even a single person whose trajectory would guide the project. It was necessarily about a cast of characters. She did a nice job demonstrating that she (1) knew this and (2) was going to be able to make each character/subject come alive on the page. It was her first day on the job as a police detective in Dublin, a city 40 miles south of Vallejo. Petite and bubbly, with highlighted, blown-out hair and gray-green eyes, Carausu had been a single mother working at Safeway when a sheriff recruited her to the force, after he investigated the sexual assault of her coworker. What did details like this demonstrate to you about Katia’s ability to write? How important are reporting chops vs. writing prowess to you in a pitch?There was no question Katia could write and report. She’d already gathered so much information, and she was able to present it in a compelling way. At the end of the day, the thing that matters most to us at The Atavist is narrative. A pitch can be gorgeously written, but if it lacks a clear sense of plot, we’re going to come back and say “No thanks” or, if we detect a hint of a narrative, “What’s the story here?” Writing ability matters, sure, but it never supersedes the strength of a story idea. The previous night, her colleagues had responded to a call about a home invasion in an upscale community. Around 3:30 in the morning, a couple awoke to find a man in dark clothing pointing a green laser at them. He tried to restrain them with zip ties, but the husband fought back, and his wife ran to the bathroom and called the police. The intruder fled but dropped his cell phone. Police traced it to a Matthew Muller, a 38-year-old man living in his family’s cabin in South Lake Tahoe, a tranquil vacation community about 150 miles from Vallejo. It’s interesting to me that Muller is such a core subject to this story but we aren’t introduced to him until the latter third of this pitch. What were your initial thoughts or impressions on this? What purpose do you think this delayed introduction, or reveal, served?If I recall correctly, Muller’s role in the story became clearer in my follow-ups with Katia, starting with a phone call shortly after I got the pitch. We talked a lot about what new information and nuance she could bring to a story that had already been reported pretty widely. In short, in telling the definitive story about the Vallejo case, what could she add? Her access to Muller and her interest in showing how his own biography was crucial to the tapestry of the story elevated the pitch even further. But it’s important to say here that a pitch doesn’t have to be a rock-solid roadmap for how a story is going to unfold; it’s a suggestion of a path. Part of the writer-editor relationship is figuring out whether that path is the right one, the most scenic one. Almost always we realize there are ways to enhance it or redirect it. 

Carausu, wearing tactical gear, was fourth in line when the cops rammed down the door. Muller, who resembled Charlie Sheen, said nothing as officers escorted him out. The cabin was crammed with cardboard boxes, and inward-facing mirrors blocked the windows. As Carausu packed laptops, a ski mask and a stun gun into brown paper bags, she sensed they were onto something more than a single failed home invasion. These details paint a really clear picture and are quite chilling. A few hours later, Carausu and her colleagues searched a stolen white Mustang parked nearby. Muller’s ID had been found on the front seat. In the trunk, Carausu found zip ties and a cache of swim goggles, some coated with black duct tape. Carausu picked one up. A lone blonde hair hung from the strap.

As Carausu dug into Muller’s past, he turned out to be an unlikely suspect. The son of a teacher and school administrator, he grew up in a well-off suburb of Sacramento, got straight A’s and played trumpet in his high-school band. He was an ex-Marine who graduated summa cum laude from Pomona College and then from Harvard Law School, where he was reportedly among the youngest ever to join the school’s faculty. But Muller struggled to keep his career as an immigration attorney afloat amid a diagnosis of bipolar disorder with psychotic features, convinced his bosses were spying on him. In 2011, the San Francisco firm where he’d worked filed a restraining order against him, accusing him of stealing confidential files and trying to cover his tracks. In 2014, he filed for bankruptcy, and the following year he was disbarred. There are a lot of twists to follow and keep track of — and this paragraph, in particular, is rich with details, contextual information and dates. How do you think about what level of detail you want to see in a pitch for a narrative story? Do you pay close attention to how a writer structures a pitch, particularly a long one like this?We do pay close attention to how a writer structures a pitch because it offers a window into their storytelling chops. Are they thinking about narrative propulsion? Are they thinking about tension? Are they thinking about twists and surprises? They don’t have to have the whole project figured out — the editing process exists in no small part to organize a piece’s constituent parts to achieve the best possible narrative — but they do need to show a dedication to plot-driven storytelling. 

 Detective Carausu’s footwork eventually put Muller on the radar of Vallejo police and the FBI. Authorities also started investigating whether he was behind two similar home invasions in Palo Alto and Mountain View in 2009; he’d been a suspect in the Palo Alto case, but police didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him. In September 2016, Muller pleaded guilty to one count of kidnapping, and the following March he was sentenced to 40 years in prison. In January 2018, the Solano County district attorney filed rape charges against him in state court; a trial date has not yet been set. In March 2018, Huskins and Quinn won a $2.5 million settlement after suing the city of Vallejo and two of its police officers for defamation.

This stranger-than-fiction tale has never been chronicled beyond local news articles, a 20/20 interview with the victims and a brief WIRED story in 2015 that focused on Muller’s technical prowess. I’d like to recount the narrative of this bizarre crime, including the untold story of Muller’s psychological decline and the delusions that drove him to violence. I think the story will illuminate the extent to which pop culture and the modern fictions we’re deluged with mediate our experience of the world, sometimes becoming more real than reality itself. To me, this previous sentence is really at the heart of what the story is truly about and unites all of the different threads that run through it. In your mind, what was the benefit of building up the pitch and then waiting until the end to express this core theme, rather than putting it high up and shaping the way that the reader filtered subsequent paragraphs?I could already sense by the time I got to this sentence that this was likely the heart of the project — a meditation on how fiction influences reality, particularly when it comes to the true-crime genre. That Katia then articulated it so clearly was perfect. Atavist stories have a lot of buildup, so it’s absolutely fine when a pitch does too. We’re also interested in letting stories speak for themselves, rather than banging readers over the head with whatever “the point” is. Katia showed that she could do that, while also being very clear about her grasp of the point. These delusions found their extreme in Muller, who variously saw himself as Batman, part of an Ocean’s Eleven-style posse, a black market “startup” with a Robin Hood ethos, and (as a Harvard alum writing a manifesto holed up in a cabin) a foil to the Unabomber. But we also see it in Vallejo police detective Mathew Mustard, who couldn’t help viewing Huskins through the “Gone Girl” lens, and the cops who had trouble seeing a handsome former Marine and Harvard alum as a criminal when he was questioned in connection with earlier home invasions. Carausu, the detective who cracked the case, talks about feeling like she’s acting out the detective shows she watches on TV. Muller’s wife, who married him right after he was sentenced, is following her own script, with Muller as underdog, victim and advocate for the innocent. The media and legal narratives largely paint Muller as a calculating monster, either downplaying the role of his mental illness or feeding into cultural tropes of the congenitally evil maniac portrayed in films like Psycho or American Psycho. We live in a kind of surreality, seeing the real in terms of the manufactured, and those delusions can take us astray. What a lovely and powerful sentence.

I have access to many of the people involved. I interviewed Muller’s mother, Joyce Zarback, who shared previously unreported details about his life and a series of mental breakdowns leading up to his criminal convictions, as well as psychological evaluations, letters, and family photos. I’ve begun interviewing Muller himself in Solano County Jail via video conference. He has not spoken to the press in depth and has agreed not to talk with other magazine writers. He is comfortable discussing anything other than the crimes he is accused of on the record at this point; he has agreed to talk about the crimes given a written agreement that the story will not be published before his trial is over. 

Muller’s third wife, Diana Dai, will likely speak with me. Muller’s father, half-sister, and most recent ex-wife are also considering talking. I’ve interviewed Dublin police detective Misty Carausu, and other detectives on the case are also willing to speak. I’ve met with Huskins and Quinn, who are now married, and had several, brief conversations. They aren’t willing to talk because they’re working on a book, but may participate in fact checking.At the preliminary hearing, the victims testified in greater detail than they ever have about their experience, providing ample fodder for a narrative of the crime. Quinn’s brother is also considering speaking with me. I’m struck by how much legwork Katia had already accomplished and the clarity of her path forward. Is the depth of reporting that Katia had already pursued typical of Atavist pitches you read?I would say Katia had done a bit more legwork than the average writer who pitches us. Freelancing is hard, and I don’t expect people pitching us to have done a ton of uncompensated reporting. But we do need writers to show some degree of legwork.When we’re evaluating a pitch, we are looking for whether a writer has a clear sense of the narrative and to be convinced that they’re the right person to tell the story because of how they’ve positioned themselves vis a vis the subject matter. Anyone can read a news brief or a couple of articles about, say, a criminal case or compelling adventure story and craft a good pitch about it. But do they have the access (to sources, to documents, to on-the-ground events) that they need? If they don’t, can they get it, and how? If it’s a buzzy/newsy topic, have they secured exclusivity? I have reviewed court records related to Muller's failed Dublin home invasion and will reach out to the couple involved (they testified in court, but I haven't seen them quoted in the press). I will also reach out to Muller’s classmates and teachers, former colleagues, neighbors, Quinn’s ex-fiancée (Muller’s intended victim), the victims’ lawyers, and other law enforcement officers involved in the investigations. I have access to detailed court records from Muller’s criminal cases and the victims’ suit against the city of Vallejo, and I will attend Muller’s trial in Solano County. 

Would you be interested in this story for The Atavist?

 Thank you,

Katia Savchuk

 ***

Carly Stern is a freelance reporter based in San Francisco who covers housing, disability policy, urban life and economic inequality.

The post The Pitch: Landing a “definitive narrative” in The Atavist Magazine appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of two posts about how the pitching, reporting and editing of a complex story about crime, assumptions and mental health. Today, Storyboard talks with Atavist editor Seyward Darby about essential story elements and annotates the pitch that led to the assignment. Previously, writer Katia Savhuk answered questions about how she found and reported the story.

It can be hard to find an editor who gives a writer free rein to dig deep, immerse in a single story and convey all the wonders they find on their reporting journey. Complex stories are streamlined for space and to accommodate short attention spans. Along the way, nuance can be lost and fascinating material ends up on the cutting room floor.

The Atavist Magazine offers an oasis in this landscape, where thorny plots of twists and turns are not only tolerated, but welcomed. For editor-in-chief Seyward Darby, working to tease a story out of this thicket is part of the appeal.

Author and Atavist editor Seyward Darby
Atavist editor Seyward Darby

After Darby graduated from Duke University — where she oversaw the campus newspaper during the Duke lacrosse case — she began her professional journalism career as an assistant editor at Transitions Online in the Czech Republic. In addition to editing other writers, she did research about media needs in post-Communist countries and reported her own stories, on everything from the economics of coffee in Poland to LGBTQ rights in Croatia. She has since served as the deputy editor of Foreign Policy and assistant managing editor of The New Republic, freelanced for a variety of national publications and written a book about women in the white nationalist movement.

Darby found her way to The Atavist in 2018, where she dove into editing long, cinematic features. “With The Atavist pieces, we are trying to tell the definitive story about something,” she told me.

One such story is “A Crime Beyond Belief,” by Katia Savchuk. It’s an example of what can emerge when a writer has the time, space and passion to dig beneath headlines. The story revisited a bizarre series of home invasions in the San Francisco Bay Area and a kidnapping that was first dismissed as a “Gone Girl” style hoax. A reconsideration of the case provided the scaffolding for a profile of one man’s experience with psychosis. “No stone went unturned, no angle went unexamined,” Darby said. “I like working on stories where it’s possible to do that.”

Storyboard reached out to Darby to ask what piques her interest in pitches and how she helps writers find a narrative spine. Readers can also check out The Atavist’s submission guidelines. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity, and is followed by an annotation with Darby about the pitch that landed “A Crime Beyond Belief.”

What are some of the key ingredients you consider essential to an Atavist story?
Having a strong sense of the story’s narrative arc is crucial. We are always looking for a plotline. That can be a direct ‘Who done it?’ but it can also be subtler than that. You want to feel like you’re getting from point A all the way to point Z, and that there’s a clear, deliberate story being told along the way. As an example, we ran a beautiful reported essay about the monarch butterfly migration, which at first glance seems like an issue story. The writer and I talked about how we could form this into something with narrative propulsion. The spine of the story is about the migration of a particular butterfly. Essentially, ‘Is he going to make it?’ We used his journey as the anchor.

People pitch us all the time with great ideas, but they’re not narratives. They might have narrative elements, and we do run nut graphs occasionally. But we’re really looking for stories that you keep reading because they keep unfolding and you want to know what’s going to happen next.

