We asked the Nieman Storyboard community — journalists, writers, storytellers, and readers — to share some of their favorite stories, podcasts, books, and documentaries of 2025. (Editor's note: We kept things casual. One of you picked a musician, and we also let you recommend anything that you discovered in 2025, even if it wasn't published this year.) 

Thanks to everyone who shared their recommendations. Here's Part 2 (and you can find Part 1 here): 

Stories 

“Can Anyone Rescue the Trafficked Girls of L.A.’s Figueroa Street?” (Emily Baumgaertner Nunn, The New York Times, October 2025)

Selected by Sophie Culpepper, staff writer covering the evolving local news business for Nieman Lab: 

I admire this reporting as a feat of yearslong trust-building, especially with Ana, and also with Officer Armendariz. Emily Baumgaertner Nunn's unflinching attention to detail, refusal to oversimplify intertwined systemic problems, and deft writing leave readers understanding not just how minors end up on the Blade and places like it, but why girls voluntarily go back after being rescued. The story is multiple things in one: essential accountability reporting with policy implications, an empathetic profile of a brave young woman, and a spotlight on the everyday heroism of the people trying, in different ways, to give her and others like her a shot at a better life.

“Selling Zohran” (Corey Atad, Defector, August 2025)

Selected by Neel Dhanesha, staff writer at Nieman Lab:

I love stories that make me feel like I'm peeking behind the curtains of a magic show, and there was no bigger magic show for me and my fellow New Yorkers this year than the rise of Zohran Mamdani. This story by Corey Atad showed us exactly how Mamdani managed to get the attention of everyone not just in New York but around the world, and it's clearly the work of both deep reporting and the keenly honed eye of a critic who can appreciate the effort that goes into getting the right shot.  

“Grave Mistakes: The History and Future of Chile’s ‘Disappeared’” (Fletcher Reveley, Undark, February 2025)

Selected by Robert Sanchez, 5280 magazine's senior staff writer and adjunct professor at the University of Denver's Department of Media, Film and Journalism Studies (Sanchez was featured in Nieman Storyboard this year for his piece on psilocybin therapy): 

Time is a luxury in this business, but taking the opportunity to follow a story for months (or years) can pay off in a big way. "Grave Mistakes" is both deeply reported and thoughtfully organized, a true example of a journalist who spends time with sources and then gets out of the way when it comes down to putting words onto the computer screen. This story is informative and elegantly written, without being overwrought.

“How to Fix a Typewriter and Your Life” (Kurt Streeter, visuals by Ruth Fremson, The New York Times, November 2025)

Selected by Andrea Pitzer, former editor of Nieman Storyboard, author of three books, and founder of the Degenerate Art newsletter: 

With the deliberately plain language and transparent arc of "How To Fix a Typewriter and Your Life," Kurt Streeter has created an extraordinary portrait of concepts that are hard to say anything insightful about head on. He explores existential despair, the skills and experiences of elders, the beauty of mechanical things, how physical bodies gain their own knowledge, the saving of a soul, and the shoring up of a community. The danger of "old-timey stories" lies in how easy it is for them to veer into sentiment or nostalgia, but Streeter's deep respect for both men and awe at the passing of a vocation from one to the other give this story the weight of an almost religious experience. 

Also selected by Mary Schmich, Pulitzer Prize-winning former Chicago Tribune columnist who wrote and narrated the 2025 podcast, “Division Street Revisited.” (She's also a 1996 Nieman Fellow and was a guest on the Nieman Storyboard podcast in April.)

This New York Times piece is the kind of feature story I rarely encounter anymore, one that carries you like a good short story does. No celebrities, no Trump, no Big Issues. Honestly, I skimmed past it on the NYT website — not newsy enough! — but then a friend sent it to me and said I had to read it, that she’d cried the whole way through. It’s a beautifully written exploration of a friendship and the passage of time. Plus — typewriters! I love stories with an object at the center.