We’re also looking for a sense of why a writer who pitches us should be the person to tell this story. Maybe you’ve done the legwork. Maybe you have a personal connection. Maybe you went into your grandmother’s attic and found a whole box full of documents. We like to see that you’re already thinking about things like nuance and character development. The pitch doesn’t necessarily have to be very long or detailed, but we want to feel that a writer has already started to dig beneath the surface to really understand the story.

You mentioned that Atavist stories strive to be “definitive.” What does that mean to you?
I don’t feel like I’m left with questions about the action of the story. Every stone has been turned or the writer has tried to turn it, and I do not feel like things have been left untouched. Much of Katia’s story was in the earlier news headlines, but if you wanted to understand the entire story —  the definitive story — you had to piece all of those things together. And even then, you probably wouldn’t have gotten the full picture. One of the things that I found really striking was that after Katia’s piece was published several people said to me, ‘All I remember (about the original case) is that it was a hoax.’ There are so many people who never even heard that it was not a hoax, but that it was connected to these other crimes. 

Every story is infinite in its own way. You can tell a story in any direction and just keep going. But I like Atavist stories to feel like the writer gave me a very clear sense of what the story is, what the frame is and that they have filled it out. 

I’ve often wondered how to pitch a story that’s plot-driven but isn’t in past tense. Are the stories you green-light often about past events, when the writer knows where the plot begins and ends? Or is that something you and the writer figure out as they report?
If you pitch a story but say ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen,’ we’re almost certain not to assign it because of the very specific nature of what we do. That piece would make a ton of sense for a place that runs more traditional magazine features — which I love — where you go see what happens and a story comes out of that. But for The Atavist, a portion of the story needs to be known. It can be recent past; it can be distant past.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t elements where things are yet to be seen or understood. With Katia’s case, based on the initial news headlines about the the kidnapping, she could say, ‘I can tell you the story: This is what happened, this is how it got unraveled, here are the people who made errors.’ But what was to be determined was the fleshing out of Matt Muller as a character and trying to understand what drove him to commit the crimes he did. It was also about trying to understand the ways in which a lot of people lost grasp of reality. These were all things that Katia wanted to dig into, but it wasn’t like digging into them would make or break the narrative itself. 

Can you walk me through the questions you ask when you read a pitch that piques your interest?
Sometimes we think we see a narrative but need a writer to push aside some of crazy details they’ve found and take us through how this story unfolds. Another question we come back with a lot is, ‘Tell us about your access. Tell us about what your reporting strategy has been or will be.’ And increasingly, we ask, ‘Do you have exclusive access to the subject?’ A person can always talk to whoever they want to talk to, but we really want to get a sense of whether the writer feels like they have this source’s trust and there aren’t other reporters sniffing around.

Sometimes we say, ‘You know what, there’s a narrative here, but I don’t necessarily think it’s the one the writer put at the forefront.’ We might read a sentence and see an interesting narrative thread. But then the question for the writer is: ‘Can you pull it?’ We’ll run our reaction by them: ‘Have you thought about this? Would you feel comfortable with that? Is this the kind of story you would want to tell?’ We feel out how willing they would be to shift gears on their approach. I never want people to write stories that they don’t want to write. So if it’s a square-peg-in-a-round-hole situation for them, that’s no problem. No harm, no foul, and please pitch us again.

The Atavist’s stories are long. How do you decide whether a fascinating story idea can sustain 3,000 words vs. 5,000 vs. 15,000?
Running minimum 8,000-word stories is arbitrary, but it’s also our brand. It’s not because we think stories of a certain length are better; it’s literally just that this is what we do. I feel very lucky to be in a job where our rejection may be of an idea I’d love to read as a person who consumes magazines, but doesn’t quite fit our niche. We’re always thinking not just about whether it can get up to a certain length but, at key moments over the course of that length, does it feel like readers are still going to be getting something new? If we see that there’s going to be a plateau, we don’t need those extra 5,000 words. Belaboring a story just because you can is not worth it to us.

​​One thing writers ask all the time is, ‘I’ve never written anything longer than 3,000 words. Is that a problem?’ As far as I’m concerned, no. If there’s an extraordinary story that somebody wants to tell and they really want to sink their teeth into it and spend time on it and put all these words into it, that’s what we as editors love to help figure out. It’s much more about, ‘Do you have the goods? Are you committed?’ I rarely Google a writer to see if they’ve written a piece of a certain length. That’s not interesting to me.

Part of this also is recognizing what the freelance landscape looks like. Often people want to take a big swing but institutions can’t support it. One of the really lovely things about our small-scale model is that we don’t spread our resources out so wide that they’re thin. We can take time with people who want to take a big swing. Having the goods and access is so much more important to us than if you’ve written for The New Yorker four times before.

How important is the chemistry between editor and writer when considering a pitch?
The most important thing for me is somebody who is going to be communicative and collaborative, and who believes the magazine has the best interests of their story at heart. Those things are pretty easy to pick up on in the pitch or a phone call or longer correspondence.

There are some writers who just want to send you something and get an edit, which is totally fine. We’ve had a few instances where people are like, ‘Whoa! This editing is really deep and hands-on, and almost too much for me.’ I definitely want people who are willing to strip a story down to its basics and figure out how to build it back up. 

I don’t think I’m smarter than anybody. If anything, I have an inferiority complex. What I do believe is that for this kind of storytelling, two brains are better than one. It’s great when writers are willing to bounce ideas around and take direction but also challenge me —  people who are willing to get into it with an editor. That vibe is important. 

What struck you as most exciting about the story that Katia pitched?
It’s like a Russian nesting doll, right? It’s like, ‘There’s this one thing. But then oh my god, there’s this other thing! And then another thing!’ It all kind of compounds into this big mess. So many screw-ups at every turn. But another thing that really drew me to it was the meta aspect  — about assumptions that people have about how crime happens, who commits crimes, what a crime looks like.

This story really was about people’s assumptions and expectations, how they’ve been shaped, what has shaped them and how bad assumptions can have profound real-world impacts. There was so much to unpack. There was an incredible story to tell here — scenes, twists, cliffhangers, plot points — but also all of these fascinating thematic pieces. It was clear that Katia saw all of those. 

A messy, complicated, dense situation can make a story narratively interesting. But are there times where you read something and think it’s just too messy or there’s no real through-line?
I can’t think of an example where I’ve read something and thought I can’t find the through-line or see what the plot is. It’s more the case that sometimes those things don’t exist.’ That’s not because a writer has failed; it’s just because the story just did not lend itself in the way that we had hoped for. 

I’m going to regret saying this because people are going to start sending me big messes, but I actually really enjoy big messes sometimes. Because I’m like, alright, crack my knuckles, let’s go. Let’s put this puzzle together.

Annotation: Katia Savchuk’s pitch for the story that became “A Crime Beyond Belief” is used with her permission. Storyboard’s questions to Seyward Darby are in red; Darby’s responses in blue.

***

Hi Seyward,

Nice to meet you! (Name omitted) mentioned that you might be interested in the story I've been reporting on the so-called "Gone Girl" kidnapping that took place in Vallejo, California, a couple of years ago. 

I'm including a pitch below…

A bit more about me: I'm a freelance magazine writer based in Oakland and a former reporter at Forbes. I've also written for Mother Jones, Pacific Standard, The Washington Post, The Guardian, San Francisco Magazine, and other publications. You can see some of my clips on my website. 

 Thanks for taking a look!

Best,
Katia

 

An Unbelievable Crime

How did a former Marine and Harvard-trained lawyer become a convicted kidnapper? And why wouldn't anyone believe his victims?

Around three o’clock in the morning on March 23, 2015, Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn were awakened by a blinding flash. A man wearing a black wetsuit stood at the foot of their bed. He held an assault pistol that beamed light into their eyes and tracked a red dot across their foreheads. In the dark, they couldn’t tell the weapon was actually a Nerf Super Soaker painted black, with a flashlight and laser pointer tacked on with duct tape. What were your initial impressions after reading this opening paragraph?The first thing I thought was that I hadn’t heard mention of Nerf Super Soakers since I was a kid. They still make those things!? That thought was followed by: What on earth is happening here? I needed to know. 

The young couple, both physical therapists, had been dating for seven months. That night, Huskins was staying over at Quinn’s eggshell yellow house on Mare Island, a placid bedroom community carved out of the city of Vallejo, an hour north of San Francisco. They’d spent Sunday evening watching television and sipping beer and whiskey before going to bed. What effect did these details have?Katia was demonstrating her ability to incorporate colorful details into storytelling and bring readers close to the characters and their interactions. There’s also a hint of how she would approach pacing: She would take her time, build scenes. Pacing matters a lot in Atavist stories, since we’re so narrative-forward. A writer flexing their muscles in a pitch to show their ability to build tension is never a bad thing.

The intruder told Quinn to turn over, calling him by his first name. He ordered Huskins to bind her boyfriend’s hands and feet behind his back with zip ties, like a trussed chicken. It conjures a haunting image, but the phrase “trussed chicken” is so vivid and evocative. He tied up Huskins himself, then told the pair to hop to the bedroom closet, where he covered their eyes with blacked-out swim goggles and placed headphones over their ears. Soothing music gave way to a pre-recorded male voice: Please remain calm. The recording instructed the couple to drink a dose of Nyquil laced with diazepam, a sedative, and they felt the man take their blood pressure. We’re a professional group here to collect debts, the voice said. If you don’t cooperate, your partner will be hurt. Why was including this dialogue effective as part of the pitch?The dialogue helped establish what the tone of the story would be — chilling! — while also hinting at some of the piece’s central questions, including what the perpetrator was trying to achieve with the crime, and whether or not he acted alone.

 When Quinn came to, he was on his living room couch, and his girlfriend was gone. He cut himself free with scissors the intruder had left out. When he checked his phone, he found an email demanding two payments of $8,500 for Huskins’ safe return. He stood behind a thin strip of red tape the kidnapper had stuck on the floor and eyed a camera mounted on the ceiling to monitor his movements. If Quinn crossed the line or called the cops, the man had threatened to kill Huskins and harm his family. For more than eight hours, Quinn agonized over what to do. Finally, he called the police.

Vallejo authorities corralled nearly 150 officers from local and federal agencies to mount an around-the-clock search for Huskins. But her boyfriend soon realized the cops weren’t also hunting for a kidnapper. Instead, they made Quinn, who is doe-eyed with boy-band good looks, change into a prison jumpsuit and interrogated him for 18 hours in a room without windows or clocks. They drew blood and DNA samples, asked him to take a polygraph and wouldn’t let him see his family for hours. “We know you’re lying and that you killed Denise,” he remembers detectives telling him. “If you continue telling us this crazy story, we’re going to paint you as a cold, calculating monster.” 

Two days after the home invasion, around 10 in the morning, Huskins turned up near her mother’s home in Huntington Beach, a seven-hour drive south of Vallejo. She told police that an intruder had thrown her in the trunk of a car, with her overnight bag and purse, and driven her to a quiet house with blacked-out windows. The man bound her to a bed with zip ties and a bike lock, she recalled, and raped her twice on tape, claiming his boss was forcing him to for blackmail. He let her bathe and brush her teeth and offered her pizza and wine. “I admire your strength and wish we’d met under different circumstances,” he told her. Eventually, the kidnapper drove her to her hometown in Southern California.

Vallejo police didn’t buy her story, either. They thought it was strange that a kidnapper would drop Huskins off at her mother’s doorstep with sunglasses and a backpack. The ransom had been paltry, and it hadn’t been paid. Officers noted that she had no visible injuries, aside from “darker impression circles” around her eyes, and she wasn’t crying or shaking. Are you ok with seeing direct quotes without the source attributed in a pitch? Do you want to know where these details came from?I am OK with it, so long as when I follow up with the question — "Where did this quote come from”  — the writer has the answer. Tales of a wetsuit-clad visitor wielding lights and lasers sounded straight out of science fiction. In a press conference 10 hours after Huskins’ reappearance, Vallejo Police Lt. Kenny Park, called the incident “an orchestrated event.” He claimed the couple had “plundered valuable resources away from our community” and vowed to explore grounds for criminal charges. The press nicknamed Huskins the “Gone Girl,” after the heroine in Gillian Flynn’s bestselling thriller who faked her own disappearance to frame her husband. “Gone Girl” is what first made headlines after this crime was committed, but Katia waits until several paragraphs into the pitch to mention it. How did you think about where this reference was placed in the pitch, and why did or didn’t this choice work for you?I’m not sure I even thought about the placement, to be honest. The information stood out in the way I think Katia intended — it’s grabby, the kind of thing that would almost certainly be in the elevator pitch of the story, and possibly even in the dek. In retrospect, though, the fact that it comes deeper in the pitch I think also signals that Katia knew the story was bigger than the “Gone Girl” framing so many media outlets had latched onto. It’s one wild fact in a story full of them. It’s not even the wildest! The film version had come out five months earlier, and Huskins, with her long blonde hair, strongly resembled the lead actress, Rosamund Pike.

A strange source came to the couple’s defense. The day after Vallejo police called the kidnapping a hoax, Henry Lee, a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, got an email from “denisehuskinskidnapping@hotmail.com.” The writer claimed to speak for a group of “professional thieves...a sort of Ocean’s Eleven, gentleman criminals” who had stolen cars before a foray into abduction for ransom. “Ms. Huskins was absolutely kidnapped. We did it,” the letter said. The writer said he deeply regretted his actions and had developed a case of “reverse Stockholm syndrome” after spending time with Huskins. This is a fascinating line — intriguing, and also confusing — about the kidnapper’s mindset. As proof, the sender attached a photo of the fake gun he said was used in the crime. Two days later, Lee received another email describing more details of the kidnapping and expressing a desire to defend “two good people thrown under the bus by the police and media.” Vallejo police didn’t budge. At this point in the pitch, what did you think this story was about? And who did you think would be the main characters?I thought it was about a crime that didn’t make much sense to anyone who experienced it or observed it — and it was possible that even the perpetrator didn’t understand what they were doing or why. I also thought the story was likely in part about people making bad, short-sighted assumptions, and why they did so. 

Two months after Huskins’ return, 37-year-old Misty Carausu got a call from her boss. “Pack a bag,” he told her. So far, we’ve been introduced to a handful of different subjects in this pitch. How many people do you like to see in a pitch, and how many is too much? At any point did you find it difficult to keep track of how these subjects related to different plot points?It really depends on the story, but introducing characters for the sake of saying “hey look, there are lots of characters here” isn’t a great idea. In any pitch, information should be included for a reason, because it serves a purpose. In this case, I think Katia was signaling that this wasn’t a story with a clear protagonist, or even a single person whose trajectory would guide the project. It was necessarily about a cast of characters. She did a nice job demonstrating that she (1) knew this and (2) was going to be able to make each character/subject come alive on the page. It was her first day on the job as a police detective in Dublin, a city 40 miles south of Vallejo. Petite and bubbly, with highlighted, blown-out hair and gray-green eyes, Carausu had been a single mother working at Safeway when a sheriff recruited her to the force, after he investigated the sexual assault of her coworker. What did details like this demonstrate to you about Katia’s ability to write? How important are reporting chops vs. writing prowess to you in a pitch?There was no question Katia could write and report. She’d already gathered so much information, and she was able to present it in a compelling way. At the end of the day, the thing that matters most to us at The Atavist is narrative. A pitch can be gorgeously written, but if it lacks a clear sense of plot, we’re going to come back and say “No thanks” or, if we detect a hint of a narrative, “What’s the story here?” Writing ability matters, sure, but it never supersedes the strength of a story idea. The previous night, her colleagues had responded to a call about a home invasion in an upscale community. Around 3:30 in the morning, a couple awoke to find a man in dark clothing pointing a green laser at them. He tried to restrain them with zip ties, but the husband fought back, and his wife ran to the bathroom and called the police. The intruder fled but dropped his cell phone. Police traced it to a Matthew Muller, a 38-year-old man living in his family’s cabin in South Lake Tahoe, a tranquil vacation community about 150 miles from Vallejo. It’s interesting to me that Muller is such a core subject to this story but we aren’t introduced to him until the latter third of this pitch. What were your initial thoughts or impressions on this? What purpose do you think this delayed introduction, or reveal, served?If I recall correctly, Muller’s role in the story became clearer in my follow-ups with Katia, starting with a phone call shortly after I got the pitch. We talked a lot about what new information and nuance she could bring to a story that had already been reported pretty widely. In short, in telling the definitive story about the Vallejo case, what could she add? Her access to Muller and her interest in showing how his own biography was crucial to the tapestry of the story elevated the pitch even further. But it’s important to say here that a pitch doesn’t have to be a rock-solid roadmap for how a story is going to unfold; it’s a suggestion of a path. Part of the writer-editor relationship is figuring out whether that path is the right one, the most scenic one. Almost always we realize there are ways to enhance it or redirect it. 

Carausu, wearing tactical gear, was fourth in line when the cops rammed down the door. Muller, who resembled Charlie Sheen, said nothing as officers escorted him out. The cabin was crammed with cardboard boxes, and inward-facing mirrors blocked the windows. As Carausu packed laptops, a ski mask and a stun gun into brown paper bags, she sensed they were onto something more than a single failed home invasion. These details paint a really clear picture and are quite chilling. A few hours later, Carausu and her colleagues searched a stolen white Mustang parked nearby. Muller’s ID had been found on the front seat. In the trunk, Carausu found zip ties and a cache of swim goggles, some coated with black duct tape. Carausu picked one up. A lone blonde hair hung from the strap.

As Carausu dug into Muller’s past, he turned out to be an unlikely suspect. The son of a teacher and school administrator, he grew up in a well-off suburb of Sacramento, got straight A’s and played trumpet in his high-school band. He was an ex-Marine who graduated summa cum laude from Pomona College and then from Harvard Law School, where he was reportedly among the youngest ever to join the school’s faculty. But Muller struggled to keep his career as an immigration attorney afloat amid a diagnosis of bipolar disorder with psychotic features, convinced his bosses were spying on him. In 2011, the San Francisco firm where he’d worked filed a restraining order against him, accusing him of stealing confidential files and trying to cover his tracks. In 2014, he filed for bankruptcy, and the following year he was disbarred. There are a lot of twists to follow and keep track of — and this paragraph, in particular, is rich with details, contextual information and dates. How do you think about what level of detail you want to see in a pitch for a narrative story? Do you pay close attention to how a writer structures a pitch, particularly a long one like this?We do pay close attention to how a writer structures a pitch because it offers a window into their storytelling chops. Are they thinking about narrative propulsion? Are they thinking about tension? Are they thinking about twists and surprises? They don’t have to have the whole project figured out — the editing process exists in no small part to organize a piece’s constituent parts to achieve the best possible narrative — but they do need to show a dedication to plot-driven storytelling. 

 Detective Carausu’s footwork eventually put Muller on the radar of Vallejo police and the FBI. Authorities also started investigating whether he was behind two similar home invasions in Palo Alto and Mountain View in 2009; he’d been a suspect in the Palo Alto case, but police didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him. In September 2016, Muller pleaded guilty to one count of kidnapping, and the following March he was sentenced to 40 years in prison. In January 2018, the Solano County district attorney filed rape charges against him in state court; a trial date has not yet been set. In March 2018, Huskins and Quinn won a $2.5 million settlement after suing the city of Vallejo and two of its police officers for defamation.

This stranger-than-fiction tale has never been chronicled beyond local news articles, a 20/20 interview with the victims and a brief WIRED story in 2015 that focused on Muller’s technical prowess. I’d like to recount the narrative of this bizarre crime, including the untold story of Muller’s psychological decline and the delusions that drove him to violence. I think the story will illuminate the extent to which pop culture and the modern fictions we’re deluged with mediate our experience of the world, sometimes becoming more real than reality itself. To me, this previous sentence is really at the heart of what the story is truly about and unites all of the different threads that run through it. In your mind, what was the benefit of building up the pitch and then waiting until the end to express this core theme, rather than putting it high up and shaping the way that the reader filtered subsequent paragraphs?I could already sense by the time I got to this sentence that this was likely the heart of the project — a meditation on how fiction influences reality, particularly when it comes to the true-crime genre. That Katia then articulated it so clearly was perfect. Atavist stories have a lot of buildup, so it’s absolutely fine when a pitch does too. We’re also interested in letting stories speak for themselves, rather than banging readers over the head with whatever “the point” is. Katia showed that she could do that, while also being very clear about her grasp of the point. These delusions found their extreme in Muller, who variously saw himself as Batman, part of an Ocean’s Eleven-style posse, a black market “startup” with a Robin Hood ethos, and (as a Harvard alum writing a manifesto holed up in a cabin) a foil to the Unabomber. But we also see it in Vallejo police detective Mathew Mustard, who couldn’t help viewing Huskins through the “Gone Girl” lens, and the cops who had trouble seeing a handsome former Marine and Harvard alum as a criminal when he was questioned in connection with earlier home invasions. Carausu, the detective who cracked the case, talks about feeling like she’s acting out the detective shows she watches on TV. Muller’s wife, who married him right after he was sentenced, is following her own script, with Muller as underdog, victim and advocate for the innocent. The media and legal narratives largely paint Muller as a calculating monster, either downplaying the role of his mental illness or feeding into cultural tropes of the congenitally evil maniac portrayed in films like Psycho or American Psycho. We live in a kind of surreality, seeing the real in terms of the manufactured, and those delusions can take us astray. What a lovely and powerful sentence.

I have access to many of the people involved. I interviewed Muller’s mother, Joyce Zarback, who shared previously unreported details about his life and a series of mental breakdowns leading up to his criminal convictions, as well as psychological evaluations, letters, and family photos. I’ve begun interviewing Muller himself in Solano County Jail via video conference. He has not spoken to the press in depth and has agreed not to talk with other magazine writers. He is comfortable discussing anything other than the crimes he is accused of on the record at this point; he has agreed to talk about the crimes given a written agreement that the story will not be published before his trial is over. 

Muller’s third wife, Diana Dai, will likely speak with me. Muller’s father, half-sister, and most recent ex-wife are also considering talking. I’ve interviewed Dublin police detective Misty Carausu, and other detectives on the case are also willing to speak. I’ve met with Huskins and Quinn, who are now married, and had several, brief conversations. They aren’t willing to talk because they’re working on a book, but may participate in fact checking.At the preliminary hearing, the victims testified in greater detail than they ever have about their experience, providing ample fodder for a narrative of the crime. Quinn’s brother is also considering speaking with me. I’m struck by how much legwork Katia had already accomplished and the clarity of her path forward. Is the depth of reporting that Katia had already pursued typical of Atavist pitches you read?I would say Katia had done a bit more legwork than the average writer who pitches us. Freelancing is hard, and I don’t expect people pitching us to have done a ton of uncompensated reporting. But we do need writers to show some degree of legwork.When we’re evaluating a pitch, we are looking for whether a writer has a clear sense of the narrative and to be convinced that they’re the right person to tell the story because of how they’ve positioned themselves vis a vis the subject matter. Anyone can read a news brief or a couple of articles about, say, a criminal case or compelling adventure story and craft a good pitch about it. But do they have the access (to sources, to documents, to on-the-ground events) that they need? If they don’t, can they get it, and how? If it’s a buzzy/newsy topic, have they secured exclusivity? I have reviewed court records related to Muller's failed Dublin home invasion and will reach out to the couple involved (they testified in court, but I haven't seen them quoted in the press). I will also reach out to Muller’s classmates and teachers, former colleagues, neighbors, Quinn’s ex-fiancée (Muller’s intended victim), the victims’ lawyers, and other law enforcement officers involved in the investigations. I have access to detailed court records from Muller’s criminal cases and the victims’ suit against the city of Vallejo, and I will attend Muller’s trial in Solano County. 

Would you be interested in this story for The Atavist?

 Thank you,

Katia Savchuk

 ***

Carly Stern is a freelance reporter based in San Francisco who covers housing, disability policy, urban life and economic inequality.

The post The Pitch: Landing a “definitive narrative” in The Atavist Magazine appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Carly Stern 2022 Power of Narrative: The matrix of editor, reporter and story https://niemanstoryboard.org/2022/05/05/2022-power-of-narrative-editors-writers-pitching-structure/ Thu, 05 May 2022 16:54:36 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/2022/05/05/2022-power-of-narrative-editors-writers-pitching-structure/ Two people discussing a text

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of five posts from the 2022 Power of Narrative conference at Boston University. Read Ellen Barry on first-person narratives, Lizzie Johnson on deadline narratives, Debbie Cenziper on investigative narratives, and Beth Macy and Martha Bebinger on covering drug addiction.

The relationship between writers and editors is one of the most important in journalism — and can one of the most challenging. Benoit Denizet-Lewis, a longtime magazine journalist and best-selling author, and Illena Silverman, deputy editor for features at The New York Times Magazine, have partnered on stories for 20 years now. “I feel like I was a child when you essentially gave me my career,” told Silverman.