“The Missing Kayaker” (Jamie Thompson, The Atlantic, November 2025) 

Selected by Lane DeGregory, Pulitzer Prize-winning enterprise reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, co-host (with Maria Carrillo) of the WriteLane podcast, and July guest on the Nieman Storyboard podcast: 

A dark lake. A meteor shower. A missing man, determined sheriff and diver who always finds the bodies. This story took readers on an irresistible detective hunt through murky waters, small towns and international border crossings — and delved into the depths of devotion, hubris, and faith. All of the characters were complicated; the reporting rounded out their desires and downfalls. I love the subheads detailing how many days the kayaker had been missing. It really brought home the urgency of the hunt and aftermath. This gem reminded me how compelling true crime stories can be. 

“No-Parking Zone: The Perils of Finding a Spot in NYC” (Zach Helfand, The New Yorker, May 2025)

Also selected by Lane DeGregory:

I shared this story with so many people: A narrative about a dude who moves cars around the Big Apple for a living. Who knew? The details were delicious. The data was rich — and astounding. The monotony, uncertainty and futility were palpable. I felt like I was with the guy, waiting and wondering and thinking existential thoughts. It reminded me of why I could never live in New York City. And how wonderful it is to be dropped into worlds that surround us — but we know nothing about, especially in the talented hands of an immersive and thoughtful writer.

“Life in Beige” (Allison P. Davis, The Cut, November 2025)

Selected by Theo Balcomb, audio producer and journalist who created “The Daily” at The New York Times:  

I've thought about this every day. Everyone needs to read it because every one of us will feel the impact of pharmaceutical companies creating lives devoid of pleasure. Someday, when we try to understand how we all became so much sadder than we needed to be, this will be the skeleton key: “Between the endless stream of soul-destroying bad news, giving up post-dinner cigarettes, endless app-matches, the slow creep of middle-age malaise, falling into a stupor after watching ‘The Shining’ in 37 parts on TikTok instead of going to a movie, and any of the other seemingly endless ways to disconnect from pleasure — maybe it doesn’t matter so much anyway.”

“How Israel erased a town of 200,000 people” (Financial Times) 

Selected by Drew Harwell, Washington Post reporter covering tech and society, and guest on the Nieman Storyboard podcast in June: 

Even in a year of so much powerful reporting from Gaza, this Financial Times story seared itself into memory by combining maps, videos, sketches, and interviews to document the annihilation of a refugee camp inside one of the hardest places to report on Earth. What made it so haunting is how it interwove the mass horrors of a military cleansing with the place's human moments: the "pistachio-stuffed baklava," the cafe music nights, the "romances blessed" at a now-flattened wedding hall.

“All by Himself” (Ben Terris, New York magazine, May 2025) 

Also selected by Drew Harwell: 

Reporting on the unseen mental health struggles of one of the Senate's most prominent members was a huge minefield, and yet Ben Terris pulled it off, delivering a dogged, sensitive and disturbing profile of John Fetterman and some of the best political journalism of the year. Every paragraph featured some new scoop or revealing detail about Fetterman's life. But between the newsiest bits, there was also an elegantly told and empathetic story about a man increasingly unrecognizable to the people who loved him. 

“Awe Is Essential” (Peter Wehner, The Atlantic, September 2025)

Selected by Carly Stern, a Nieman Storyboard contributor and journalist based in Brooklyn whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Vox: 

At the start of each new year, I pick two words that I aspire to bring into my life. In 2025, one was “wonder.” After moving from California to New York, I wanted to be intentional about how to find and cultivate feelings of wonder and awe in my everyday life. This beautiful Atlantic piece by Peter Wehner meditates on why this hard-to-describe emotion is so essential: how awe humbles us, is a portal to feelings of transcendence, and can help us feel more grounded and purposeful in dark or chaotic times. His words have stuck with me.

“A beloved alley cat now lives in the Watergate. Was she kidnapped, or rescued?” (Andrea Sachs, The Washington Post, May 2024)

Selected by Laura Coffey, longtime editor, feature writer, author, and president of the Society for Features Journalism: 

I discovered this 2024 Washington Post story when it bubbled up as a winner of the 2025 Society for Features Journalism’s Excellence-in-Features contest. From the contest judges: “The saga of the maybe-kidnapped, maybe-rescued alley cat comes alive through Andrea Sachs’ layering of neighborhood sources with nuanced details. And the writing is stellar.” So true! Set aside some time to savor this one if you missed it when it first came out.