In a virtual conversation at the 2022 Power of Narrative conference, hosted by Boston University, the two discussed what an editor brings to a story, the puzzle of narrative structure and the importance of a good story pitch.

Pre-reporting and pitching

Denizet-Lewis has been most successful with story pitches that have already identified characters and “really have a sense of the narrative.” He asked Silverman what, specifically, she looks for in a pitch.

Silverman: “I just want a lot of depth. When you’re working with great writers, what they can do is bring people to life, the way that novelists can bring people to life. … I like all the details and the emotional nuances of how someone is experiencing something.”

As an example, she referenced a Denizet-Lewis story from 2017 about American teens struggling with anxiety.

“You can’t just send me a pitch that says: ‘I want to write about anxious teens; it’s really important,’” she said. “You had already identified exactly where you wanted to report.”

She acknowledged the challenge that presents for freelancers, who must invest time in substantive pre-reporting without knowing if a pitch will be accepted: “It feels very unfair to me, but the truth is that the best pitches, the pitches that get assigned, are pitches where people have put a tremendous amount of unpaid work into it.”

Structure: conventions and instinct

Silverman and Denizet-Lewis analyzed a 2021 story by Susan Dominus about high school sophomores dealing with pandemic-era schooling. It’s a “show, don’t tell” narrative; the situations described are not expanded upon or explained by outside experts or sources.

“It’s kind of an atypical New York Times Magazine piece in that way,” Silverman said . “We may have six or eight sections, and most of them are narrative, but sometimes depending on a piece, every other section will pull back and give context.”

Dominus attempted to write pullback sections in early drafts, but Silverman cut them: “They just weren’t that interesting. There are a few paragraphs in the piece where it pulls back a little bit. But now they’ve just become part of the narrative as opposed to separate sections.”

Dominus’ story also lacked a clear central character, opting instead to move around from teachers to parents and children. “The metaphor that Sue had at some point was that she imagined it like a relay race where someone was like, handing the baton to the next person,” Silverman said.

Although conventions can help a writer find the right structure for a long piece, they can’t be manufactured. Editing decisions in Dominus’ piece happened organically to serve the purpose and flow of the story. “It was just an instinct,” Silverman said.

Story therapy

Denizet-Lewis doesn’t remember narrative, as a journalistic genre, being talked about much early in his career. “But that’s what attracted me to being a magazine writer, was to write narrative.”

Silverman said she didn’t know if narrative has expanded, but her self-confidence as an editor has: “I think I’ve gotten more comfortable in knowing what I want as a reader, like the kinds of stories that I want, what I’m interested in.”

That confidence and clarity has earned her a reputation among writers as something of a narrative therapist. Denizet-Lewis collected comments from other writers who have worked with Silverman, including one who described her as a “a serial monogamist: She leaps from one intense, singularly focused relationship with a writer during the editing stages to the next singularly focused relationship.”

Silverman did not reject the analogy. “My mother and father are both psychologists. My sister is a psychologist,” she said. “If one has been in therapy, the therapist sort of puts ideas out there and makes interpretations, and if it doesn’t feel right to you, you have to say it doesn’t feel right. I feel like my job as an editor is similar. I want to help you figure out what it is that you want to say.”

***

Brian Foisy is sophomore journalism student at Boston University. He currently works as co-editor of the Daily Free Press opinion section and as a host for WTBU Sports’ radio show. 

The post 2022 Power of Narrative: The matrix of editor, reporter and story appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Two people discussing a text

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of five posts from the 2022 Power of Narrative conference at Boston University. Read Ellen Barry on first-person narratives, Lizzie Johnson on deadline narratives, Debbie Cenziper on investigative narratives, and Beth Macy and Martha Bebinger on covering drug addiction.

The relationship between writers and editors is one of the most important in journalism — and can one of the most challenging. Benoit Denizet-Lewis, a longtime magazine journalist and best-selling author, and Illena Silverman, deputy editor for features at The New York Times Magazine, have partnered on stories for 20 years now. “I feel like I was a child when you essentially gave me my career,” told Silverman.

In a virtual conversation at the 2022 Power of Narrative conference, hosted by Boston University, the two discussed what an editor brings to a story, the puzzle of narrative structure and the importance of a good story pitch.

Pre-reporting and pitching

Denizet-Lewis has been most successful with story pitches that have already identified characters and “really have a sense of the narrative.” He asked Silverman what, specifically, she looks for in a pitch.

Silverman: “I just want a lot of depth. When you’re working with great writers, what they can do is bring people to life, the way that novelists can bring people to life. … I like all the details and the emotional nuances of how someone is experiencing something.”

As an example, she referenced a Denizet-Lewis story from 2017 about American teens struggling with anxiety.

“You can’t just send me a pitch that says: ‘I want to write about anxious teens; it’s really important,’” she said. “You had already identified exactly where you wanted to report.”

She acknowledged the challenge that presents for freelancers, who must invest time in substantive pre-reporting without knowing if a pitch will be accepted: “It feels very unfair to me, but the truth is that the best pitches, the pitches that get assigned, are pitches where people have put a tremendous amount of unpaid work into it.”

Structure: conventions and instinct

Silverman and Denizet-Lewis analyzed a 2021 story by Susan Dominus about high school sophomores dealing with pandemic-era schooling. It’s a “show, don’t tell” narrative; the situations described are not expanded upon or explained by outside experts or sources.

“It’s kind of an atypical New York Times Magazine piece in that way,” Silverman said . “We may have six or eight sections, and most of them are narrative, but sometimes depending on a piece, every other section will pull back and give context.”

Dominus attempted to write pullback sections in early drafts, but Silverman cut them: “They just weren’t that interesting. There are a few paragraphs in the piece where it pulls back a little bit. But now they’ve just become part of the narrative as opposed to separate sections.”

Dominus’ story also lacked a clear central character, opting instead to move around from teachers to parents and children. “The metaphor that Sue had at some point was that she imagined it like a relay race where someone was like, handing the baton to the next person,” Silverman said.

Although conventions can help a writer find the right structure for a long piece, they can’t be manufactured. Editing decisions in Dominus’ piece happened organically to serve the purpose and flow of the story. “It was just an instinct,” Silverman said.

Story therapy

Denizet-Lewis doesn’t remember narrative, as a journalistic genre, being talked about much early in his career. “But that’s what attracted me to being a magazine writer, was to write narrative.”

Silverman said she didn’t know if narrative has expanded, but her self-confidence as an editor has: “I think I’ve gotten more comfortable in knowing what I want as a reader, like the kinds of stories that I want, what I’m interested in.”

That confidence and clarity has earned her a reputation among writers as something of a narrative therapist. Denizet-Lewis collected comments from other writers who have worked with Silverman, including one who described her as a “a serial monogamist: She leaps from one intense, singularly focused relationship with a writer during the editing stages to the next singularly focused relationship.”

Silverman did not reject the analogy. “My mother and father are both psychologists. My sister is a psychologist,” she said. “If one has been in therapy, the therapist sort of puts ideas out there and makes interpretations, and if it doesn’t feel right to you, you have to say it doesn’t feel right. I feel like my job as an editor is similar. I want to help you figure out what it is that you want to say.”

***

Brian Foisy is sophomore journalism student at Boston University. He currently works as co-editor of the Daily Free Press opinion section and as a host for WTBU Sports’ radio show. 

The post 2022 Power of Narrative: The matrix of editor, reporter and story appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Brian Foisy #7 rule of pitching: Prove your skills and your passion https://niemanstoryboard.org/2021/11/10/7-rule-of-pitching-prove-your-skills-and-your-passion/ Wed, 10 Nov 2021 13:00:54 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/2021/11/10/7-rule-of-pitching-prove-your-skills-and-your-passion/ Woman in silhouette with megaphone

Throughout my newspaper career, some of the best writing I ever read could be found in contest entry letters. Those brag pages also could carry some wince-worthy writing, especially, it seemed, when they were written by the same reporter who had produced a stellar project. Gold-star journalists seldom lack for ego. Yet, when it comes to writing about themselves or promoting their work, they would hem and haw and lose control of the very craft skills they bring to their reported pieces.

The solution, usually, was to have an editor write the entry letter. The alternative was to have the reporter produce a draft, then have an editor — essentially a rewrite person — both tone it down and boost it up. In larger newsrooms, some editors become the go-to writer come contest time.

But all of that is moot unless and until you’ve produced a quality story. And you can’t produce any story unless you have landed a pitch. That’s especially true for freelancers who are pitching to an editor who doesn’t know them or their work.

Newsroom reporters have to do a version of pitching, too, but once they have established themselves, they can focus on the story — not their own skills. If, however, they want to pursue a new beat or take on an aspirational project, they need to be able to sell themselves out of whatever pigeonhole they might be slotted in. And given the turnover in the industry, they always need to be ready to sell themselves to a new editor.

That brings us to the last of our 7 Fatal Flaws of Story Pitches: Failure to sell yourself. Along with #6, Failure to focus, it’s often the weakest part of pitch letters.

Let’s start with that word: Sell.  A lot of journalists chafe at it. I know I always did. Our work was too values-based, too noble, to be lumped in with the oft grubby world of salesmanship.

Now let’s add in the rest: Sell yourself. Ego doesn’t change that fact that most reporters, and certainly those in print, spend their lives on the anonymous side of a notebook. The spotlight is on the sources and story subjects. Turn it on themselves — how gauche.

But if you scrub the word “sell,” it becomes clear that that’s what we do, constantly. We sell the imperative of our story to an editor. We sell, sell, sell to sources we want to talk to us. We sell partnerships to our data base and multi-media colleagues. We sell placement and play to the production desk.

When it comes to pitching a story we want to pursue, we need to apply that same sense of purpose — because that’s what it is — to selling ourselves.

That doesn’t mean larding a pitch letter with a long list of other stories or publication mastheads or awards. Were that the case, it’d be easy.

What it means is getting clear (focused) about two things:

  • Why you are invested in the story you are pitching. Why does it spark your interest or curiosity or passion? What do you want to explore that will be of interest to others?

  • Why you are the right one to deliver that story? What background or skills or connections do you bring to a particular subject for a particular publication?

What this boils down to is knowing the story you want to pursue (see Fatal flaw #6). Even more, it means knowing yourself and why your approach, style, experience and access are the right match for the story. Then you have to prove that, in no more than a paragraph or two.

Know thyself

None of that is easy — especially for people not used to writing about themselves. It’s a disciplined process of selection: You want to show you’ve got the goods, but you want to highlight the goods that are right for this particular job. And you never want to sell what you can’t deliver. Can you pitch an aspirational stretch? You can, and should. But don’t brag that your work has appeared in The New York Times if what you did was grab a couple of quotes one day as a stringer.

If all this makes you squirm, here are a few tips:

Read bios on websites of journalists you admire. What do they say about themselves that impresses you? What reads like too much gush?

Report on yourself. Step out of the moment and take clear-eyed inventory. What craft skills are your strengths? What kind of reporting/writing gives you the most joy? Conversely, what do you struggle with, and what kind of work makes you wish you could flip burgers for a living? Now match those lists up with what the story you are pitching will require.

Show your summary of self to a trusted colleague. (We all need editors.) Does it read authentic and appropriate to them? If it’s someone who knows you well enough, lean on your reporting skills: Interview them about what they see as your strengths. Remember to ask for specific examples that back their praise.

You are, in essence, writing a mini-profile of a character in your story. The only difference: You’re the character, and the story is your pitch.

The post #7 rule of pitching: Prove your skills and your passion appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Woman in silhouette with megaphone

Throughout my newspaper career, some of the best writing I ever read could be found in contest entry letters. Those brag pages also could carry some wince-worthy writing, especially, it seemed, when they were written by the same reporter who had produced a stellar project. Gold-star journalists seldom lack for ego. Yet, when it comes to writing about themselves or promoting their work, they would hem and haw and lose control of the very craft skills they bring to their reported pieces.

The solution, usually, was to have an editor write the entry letter. The alternative was to have the reporter produce a draft, then have an editor — essentially a rewrite person — both tone it down and boost it up. In larger newsrooms, some editors become the go-to writer come contest time.

But all of that is moot unless and until you’ve produced a quality story. And you can’t produce any story unless you have landed a pitch. That’s especially true for freelancers who are pitching to an editor who doesn’t know them or their work.

Newsroom reporters have to do a version of pitching, too, but once they have established themselves, they can focus on the story — not their own skills. If, however, they want to pursue a new beat or take on an aspirational project, they need to be able to sell themselves out of whatever pigeonhole they might be slotted in. And given the turnover in the industry, they always need to be ready to sell themselves to a new editor.

That brings us to the last of our 7 Fatal Flaws of Story Pitches: Failure to sell yourself. Along with #6, Failure to focus, it’s often the weakest part of pitch letters.

Let’s start with that word: Sell.  A lot of journalists chafe at it. I know I always did. Our work was too values-based, too noble, to be lumped in with the oft grubby world of salesmanship.

Now let’s add in the rest: Sell yourself. Ego doesn’t change that fact that most reporters, and certainly those in print, spend their lives on the anonymous side of a notebook. The spotlight is on the sources and story subjects. Turn it on themselves — how gauche.

But if you scrub the word “sell,” it becomes clear that that’s what we do, constantly. We sell the imperative of our story to an editor. We sell, sell, sell to sources we want to talk to us. We sell partnerships to our data base and multi-media colleagues. We sell placement and play to the production desk.

When it comes to pitching a story we want to pursue, we need to apply that same sense of purpose — because that’s what it is — to selling ourselves.

That doesn’t mean larding a pitch letter with a long list of other stories or publication mastheads or awards. Were that the case, it’d be easy.

What it means is getting clear (focused) about two things:

  • Why you are invested in the story you are pitching. Why does it spark your interest or curiosity or passion? What do you want to explore that will be of interest to others?
  • Why you are the right one to deliver that story? What background or skills or connections do you bring to a particular subject for a particular publication?

What this boils down to is knowing the story you want to pursue (see Fatal flaw #6). Even more, it means knowing yourself and why your approach, style, experience and access are the right match for the story. Then you have to prove that, in no more than a paragraph or two.

Know thyself

None of that is easy — especially for people not used to writing about themselves. It’s a disciplined process of selection: You want to show you’ve got the goods, but you want to highlight the goods that are right for this particular job. And you never want to sell what you can’t deliver. Can you pitch an aspirational stretch? You can, and should. But don’t brag that your work has appeared in The New York Times if what you did was grab a couple of quotes one day as a stringer.

If all this makes you squirm, here are a few tips:

Read bios on websites of journalists you admire. What do they say about themselves that impresses you? What reads like too much gush?

Report on yourself. Step out of the moment and take clear-eyed inventory. What craft skills are your strengths? What kind of reporting/writing gives you the most joy? Conversely, what do you struggle with, and what kind of work makes you wish you could flip burgers for a living? Now match those lists up with what the story you are pitching will require.

Show your summary of self to a trusted colleague. (We all need editors.) Does it read authentic and appropriate to them? If it’s someone who knows you well enough, lean on your reporting skills: Interview them about what they see as your strengths. Remember to ask for specific examples that back their praise.

You are, in essence, writing a mini-profile of a character in your story. The only difference: You’re the character, and the story is your pitch.

The post #7 rule of pitching: Prove your skills and your passion appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Jacqui Banaszynski 3 rejections before a successful pitch to ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network https://niemanstoryboard.org/2021/08/18/3-rejections-before-a-successful-pitch-to-propublicas-local-reporting-network/ Wed, 18 Aug 2021 12:00:48 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/2021/08/18/3-rejections-before-a-successful-pitch-to-propublicas-local-reporting-network/ How freelancer Max Blau persisted to land an investigative project fellowship, then a staff reporting position

The post 3 rejections before a successful pitch to ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Read an interview with ProPublica’s editors about how to submit a successful pitch to the Local Reporting Network.When writing his style of investigative stories, Max Blau considers narrative first. His signature pieces are longform stories that a reader won’t often find on the front page of newspapers — deep, winding journeys that center on a person whose experience reveals a broader pattern of wrongdoing.

ProPublica reporter Max Blau
Max Blau

The Atlanta-based reporter, originally from Chicago, typically focuses on health and environmental stories affecting communities in the South. He finds people who have faced barriers within the healthcare system, or harm at the hands of a system, corporation or government: “Most of the time, I’m thinking of stories from someone I’ve met in a single place and then trying to widen it out,” Blau says.

This was exactly the type of “bread and butter” story he pursued through ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network (LRN), in partnership with Georgia Health News, throughout 2020 and 2021. Blau chipped away at an investigative story that revealed how a Georgia energy behemoth sought to avoid cleaning up toxins from America’s largest coal-fired power plant. The yearlong project drew on legwork Blau had done for previous stories, and culminated in the March 2021 publication of “The Coal Plant Next Door.”

Related stories

Check out “The Pitch,” a series that looks at the elusive art of pitching stories

Get to know the seven fatal flaws of story pitches

The story was a testament to Blau’s persistence: He applied three times to ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network before breaking through on his fourth try. And there was a bonus: In April 2021, a month after the project ran, Blau was hired full-time as a reporter in ProPublica’s South bureau.

Before he joined ProPublica, Blau combined stints as a freelancer — his work has appeared in local, regional and national outlets like Stat, Stateline, The Atlantic, Politico Magazine, The New York Times and others — with full-time stretches at publications including CNN, Atlanta Magazine and Creative Loafing.

“I wanted to keep reporting where I lived,” Blau says. “I figured I would always have to be a freelancer to keep doing that, or move to then report from afar about the region — which never really made sense to me.”

Only a sliver of ProPublica’s LRN projects have been produced by freelancers. Most are powered by staff writers within a partner newsroom. Storyboard spoke with Blau to illuminate the steps Blau took to earn a green light. Our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, is followed by an annotation of Blau’s application for the coal plant project, including selected story proposals and a cover letter.

Did you have investigative reporting experience before this partnership?
I think there’s a narrow way that many of us think about investigative journalism. But a lot of wrongdoing or barriers to people having healthier, happier communities is not always something illegal, but might be a pattern of long-term neglect. Or there’s a culture of large corporations profiting off some group of people. There’s not necessarily someone who’s going to get fired, because nothing illegal happened, but the practice itself has moral implications.

Over the years,I’ve done traditional stories that have gone on A1 of a city daily. An early example is that in the summer after Ferguson, I created a database of officer-involved police killings over a five-year period,  across 55 police agencies, in the five core counties of metro Atlanta. I started doing that kind of traditional investigative work in 2014 or 2015. Then there’s a story I did for The Bitter Southerner about a family who, 50 years after Dr. King’s assassination, lived on the same street where he lived at the time of his death. The matriarch of this family was caring for 10 people in a two-bedroom house the size of a 900-square-foot apartment.

From an investigative perspective, that story was not about a single thing the government had done wrong, but the consequences of different systems. I was looking at why, and how, this family moved through a community that at one point had been the largest open-air drug market in the Southeast. And why, in a city that claims to be the birthplace of the Civil Rights movement, you can have a family living in this kind of poverty with Atlanta’s Fortune 500 companies based a mile or two away. I don’t know if I would consider that a “traditionally ProPublica” investigation, but I would consider it investigative in nature even though it’s telling the story about this one family moving through the world.

I think the best of my work today merges those two different kinds of investigations together.

At the time that you submitted a proposal to the LRN, what was your relationship with Georgia Health News (GHN) and the editors there? Was GHN a recurring client for you, like an anchor gig?
GHN is a tiny publication with one full-time editor, Andy Miller, who writes as well. He was a longtime Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) hospital reporter until the AJC started cutting its health care team. In 2012, I was new to hospital reporting and writing my first true health care story — a 10,000-word series about a public hospital in Atlanta that had almost gone bankrupt and was on its way back toward financial viability. I called Andy to interview him for that piece. He was very generous with his time and walked me through things.

From that point on, we stayed in touch. There’s a small community of health care journalists based in Atlanta, and whenever I published a health care piece, he would send me a note. I worked with him for the first time after becoming a freelancer. We’d chat about story ideas and, in 2017, made plans to work on a series with another reporter, about obstacles facing physicians born outside the U.S. who basically have to restart their medical education to be certified in the U.S. — even as Georgia has provider shortages.

That led to us working together on and off. When I had health care stories that seemed right for him, I pitched him, but it was not an anchor gig. Before I had reached out to Andy about the ProPublica fellowship, I had reported another story in 2019 in Juliette, Georgia, which ended up being a collaboration between Grist and Georgia Health News. I had gathered different threads and potential leads that were investigative in nature, but because I had a limited budget, I wasn’t quite able to pull all the threads I wanted to or compile the records I needed for a ProPublica pitch.

How did you approach pre-reporting legwork in order to suss out whether there was something meaty enough there to become a full-blown investigation?
I had the benefit of not getting accepted the first three times I applied to the LRN. For anyone who’s pitching LRN currently or in the future, you have to reverse-engineer it and look at things from the ProPublica side. Let’s say you are a criminal justice reporter in Kansas City, for example. You have to do a bit of research: What makes this place unique enough that Kansas City is going to be the place where ProPublica is going to do its story about sheriffs exploiting their powers?

Then you have to do your homework to see what kind of work ProPublica has done on a topic. That’s not unlike doing research for any national publication in which you’re trying to pitch a deeply local story with national resonance.

One point that was stressed to me when I applied previously was that it wasn’t enough simply to say, “I think there’s an investigative story here.: You had to do legwork — whether that’s publishing other stories on this topic, or maybe gathering records. If ProPublica was going to give you a year’s salary and place that bet on you, this was not going to be some fishing expedition where you didn’t know how it’s going to work out. You can’t predict how an investigation may turn out. But there has to be work already done to indicate that you’re serious about this — and that if you keep going, there’s a good chance you will be able to do the story you’re proposing in the year that you have.

Finally, ProPublica doesn’t want to be replicating work other newsrooms are doing or competing against publications for the same story. ProPublica’s model, as a local reporting network, is about trying to fill in some of the coverage gaps that have emerged over the years as local newsroom jobs have been cut.

What advice would you give to freelancers with an idea that could be a strong fit for the LRN, but who may not have an established relationship with a local newsroom and don’t know where to find that institutional support? Often, applying for grants and fellowships as a freelancer can feel like a catch-22: You need an editor’s letter of approval to get the grant, but grant support can help do the work needed to land the commission.
Go to the people you know and have the best relationships with. Freelancing is this combination of wanting to consistently work with new editors who excite you, versus mixing in ones who you would get a beer or coffee with and chat through story ideas. You should see if the local editors you have good relationships with are interested in doing the kind of work that ProPublica does. You need to have confidence that this person is going to have your back. You want to know that you two get along well enough to have trust both ways throughout that year. Before you look at the money or feasibility, find the people who you would trust with the most important stories of your career.

What surprised you most about working with LRN?
One of the things I loved most, and that I found surprising, was that while ProPublica is very clear on what works for them, the organization is very much focused on being equal partners with the local newsroom. Yes, ProPublica needs X Y Z things, but the process is driven by questions like, “How is this going to serve GHN and its partners? How is this going to have the highest degree of local impact?” Then they put the full weight of the ProPublica institution and machine behind that goal.

The annotation: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Blau’s responses in blue.

COVER LETTER

Dear ProPublica team:

In the spring of 2018, I traveled to Juliette, Ga., to see if there was any truth to the whispers I’d heard about its groundwater. For years, I had heard stories of how people living near America’s largest coal-fired plant worried that heavy metals found in coal ash had seeped into their aquifers. But there were few clear answers, or evidence to back up those claims. But then, a local riverkeeper tested

the drinking wells of a few dozen homes, and discovered troubling levels of hexavalent chromium, the carcinogen Erin Brockovich found in Southern California.

I reported on this effort in a story that published with Georgia Health News and Grist in early 2020. Now residents want more answers – action, even – from one of the nation’s largest utilities. Why did you choose to structure the lede of your cover letter this way?About a decade ago, I worked as an editor at Paste magazine, and was on the other side of the application process. The cover letters that stood out to me were the ones that told a compelling story. I’ve since tried to incorporate that in my own cover letters, given how it can stand out in a pile of dry cover letters.

As I spent eight months reporting in Juliette, I stumbled upon thousands of pages of evidence, along with the stories of residents, that showed how Georgia Power had taken clear steps to minimize the appearance of risk in order to continue disposing of coal ash more cheaply and without regard to its neighbors.