Books

“Cry for Me, Argentina: My Life as a Failed Child Star” (Tamara Yajia, Bloomsbury, 2025)

Selected by Trevor Pyle, a Nieman Storyboard contributor and former journalist in the Pacific Northwest: 

Comedian Tamara Yajia's memoir swings from bawdy to beautiful. In a nation where immigrants' stories can be reduced to clichés or wielded like political batons, it reminds readers that each such story has its own rhythms, surprises, and unexpected style of humor. 

“Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-Women's Ascent of Denali” (Cassidy Randall, Abrams Books, 2025)

Selected by Brendan O'Meara, author of “The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine” and host of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast:  

Cassidy Randall's account of the "Denali Damsels" is riveting and suspenseful.

“The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture” (Tricia Romano, PublicAffairs Books, 2024)

“Paper of Wreckage: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media” (Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo, Atria Books, 2025)

Selected by Samantha Henry, editor of Nieman Reports: 

I've really enjoyed two recent books about game-changing newspapers: “The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice,” and “Paper of Wreckage,” about the New York Post. I found the oral history compilation format — which both books used — incredibly compelling for telling these specific stories. They read much like the publications themselves: frenetic, boundary-pushing, wildly imperfect — and always a gripping read. 

“Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful” (David Enrich, William Morrow, March 2025)

Selected by Daniel Drepper, 2026 Nieman Fellow and chairman of Netzwerk Recherche, the association of investigative journalists in Germany: 

New York Times investigative reporter David Enrich gives us an intimate look into the coordinated campaign to weaken press freedom in the U.S. Through detailed stories of individual cases, Enrich explains how risky it already is to investigate the rich and powerful, especially for freelance reporters without big institutional backing. And how powerful legal scholars, lawyers, and politicians try to expand libel lawsuits to silence the press. I love all of Enrich’s books, but this one is especially timely.

“They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals” (Mariah Blake, Crown, May 2025)

Also selected by Daniel Drepper: 

"They Poisoned The World" follows Michael Hickey from Hoosier Falls in his fight against one of the most dangerous chemicals in the world: PFAS, also called “forever chemicals.” PFAS are linked to cancer, obesity, infertility and a weak immune system, among others. Reporter Mariah Blake is one of the main journalists investigating PFAS and explains, after years of research, that big chemical companies knew about the risks for decades, but still decided to keep producing and using PFAS without appropriate safeguards. The book shows how hard it is for people who got poisoned to fight these big companies, get justice and keep going with their lives.

“The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing” (Adam Moss, Penguin Random House, April 2024)

Selected by Kara Cutruzzula, Storyboard contributor and co-editor of The Hat:

If you’re interested in the creative process, this chunky book is a repository of inspiration and micro details. Dive into the minds of wide-ranging artists, from Suzan-Lori Parks to Sofia Coppola to George Saunders, each expertly shepherded towards revealing interviews by former New York magazine editor Adam Moss. “The Work of Art” somehow accomplishes the impossible: it encourages you to marvel at the effort involved in making great art, yet convinces you to chip away at the effort yourself. 

Podcasts

“What Happened in Alabama?” (Lee Hawkins, APM Studios)

Selected by Sharon Broussard, veteran editor and writer: 

A podcast that talks about how you can take the traumatized family out of the South but you can't easily take the source of the trauma out of the family. Lee Hawkins unpacks his family's violent history and exposes America's brutal history, which still lingers in all of our bones. I was surprised by the depth of this podcast and Hawkins's honesty about his family situation. Part journalism, history, and memoir, and always a compelling listen.