This did not surprise me. As a journalist who has covered Georgia Power on and off for years, I’ve seen the utility use its power, money, and influence to advance the interest of shareholders instead of its neighbors statewide. Few have dug deep into the company’s obscure practices, from massive data dumps or complex permit filing. I believe the story of coal ash – which Juliette residents fear has killed or caused life-altering cancers – is one of the most important in this central Georgia town just north of Macon. And it’s also one with statewide resonance given other coal ash ponds, or the fact that every customer foots the bill for its practices. My Grist-Georgia Health News story from January 2020 has only scratched the surface, and I hope to get more resources to dig in deeper in the way that could lead to reforms for Georgians near Macon and beyond. And I’m hoping that ProPublica, in partnership with Georgia Health News, can help make this happen. Structurally and flow-wise, what was your thinking for where to place the graf where you start to describe your relevant experience and expertise?I saw this as an opportunity to emphasize my subject expertise and relevant experience. And after opening with a narrative anecdote about how I first came to report in Juliette, I wanted editors to know I had done my homework, but only had reached the tip of the iceberg of what could be done in a yearlong reporting project.

I believe I’m qualified to do so. Over the past eight years, my reporting has been published in national outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, The Atlantic, and the Boston Globe. The best of my stories blend vivid narrative – earning awards and recognition on sites like Longform – and original investigative reporting. These pieces have shined light on the practices that led to metro Atlanta’s officer-involved shootings, revealed the barriers to addiction treatment in the epicenter of the opioid crisis, reported about the failures of private jail medical companies, and shed light on a scandal tied to one the world’s largest car manufacturers. As far as energy and environmental reporting goes, I have dug deep on Georgia Power’s costly and controversial nuclear power plant, the consequences of intensifying hurricanes impacting south Georgia farmers, and other topics. Here, you sprinkle in where you’ve been published, awards or accolades you’ve earned, big projects you’ve undertaken of an analogous scope, and the subject matter expertise you’ve developed along the way. What’s the “secret sauce” for how you typically think about highlighting your experience, when applying for opportunities like this? How do you strike that balance — and as a freelancer, why is it so especially important to market your credentials intentionally?I think it’s important to keep asking yourself: What can I say here that’s different? I looked for ways to be additive beyond the resume. So I called out my investigative experience on complex subjects and my relevant clips on utilities and the environment. In addition, they needed to know that while I’d written for major national outlets, I wasn’t proposing to parachute into a rural community for the first time.

Few of Georgia’s newsrooms have the capability to sustain this sort of investigative journalism. Most have scaled back or cut their environmental and health care budgets outright. Personally, I am interested in working with Georgia Health News because it would allow me to work again with Andy Miller, a longtime health reporter with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who now oversees GHN. It’d be a privilege to reunite with him on a story of local and national importance. I like the conversational tone that you strike here.I think most journalists err on the side of formality with cover letters. In doing so, they forget that the cover letter, first and foremost, is a writing sample. I wanted my writing sample to convey who I was, and where I wanted to go.

Thanks for taking the time to consider our project.

Best,
Max Blau


LOCAL REPORTING NETWORK 2020 PROPOSAL:

How Georgia’s largest utility used its power, money, and influence to cheaply dispose of toxic coal waste and downplay the health risks to its neighbors.

Here in the headline, you reveal both the actor (the utility) and the repercussions of their wrongdoing upfront. Why did you choose to do this?I believe the best Local Reporting Network stories clearly define harm, an unequal power balance, and a lack of accountability. When I imagined ProPublica editors sitting down to discuss applications, I wanted them to know the actor and the actions from the very start. By doing so, I could set the stage for everything that followed.


The residents of Juliette, Georgia, are no longer taking chances. Tony urged his neighbors to test the water in their wells. Andrea purchased bottled water for her family to drink. Jim* sold his home to move someplace safer. (Jim is a pseudonym to protect that person’s identity.) Why did you pick three characters, or examples, to draw on?I wanted ProPublica editors to know that this was a problem affecting more than just one individual. With three residents, I could hint at the scope of this problem, and touch on the nuanced ways their lives were being upended.

They all had several things in common: Their tap water contained unsafe levels of heavy metals including hexavalent chromium, a carcinogen that Erin Brockovich had found in the wells of Southern California families. They lived next door to America’s largest coal plant. And after years of living there, they were confronting what they feared to be an environmental crisis caused by disposal practices that threatened their health and the future of their town. Why was it important for you to spell out the stakes really clearly, and urgently, right away in this first graf?The first time I pitched a project to LRN, in the fall of 2017, I was one of 239 applicants. The coal ash pitch was my fourth proposal. With that in mind, I knew the stakes needed to be clear from the very first paragraph. So I decided to establish the power imbalance of a small community and a giant company in order to set up a very complicated problem in a clear and concise manner. If I proved successful, I could grab a reader’s attention.

The Robert W. Scherer Power Plant, which is powerful enough to light up more than half of Georgia’s 3.7 million households, produces an ungodly amount of waste. When the plant generates power, it leaves behind a toxic byproduct called coal ash. If ingested, it can cause long-term and life-threatening injuries, like ulcers, liver and kidney failure, and cancer.

For decades, Georgia Power, a subsidiary of the nation’s second-largest energy provider, Southern Company, ignored the risks of its lower-cost disposal practices. It dumped coal ash into giant pits in the ground, mixed it with water, and stored it in ponds collectively large enough to hold roughly 4,700 Olympic-sized swimming pools of contents. Here, you made pretty damning statements, notably without attribution. Did you trust that the reader would assume you’d done your homework and take your word for it? Also, that comparison to Olympic pools is fantastic — it really brings to life the sheer scale of all this.I had the benefit of having recently published a 4,000-word feature about Georgia Power’s practices in Juliette. That piece had gone through a magazine-style fact-checking process with Grist. It had plenty of attributions, and required me to reach out to the company for comment. I didn’t want to bog down the narrative this early in the proposal. But in a pool, the cement barrier keeps water from spilling out. Here, no protective lining existed between the waste and the land underneath, and environmental experts now argue that the ash has seeped into the area’s aquifer. Juliette is far enough from the two closest cities with municipal water systems, Macon and Forsyth, that nearly all of its residents rely on wells that draw up groundwater. Georgia Power has denied that it’s caused any health risks — even though its own data has detected heavy metals in the water — claiming it might be naturally occurring or pollution from another source. Did they deny this to you personally during your pre-reporting, and where did you access this data? Again, what was the strategy behind keeping these assertions brief and less specific?Looking back, my Georgia Health News-Grist feature served as “pre-reporting” for my ProPublica proposal. Because I had spent months reporting on this topic, I felt confident in this material and I wanted that to show throughout my pitch. I also felt that, beyond selling an investigative story, I needed to sell myself as a narrative writer. I was betting that if I got ProPublica editors interested in my voice and my vision for this project, I could show my work in a subsequent stage of the application process.

Over the past eight months, I’ve spent time reporting in Juliette, getting to know residents and citizen advocates as they grapple with the realities of the contamination long suspected and now confirmed by one of the state’s top riverkeeper organizations. Structurally, why did you feel like this was the right place to step back and insert yourself?I figured, by this point, the editors would have similar questions to the ones you had in the last paragraph. I needed to establish my credentials and commitment to this proposal. But I figured ProPublica wouldn’t care who I was if they didn’t care about Juliette residents first. This reporting culminated in a recent collaboration published by Grist and Georgia Health News, which broke the news about the presence of hexavalent chromium and was followed by the introduction of a new bill at the state capitol that, if passed, would force utilities like Georgia Power to dispose of coal ash in a lined facility to prevent waste from seeping into the groundwater. But as I reported that feature, I discovered new tips, data, and records that, if I had the time and resources to investigate, could reveal how Georgia Power has shaped rules, skirted regulations, and operated in a way that prioritizes profits over people’s health. This paragraph is fantastic. It really spells out the potential impact and what you’re seeking to do.Before each Local Reporting Network application deadline, ProPublica allows journalists to submit ideas ahead of time for a round of feedback. During the prior application cycle, I had sent a preliminary version of this pitch to one of ProPublica’s editors, Charlie Ornstein, who replied. “Right now, it seems like a narrative profile…I think for someone like us to be interested, you’d have to bring your own findings. Does this make sense? Seems worth exploring.” I decided to hold off on submitting this project until the following application cycle. Without Charlie’s advice, I don’t think this paragraph would have laid out the potential impact as clearly.

With ProPublica’s support, we believe our stories can force Georgia Power — and the officials who regulate the utility giant — to change its approach to storing this waste in ways that may jeopardize the health of its neighbors in Juliette and other Georgia communities that are home to coal ash ponds.

Reporting on Georgia Power’s handling of coal ash could not be more timely and relevant. As the U.S. Environmental Agency rolls back regulations passed during the Obama era, states are playing a greater role in how utilities must handle the legacy waste of a generation past. For Plant Scherer’s ponds and others statewide, Georgia’s regulators this year are weighing whether to let the utility leave coal ash in its current unlined ponds forever or to force the company to move it into a place that posed fewer health risks to residents. As Georgia Power reckons with the costs of coal ash, it’s asked utility regulators to increase electricity bill rates so that Georgians will pick up the tab instead of shareholders, even though much of that waste was produced as the company overprojected its energy needs for Georgia and instead sold energy to Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and other states. (Georgia residents, including those in Juliette, are dealing with more waste because a Georgia-based company had regional ambitions.) Why did you choose to zoom out and place the “why this matters now, and here” graf at this particular juncture of the proposal? How were you thinking about the overall momentum of your copy as you put it together?After establishing the investigative stakes, my reporting credentials on the topic, and the goals of this project, I needed to convince ProPublica that Georgia was the best place to tell a story about coal ash. I knew that the organization had not yet worked on an Local Reporting Network project based in Georgia. From my past research of LRN stories and my previous applications, I knew that ProPublica valued timeliness and news relevancy, as well as telling stories that avoided turning Georgia into “one of X states” experiencing a problem.

But at a time when utilities in neighboring states are excavating coal ash from unlined ponds and placing it in lined landfills, Georgia Power has avoided accepting full responsibility of its waste and the costly clean-up that’s necessary to protect communities like Juliette. Not only has the company exploited a cash-strapped state environmental agency, its lobbying army has killed nearly every proposed coal ash regulation introduced in the state capitol. You do a really nice job at clearly laying out who the power players are.The best ProPublica stories are about winners and losers, the powerful and the powerless. I was hoping they might see a potential ProPublica story in my proposal.

Between 2014 and 2019, Georgia Power contributed nearly $2 million to state lawmakers, including top leadership in the Republican party, as well as Democrats. When one Republican lawmaker tried to pass a bill to protect local water supplies from coal ash, it was killed by the House Speaker’s allies. When a Democratic lawmaker sought to make coal ash landfill fees the same price as ones for household garbage, the head of the influential natural resources committee killed her amendment. The two influential lawmakers had received routine donations from the utility. It’s worth noting that state lawmakers ended up passing this bill around the time my LRN project was chosen, so this part of the story changed. One veteran lobbyist, who’s worked inside the state capitol since before Scherer’s construction in the ‘70s, described the story of coal ash in Georgia as “a long and sordid tale of greed, corruption, [and] undue political influence.” By this paragraph, the proposal is quite long. Was there a target word count you were working with, and how did you think about making sure your reader stayed engaged all the way through?I was OK with it being long if it wasn’t repetitive. When I was a freelancer, I tailored the length of my pitch to fit the scope of the story or of the series. Because I was asking ProPublica to invest in me for a full year, I needed to be comprehensive.

Georgia Power has a massive PR machine that has touted the company as an environmental steward of the state’s waters. Many of Georgia’s manmade lakes, including Lake Juliette, where people fish and kayak, are owned by the company. The lakes are used primarily as a water supply to cool its plants. It’s used this apparatus to push a message that it’s acted responsibly on all things coal ash cleanup. But the company’s influence has effectively turned Georgia into the nation’s dumping ground for coal ash. Other states from North Carolina to Tennessee to Puerto Rico have shipped their coal ash to landfills in the Macon area as well as other parts of the state. With few exceptions, waste produced by Georgia Power and its fellow utilities in neighboring states is often stored in low-income communities (white and black, Republican and Democratic ones) that lack the political capital to fight back. I like how you really effectively convey why this local context matters against the national backdrop.This goes back to convincing ProPublica editors, most of whom have never lived in Georgia, why Georgia matters. At the same point, I was hoping the choice details of Georgia Power’s presence here might showcase my deep knowledge of the company’s influence throughout the state.

Our reporting can have a lasting impact. Georgia has lost the vast majority of its full-time healthcare and environmental reporters due to budget cuts at local newspapers like the Telegraph in Macon, Ga. Georgia Health News, an INN member that covers health and environmental issues statewide, has remained a rare bright spot. (In recent years GHN’s founder, Andy Miller, one of Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s former healthcare reporters, has published bombshell investigations about environmental issues about ethylene oxide and lead in metro Atlanta.) Fewer people than ever before are writing about issues like coal ash, and the health consequences of groundwater contamination. While there are occasional coal ash reports in Georgia, most are political reporters who cover daily press releases or town hall meetings, with little investigative reporting on the power company’s practices related to coal ash and its health or environmental consequences. We believe that our reporting will show central Georgians how unsafe coal ash disposal techniques have posed a potential hazard to their health, inform the rest of the state how the issue is a problem facing all Georgians (who pay for it with their electric bills), and force lawmakers to revisit an issue they’ve largely neglected in the past. Georgia Health News is small but has an outsized track record of forcing powerful lawmakers to call for state reforms on environmental health issues. And I believe, with ProPublica’s help, we can continue that tradition.

For Georgia Health News’s ProPublica Local Reporting Fellowship series, we propose the following stories, as well as others that may develop during the year’s worth of reporting. I have broken these up into three tiers of stories. Tier One are stories for which we have already gathered much of the materials (records, data, etc.) to execute the stories. Tier Two are stories in which we’ve gathered some of the materials needed to produce the stories but have a clear plan of obtaining the rest of the reporting over the yearlong fellowship. Finally, Tier Three stores are ones that are guided by credible sources but require further reporting to determine if they will lead to a publishable investigation. Where did you come up with this idea for a tiering system? And did you know in advance that you needed this level of specificity for story pitches?Earlier, I mentioned that ProPublica offers feedback to reporters ahead of the application deadlines. When I took up ProPublica on that offer during this cycle, I was able to speak with Henri Cauvin, a senior editor who had reviewed my application. He had suggested the idea of creating tiers to give a clearer sense of my reporting plan and the feasibility of executing on each of the story ideas. (Ultimately, COVID-19 had other plans for an ongoing series. I ended up publishing a longform feature that included many of the smaller story ideas.)

For tier three, I would report these out as I was actively working on the Tier One and Two stories. I submitted 10 story ideas like the ones below. I’ve included three of them here — I’m still reporting out some of the other ones!

Tier One: The U.S. EPA warned Georgia Power about the health risks of storing coal ash in unlined pits. The utility did so anyway in a community that relied on private wells for drinking water. In the ‘80s, federal environmental officials cautioned Georgia Power of the potential long-term consequences of storing coal ash in unlined pits. In one EPA report, researchers warned the coal industry that ash storied unlined ponds may “continue to leach,” creating the concern for the “potential for waste leachate to cause groundwater contamination.” But the subsidiary of Southern Company, one of the nation’s largest utilities, did so anyway. In doing so, Georgia Power doubled down on a storage method that was cheaper in the short term, even as scientific consensus grew around the health risks surrounding coal ash’s potential carcinogens. Now, the utility is reckoning with consequences of its past decisions — consequences that have alarmed the residents of Juliette, Ga.

Tier Two: Residents have long feared that Plant Scherer’s pollution has spawned high rates of cancer. A prominent Georgia politician will take up their legal fight against Georgia Power. In 2013, after years of whispers about Plant Scherer’s pollution causing people to get sick, about 100 residents filed a series of class-action lawsuits against Georgia Power and the plant’s minority owners claiming the utility had knowingly released toxins contained in coal ash into Juliette’s air and groundwater. The lawsuit contended the utility’s actions caused a “loss of potable water supply and increased risk of diseases.” But the suit lost steam, and was ultimately dismissed without prejudice, due to a lack of funding to build a case against the utility. Now, attorney Stacey Evans, a state lawmaker who ran to be Georgia’s governor in 2018, is building a case against Georgia Power that is set to allege the company’s coal ash contained hexavalent chromium — the carcinogen Erin Brockovich found in southern California drinking wells — has harmed the health of Juliette residents. Evans isn’t just any attorney, though, picking up cases for the sake of political expediency. The last big case she took on was a whistleblower case against Davita, the nation’s largest dialysis provider, which was forced to settle for $495 million, one of the largest Medicare fraud recoveries ever.

Tier Three: Georgia’s utility regulators set favorable rates that have enriched Georgia Power’s executives and shareholders. Those elected officials are now forcing ratepayers to pay for the costs of Georgia Power’s past mistakes. Decades ago, Georgia Power chose a cheap route in dumping its coal ash in unlined ponds. In recent rate hearings, it convinced utility regulators that the public should now foot the bill for its coal ash cleanup efforts. Rate hearings occasionally get covered by local media. But rarely is the relationship between Georgia Power and the five members of the Public Service Commission discussed. Or why the PSC acts passively and with great deference to Georgia Power’s requests. And I think this is worth further scrutiny in terms of how they influence decisions that impact people from Juliette as well as everywhere else in the state. Even if you don’t live next to a coal ash pond, you’re still picking up the tab with your monthly electric bill, one that’s inflated by the costs of a for-profit company selling power to other states. While this right now is a story about a captive regulatory body, I think it’s worth digging into it while reporting the other stories to follow the money contributed by Georgia Power to these elected officials. (There is no full-time reporter in Georgia devoted to this body anymore, so I think spending a portion of the year keeping an eye on the body, particularly with some members up for re-election in 2020, is worth doing.)


Max Blau’s journey to land a ProPublica grant, and then a staff reporting position


  • Late 2012: I first interviewed Andy Miller at GHN for a Creative Loafing story about Grady Memorial Hospital.

  • January 2017: I left CNN to become a freelancer, starting with a one-year contract with STAT.

  • Fall 2017: I pitched my first LRN proposal on evictions in metro Atlanta. My proposal made it to the final round of interviews, but was not chosen. (In early 2019, I used this proposal’s reporting for a shorter freelance assignment for Stateline.)

  • December 2017: I learned that STAT would not be extending my contract due to changes in their areas of coverage. I began working with a variety of publications and constantly pitching outlets for assignments.

  • Early 2018: Andy Miller and I chatted about a bunch of story ideas. We settled on reporting a collaborative series about foreign-born physicians in Georgia.

  • Spring 2018: I visited Juliette for the first time with a source.

  • Fall 2018: I pitched my second LRN proposal on privatized medical care in Georgia jails. It didn’t get accepted. I repackaged the proposal to land grant funding, which allowed me to report out this story.

  • May 2019: I met with Charlie Ornstein at an Association of Health Care Journalists conference to get a better sense about what works and doesn’t work for pitching LRN.

  • June – early August 2019: I met with advocates to learn about coal ash, and met the first set of families in Juliette.

  • August 2019: I wrote up a pitch focused on the Altamaha Riverkeeper’s work in Juliette. It was commissioned by the Telegraph, the daily newspaper in Macon, and Grist.

  • September 2019: I pitched my third LRN proposal on Georgia’s controversial child abuse registry. For the third time, my proposal didn’t get accepted.

  • September – December 2019: I continued reporting on Juliette for the Telegraph/Grist assignment.

  • December 2019: McClatchy, which owns the Telegraph, laid off my editors. I pulled the story from the Telegraph. I asked Andy if GHN would consider being the local partner for the story in place of the Telegraph. He agreed.

  • January 8, 2020: Charlie reached out to me saying they’ve opened LRN up for 3 more reporters in a specific set of cities and regions.

  • January 13, 2020: My Grist-GHN story was published.

  • Mid-January 2020: I worked on my Georgia Power-Juliette LRN proposal with Andy.

  • January 27, 2020: I sent the proposal to Charlie to take ProPublica up on their feedback offer. One of their editors, Henri Cauvin, discussed it with me over the phone. I retooled the application based on his suggestions.

  • January 30, 2020: Andy and I submitted our LRN application.

  • February 2020: I had interviews with ProPublica editors.

  • Early March 2020: Charlie informed us that we were chosen to participate in LRN.

  • April 1, 2020 – March 31, 2021: LRN year culminates with the publication of “The Coal Plant Next Door.”

  • April 5, 2021: I joined ProPublica’s South bureau full-time.


***

Carly Stern is a freelance reporter based in San Francisco who covers housing, disability policy, urban life and economic inequality.

The post 3 rejections before a successful pitch to ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Carly Stern Pitching ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network: Focus on sources and impact https://niemanstoryboard.org/2021/08/17/pitching-propublicas-local-reporting-network-focus-on-sources-and-impact/ Tue, 17 Aug 2021 12:00:38 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/2021/08/17/pitching-propublicas-local-reporting-network-focus-on-sources-and-impact/ ProPublica Local Reporting Network logo

EDITOR’S NOTE: Tomorrow we feature an interview with Max Blau, a local reporter who made a successful pitch to ProPublica, and an annotation of the pitch. Blau is now a staff reporter for ProPublica based in Atlanta.

Freelancers and community journalists dream of chasing down investigative stories instead of invoices and city council meetings. But carving out time to follow leads, and to establish the evidence necessary to convince a publication to provide the time and resources needed to do deep accountability journalism, can feel implausible. For independent journalists who get paid by the word, and staffers who  work in shrinking newsrooms, the ability to make a living often correlates more with volume — not the depth — of the work produced.

In recent years, grant-making organizations, fellowships and newsroom partners are offering a path out of that rut. Few pack a heavier investigative punch than ProPublica. Since it launched in 2008, the nonprofit news organization has become a formidable hub for deeply reported, damning investigations that expose abuses, challenge power and change laws.

Charles Ornstein, managing editor for local initiatives, ProPublica
Charles Ornstein

The first cohort of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network (LRN) set out in 2018, as local news outlets across the country kept shuttering. The goal was to nurture ideas that people had in their notebooks but didn’t have the time or opportunity to pursue, says Charles Ornstein, managing editor for local at ProPublica. A few months earlier, ProPublica had launched its first regional reporting hub from Illinois.  “It was sort of a ‘let many flowers bloom,’ approach to local news,” Ornstein says. “There was also a recognition that ProPublica by itself was not in a position to solve the crisis in local news. It’s a multifaceted, complex problem that  looks different in different areas of the country.”

The local network — which pays reporters’ salaries for a year up to $75,000, with a stipend for benefits — has since cultivated 59 partnerships with 50 unique news organizations (a new group will begin in September). A series published by the Anchorage Daily News and supported by ProPublica, about the dirth of police protection in many of Alaska’s villages, earned a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

Sarah Blustain, deputy managing editor for local initiatives, ProPublica
Sarah Blustain

To gain that backing, staff or independent reporters can apply with the support of a local newsroom. ProPublica works to ensure that the full weight of its newsroom resources are available to support the locally-based reporters as they pursue their projects, says Sarah Blustain, deputy editor, local, at ProPublica. Blustain joined ProPublica in January 2021 after working at Type Investigations, Newsweek, the New Republic and other publications.

Storyboard spoke with Ornstein and Blustain about the application process and what they look for in proposals. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

From conception to publication, I’d love to hear more about how the Local Reporting Network functions. How are projects initiated and how do they develop?
BLUSTAIN: We put out a call two to three times per year. We leave open the opportunity for people to send in drafts of their proposals early. Some member of our editorial team — it could be me or Charlie, or someone else — will read it and send feedback. This is intended to both strengthen the proposal — whether or not we take it on — and to make it more aligned with the criteria we’re looking for.

Once the winners are selected, then the really hard work starts. We have this story idea and now have to figure out the right approach. How are you going to do the data, if it’s a data story? How are you going to pursue the reporting? What’s the project arc going to look like? All those things are conversations the reporter will work out in conjunction with their editor at ProPublica and in their home newsroom.

What’s that three-way partnership like?
BLUSTAIN: Every newsroom is different, with different bandwidth and needs. That’s the starting point for all partnerships. There are some newsrooms where the partner editor is highly engaged in the process, and is on call every week. Editors are always consulted about where things are going, but there are newsrooms where editors are less involved in the day-to-day, for various reasons. Every work product that’s created is going to be approved by the local   and our newsroom. We have certain skills around how to frame an investigative story that add to the project, but we don’t have the community knowledge that local editors have. Both elements are really important to putting together a story that will be meaningful in a local community and also nationally.

When you’re reading proposals and giving feedback, or seeing a polished submission, which elements of a pitch suggest that a story could be a strong fit for ProPublica?
BLUSTAIN: The potential for impact is a big one. It can take a lot of different forms, but seeing a level of specificity in the projects that points toward the possibility of change is very appealing. Having a reporter who’s able to identify what has already been written in the space, and can clearly express how this advances the story, is an important element. And then also understanding what sources or types of sources reporters have access to — whether that’s data, human sources or other kinds of documents. You want to know that they have those resources in hand, or have the possibility of having them in hand.