“Fela Kuti: Fear No Man” (Jad Abumrad, Higher Ground / Audible / WNYC Studios)

Also selected by Sharon Broussard: 

I have long listened to Fela's music and even saw the Broadway play, but this historical podcast filled in a lot of holes. I discovered that Fela's activism came from his mother, who challenged a monarch, and that an American woman helped guide him in his musical career. Fascinating history and a painful story about a (flawed) hero who paid a high price for opposing his government.

“No Easy Fix” (Ethan Brooks, The Atlantic)

Three-part Radio Atlantic series on homelessness and addiction in San Francisco. Selected by Chris Bannon, podcast and public radio veteran exec: 

Vivid, personal, emotionally rich storytelling about a complex problem. 

“Alternate Realities” (3-part “Embedded” series, NPR) 

Selected by Alison MacAdam, audio story editor and 2014 Nieman Fellow: 

At a time when — in the genre of "limited series" narrative podcasts — there's a glut of overwrought, over-produced true crime, this show is beautifully minimalist: a son, a father, and a bet, with stakes as big as the crisis facing American democracy right now. 

“Signal Hill”

Selected by Neel Dhanesha, staff writer at Nieman Lab:

Signal Hill takes two of my favorite journalistic forms — magazines and audio documentaries — and mashes them together. The result, a podcast with "issues" rather than seasons, structured around a table of contents (complete with editor's notes), is beautiful, weird, and mesmerizing. There's nothing else like it out there, and at a time when it feels like there's less and less space for longform, craft-obsessed work of any kind, it's a true breath of fresh air. This is the kind of stuff that made me want to be a journalist in the first place. I hope it lives forever.

“Shell Game” (Evan Ratliff) 

Selected by Mary Schmich: 

“Shell Game’s” first season was released in late 2024 but I didn’t discover it until 2025 when I was reading a story about the rocky future of narrative podcasts. That story raved about “Shell Game” so, having just written and narrated a podcast myself, I sought it out. And wow. Evan Ratliff, a tech journalist, makes an AI voice clone of himself and then sets his clone loose in the world to chat with friends, family, phone scammers. It’s a hugely entertaining and unnerving look at a vital phenomenon that many of us are struggling to understand.

“Question Everything: Media freedom & the 26 words that created the Internet” (Brian Reed, KCRW)

Selected by Joni Deutsch, award-winning NPR veteran and SVP of Marketing & Audience Development at the podcast services firm The Podglomerate: 

What if we could stabilize the future of media, journalism, and the internet? The solution could take the form of 26 words known as Section 230, buried in a much bigger act that Congress passed in 1996. And with that quest in mind, host Brian Reed embarks on a podcast journey to get to the heart of press freedom and what it'll take to recapture it.

Documentaries 

“King Hamlet” (directed by Elvira Lind)

Selected by Franklin Leonard, founder of the Black List and June 2025 guest on the Nieman Storyboard podcast: 

Elvira Lind chronicles her husband Oscar Isaac's personal and professional journey as he prepares to play the lead role in a production of “Hamlet” at the Public Theater, at a time when his mother was ill and their first child is born. A remarkable piece of art about how we humans make art amidst the mess of being human. 

Music 

Jensen McRae

Selected by Megan Cattel, assistant editor of Nieman Reports: 

I’ve been listening to singer-songwriter Jensen McRae for the past few months. There’s nothing quite like an artist who can capture the rapturous highs and haunting lows of a doomed relationship — all within a single song. Her work is lyrical storytelling at its finest. She is a writer’s writer, a compulsive diarist, and has a pretty cool Substack!

***

The post Nieman Storyboard Best of 2025: Your favorite stories — and storytellers — of the year (Part 2) appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

We asked the Nieman Storyboard community — journalists, writers, storytellers, and the readers who love them — to share some of their favorite stories, podcasts, books, and documentaries of 2025. (For books, we let you pick any book that you read in 2025, not just what was published this year.) Thanks to everyone who shared their recommendations. Here's Part 1 (and you can read Part 2 here): 

Stories 

“The Rice Records” (Latria Graham, Oxford American, March 2025)

Selected by Minda Honey, Nieman Storyboard contributor, author of ”The Heartbreak Years” and writer at mindahoney.substack.com: 

Latria Graham masterfully layers her personal history with the history of a region and Black oppression in America using a grain of rice as the vehicle, Carolina Gold Rice, specifically.