ORNSTEIN: People are seeking the ability to spend a year working on a project. Coming into that, we don’t expect that they have already spent a year working on the project or the pitch. We know there are going to be things they don’t know and requests they want to put out. But we want to see that there is a high probability that their hunch or instinct of what’s happening is actually happening. We also want to make sure that it’s not something that can be told in any community across the country. We really ask the questions of, ‘Why does this story need to be told here, in this community?’ and, ‘Why does this story need to be told now?’”

When you’re in the feedback stage and have questions about a potential project, what puts you over the edge to convince you the story is worth pursuing? What revisions or additional steps do you like to see?ORNSTEIN:  Some people have gone to the courthouse and pulled additional records, or they’ve called additional sources. We want to see that if you have an example of something that went wrong, it’s not an anomaly. Even the best institutions make mistakes; even the best-run governments do things that are not right. That doesn’t mean it’s a big investigation. We want to see that there’s more than just an isolated example — there’s material here that would enable you to keep pulling on the string. For some people, that may mean data. For some people, that may mean documents. For some people, that may mean sources. For some people, that may mean examples. It really looks different for different projects.

In terms of the track records of journalists you work with, do you partner with reporters who have not pursued long, ambitious investigative pieces before, but have a compelling idea? What makes you inclined to take a chance on a younger or newer reporter who might not have that ‘proof of concept,’ clip, but who wants to move into this space?
ORNSTEIN: We’ve worked with a huge range of reporters. We’ve worked with people who’ve won a MacArthur “genius grant,” like Jerry Mitchell and Ken Ward Jr., with people fresh out of Report for America, like Samantha Hogan in Maine, and everywhere in between. We want to see the strength of the idea and ability to pull that off. Experience is important, but it’s not the only factor.

What advice would you give to reporters who have the nugget of a compelling idea? How can they prove they’re capable of pulling it off?
BLUSTAIN: Reading investigative materials — understanding how they’re constructed and reflecting that in your proposal — is probably the single best way to dissect what an investigation is and then apply it to your work. As a reader of proposals for many years, I can also say that when I give feedback and a proposal comes back to me really well-refined, that’s an excellent sign that I’m going to have a good editorial dialogue with somebody. I asked for something and they went out and got it. They flipped this proposal upside down and twisted it around, and now it looks like what we were talking about.

What are some typical shortfalls you come across in first-round pitches?
BLUSTAIN: People identify something bad going on, but have no idea what’s behind it. The proposal comes in with a question, and ‘I want to investigate whether X, Y and Z is happening.’ That is an excellent first question, but when you’re in a year-long investigative project that has a deadline, you’re going to need to know more about the project than asking those initial questions.

ORNSTEIN: As we’ve noted  before, for some folks, it’s, ‘Why does this story have to be told in your community and why does the story have to be told now?’ Problems with the criminal justice system, for example, are happening all across the country. Issues with extremism are happening all across the country. So why does the story have to be told in your jurisdiction? If you can’t answer that, it’s hard for us to accept a proposal.

If you want to submit a formal pitch after the initial proposal, what are the steps and what’s the timeline?BLUSTAIN: I’ll take our recent call for proposals as an example. It opened on June 3; the deadline to submit was July 5. But we looked at drafts submitted through June 21, a couple of weeks before the deadline, to give our editors time to read them and give applicants time to absorb that feedback. I  for us to read through everything. We have committees of people reading proposals, asking good questions and narrowing down the pool.

What’s the ratio of proposals you receive to those you commission?
BLUSTAIN: We probably accept somewhere between five and 10 percent of applications in any given cycle. We stay in touch with folks as the process develops to let them know whether they are still in the running. For those who don’t get it, we let them know as well.

Any other advice you’d offer?
ORNSTEIN: If you’re not successful the first time, it doesn’t mean there isn’t merit to your idea. It doesn’t mean you won’t be successful the second time. We’ve had people who’ve applied four or five times before we’ve accepted one of their ideas. So don’t be discouraged. We like far more ideas than we have the capacity to fund, but stay in touch with us. Submit your ideas early in order to get feedback.

***

Carly Stern is a freelance reporter based in San Francisco who covers housing, disability policy, urban life and economic inequality.

The post Pitching ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network: Focus on sources and impact appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> ProPublica Local Reporting Network logo

EDITOR’S NOTE: Tomorrow we feature an interview with Max Blau, a local reporter who made a successful pitch to ProPublica, and an annotation of the pitch. Blau is now a staff reporter for ProPublica based in Atlanta.

Freelancers and community journalists dream of chasing down investigative stories instead of invoices and city council meetings. But carving out time to follow leads, and to establish the evidence necessary to convince a publication to provide the time and resources needed to do deep accountability journalism, can feel implausible. For independent journalists who get paid by the word, and staffers who  work in shrinking newsrooms, the ability to make a living often correlates more with volume — not the depth — of the work produced.

In recent years, grant-making organizations, fellowships and newsroom partners are offering a path out of that rut. Few pack a heavier investigative punch than ProPublica. Since it launched in 2008, the nonprofit news organization has become a formidable hub for deeply reported, damning investigations that expose abuses, challenge power and change laws.

Charles Ornstein, managing editor for local initiatives, ProPublica
Charles Ornstein

The first cohort of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network (LRN) set out in 2018, as local news outlets across the country kept shuttering. The goal was to nurture ideas that people had in their notebooks but didn’t have the time or opportunity to pursue, says Charles Ornstein, managing editor for local at ProPublica. A few months earlier, ProPublica had launched its first regional reporting hub from Illinois.  “It was sort of a ‘let many flowers bloom,’ approach to local news,” Ornstein says. “There was also a recognition that ProPublica by itself was not in a position to solve the crisis in local news. It’s a multifaceted, complex problem that  looks different in different areas of the country.”

The local network — which pays reporters’ salaries for a year up to $75,000, with a stipend for benefits — has since cultivated 59 partnerships with 50 unique news organizations (a new group will begin in September). A series published by the Anchorage Daily News and supported by ProPublica, about the dirth of police protection in many of Alaska’s villages, earned a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

Sarah Blustain, deputy managing editor for local initiatives, ProPublica
Sarah Blustain

To gain that backing, staff or independent reporters can apply with the support of a local newsroom. ProPublica works to ensure that the full weight of its newsroom resources are available to support the locally-based reporters as they pursue their projects, says Sarah Blustain, deputy editor, local, at ProPublica. Blustain joined ProPublica in January 2021 after working at Type Investigations, Newsweek, the New Republic and other publications.

Storyboard spoke with Ornstein and Blustain about the application process and what they look for in proposals. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

From conception to publication, I’d love to hear more about how the Local Reporting Network functions. How are projects initiated and how do they develop?
BLUSTAIN: We put out a call two to three times per year. We leave open the opportunity for people to send in drafts of their proposals early. Some member of our editorial team — it could be me or Charlie, or someone else — will read it and send feedback. This is intended to both strengthen the proposal — whether or not we take it on — and to make it more aligned with the criteria we’re looking for.

Once the winners are selected, then the really hard work starts. We have this story idea and now have to figure out the right approach. How are you going to do the data, if it’s a data story? How are you going to pursue the reporting? What’s the project arc going to look like? All those things are conversations the reporter will work out in conjunction with their editor at ProPublica and in their home newsroom.

What’s that three-way partnership like?
BLUSTAIN: Every newsroom is different, with different bandwidth and needs. That’s the starting point for all partnerships. There are some newsrooms where the partner editor is highly engaged in the process, and is on call every week. Editors are always consulted about where things are going, but there are newsrooms where editors are less involved in the day-to-day, for various reasons. Every work product that’s created is going to be approved by the local   and our newsroom. We have certain skills around how to frame an investigative story that add to the project, but we don’t have the community knowledge that local editors have. Both elements are really important to putting together a story that will be meaningful in a local community and also nationally.

When you’re reading proposals and giving feedback, or seeing a polished submission, which elements of a pitch suggest that a story could be a strong fit for ProPublica?
BLUSTAIN: The potential for impact is a big one. It can take a lot of different forms, but seeing a level of specificity in the projects that points toward the possibility of change is very appealing. Having a reporter who’s able to identify what has already been written in the space, and can clearly express how this advances the story, is an important element. And then also understanding what sources or types of sources reporters have access to — whether that’s data, human sources or other kinds of documents. You want to know that they have those resources in hand, or have the possibility of having them in hand.

ORNSTEIN: People are seeking the ability to spend a year working on a project. Coming into that, we don’t expect that they have already spent a year working on the project or the pitch. We know there are going to be things they don’t know and requests they want to put out. But we want to see that there is a high probability that their hunch or instinct of what’s happening is actually happening. We also want to make sure that it’s not something that can be told in any community across the country. We really ask the questions of, ‘Why does this story need to be told here, in this community?’ and, ‘Why does this story need to be told now?’”

When you’re in the feedback stage and have questions about a potential project, what puts you over the edge to convince you the story is worth pursuing? What revisions or additional steps do you like to see?ORNSTEIN:  Some people have gone to the courthouse and pulled additional records, or they’ve called additional sources. We want to see that if you have an example of something that went wrong, it’s not an anomaly. Even the best institutions make mistakes; even the best-run governments do things that are not right. That doesn’t mean it’s a big investigation. We want to see that there’s more than just an isolated example — there’s material here that would enable you to keep pulling on the string. For some people, that may mean data. For some people, that may mean documents. For some people, that may mean sources. For some people, that may mean examples. It really looks different for different projects.

In terms of the track records of journalists you work with, do you partner with reporters who have not pursued long, ambitious investigative pieces before, but have a compelling idea? What makes you inclined to take a chance on a younger or newer reporter who might not have that ‘proof of concept,’ clip, but who wants to move into this space?
ORNSTEIN: We’ve worked with a huge range of reporters. We’ve worked with people who’ve won a MacArthur “genius grant,” like Jerry Mitchell and Ken Ward Jr., with people fresh out of Report for America, like Samantha Hogan in Maine, and everywhere in between. We want to see the strength of the idea and ability to pull that off. Experience is important, but it’s not the only factor.

What advice would you give to reporters who have the nugget of a compelling idea? How can they prove they’re capable of pulling it off?
BLUSTAIN: Reading investigative materials — understanding how they’re constructed and reflecting that in your proposal — is probably the single best way to dissect what an investigation is and then apply it to your work. As a reader of proposals for many years, I can also say that when I give feedback and a proposal comes back to me really well-refined, that’s an excellent sign that I’m going to have a good editorial dialogue with somebody. I asked for something and they went out and got it. They flipped this proposal upside down and twisted it around, and now it looks like what we were talking about.

What are some typical shortfalls you come across in first-round pitches?
BLUSTAIN: People identify something bad going on, but have no idea what’s behind it. The proposal comes in with a question, and ‘I want to investigate whether X, Y and Z is happening.’ That is an excellent first question, but when you’re in a year-long investigative project that has a deadline, you’re going to need to know more about the project than asking those initial questions.

ORNSTEIN: As we’ve noted  before, for some folks, it’s, ‘Why does this story have to be told in your community and why does the story have to be told now?’ Problems with the criminal justice system, for example, are happening all across the country. Issues with extremism are happening all across the country. So why does the story have to be told in your jurisdiction? If you can’t answer that, it’s hard for us to accept a proposal.

If you want to submit a formal pitch after the initial proposal, what are the steps and what’s the timeline?BLUSTAIN: I’ll take our recent call for proposals as an example. It opened on June 3; the deadline to submit was July 5. But we looked at drafts submitted through June 21, a couple of weeks before the deadline, to give our editors time to read them and give applicants time to absorb that feedback. I  for us to read through everything. We have committees of people reading proposals, asking good questions and narrowing down the pool.

What’s the ratio of proposals you receive to those you commission?
BLUSTAIN: We probably accept somewhere between five and 10 percent of applications in any given cycle. We stay in touch with folks as the process develops to let them know whether they are still in the running. For those who don’t get it, we let them know as well.

Any other advice you’d offer?
ORNSTEIN: If you’re not successful the first time, it doesn’t mean there isn’t merit to your idea. It doesn’t mean you won’t be successful the second time. We’ve had people who’ve applied four or five times before we’ve accepted one of their ideas. So don’t be discouraged. We like far more ideas than we have the capacity to fund, but stay in touch with us. Submit your ideas early in order to get feedback.

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Carly Stern is a freelance reporter based in San Francisco who covers housing, disability policy, urban life and economic inequality.

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