“‘It broke me’: Inside the FBI hunt for the online predators who persuaded a 13-year-old to die” (William Wan, The Washington Post, October 2025)

Selected by Trevor Pyle, a Nieman Storyboard contributor and former journalist in the Pacific Northwest: 

The word I keep landing on is "unflinching." William Wan's haunting story of a Washington state teenager and the online community that encouraged his suicide is hard to read and harder to shake. But it teaches a sharp lesson about journalism: You don't need to be showy or ornamental in your writing. The difficult truth is enough.

“The Nuns Trying to Save the Women on Texas’s Death Row” (Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker, February 2025)

Selected by Brendan O'Meara, author of “The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine” and host of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast:  

It's so good I never want to ever do this kind of work again. There's no point anymore. Law school, here I come!

“The River House Broke. We Rushed in the River” (Aaron Parsley, Texas Monthly, August 2025)

Selected by Paige Williams, staff writer at The New Yorker and former editor of Nieman Storyboard: 

I’ve been unable to stop thinking about “The river house broke,” by Aaron Parsley, of Texas Monthly. Parsley succeeded, with heart-sickening skill, at the journalistic ideal of documenting horror with appropriately visceral — yet unpretentious, unsentimental, un-self-pitying (a tough trick!) — detail and pacing. The piece goes on not a beat too long, ending, somewhat surprisingly, as a love letter to one particular survivor of the Guadalupe River flood. “River house” is a service; it can only contribute to our shared understanding of how the unthinkable unfolds, and, let’s hope, of how to spare others the same measure of suffering.

Editor's note: Parsley's family partnered with the Austin Community Foundation to establish a fund in memory of Clay Parisher, Parsley's 20-month-old nephew who died in the flooding. 

“Healing Is a Fluid Journey: How Hurricane Katrina Changed Me” (Melanie Dione, NewsOne, August 2025)

Selected by Deesha Philyaw, author of short story collection “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies” and the forthcoming novel, “The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman”:

Melanie Dione opens with a reflection on how she spent Friday night, Aug. 26, 2005, the day before she and her children fled New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approached. She then pivots to the simultaneous flooding in Mississippi and how “we all share the kinship of being failed.” She writes of the years of displacement, rebuilding, and healing that followed, and concludes with her return to New Orleans and her advocacy work in climate justice. Melanie's essay reminds us that Katrina was more than a catastrophic hurricane. She is an emblem of this country's enduring racism and systemic failure to value and protect Black life.

“Playing Secretary” (Kerry Howley, New York magazine, June 2025) 

Selected by Kevin Nguyen, deputy editor at The Verge and author of two novels:

New York magazine got raked through the coals for Olivia Nuzzi — OK, a lot of that is fair — but it overshadowed that the magazine still does some of the best D.C. reporting there is. This Pete Hegseth write-around by Kerry Howley is probably the most revealing piece about a figure in Trump's Cabinet this year. What did I learn? Well, just a lot of horrible details about the person who runs our Department of Defense — I mean, Department of War.

“House Arab” (Ismail Ibrahim, Bidoun)

Also selected by Kevin Nguyen: 

Inside baseball, but this piece just totally crackles on every line. I still have immense respect for The New Yorker (it's the best English-language magazine, I don't think anyone can meaningfully argue otherwise); still, this punctures quite a few holes in what they do there.

“Taylor Swift Turned Me Straight” (Lauren Theisen, Defector, August 2025)

Selected by Eva Holland, a Yukon-based writer and editor: 

All the stories I read in a year tend to blur together as the months roll by, but this essay from Lauren Theisen stayed with me. It's about a specific experience — a trans woman's changing relationship to a particular flavor of American pop music — and a nearly universal one: what it feels like to fall in love. I have no doubt it will stay with me months into next year, too.

“She Despised Charlie Kirk. He Resolved to Make People Like Her Pay” (Eli Saslow, The New York Times, October 2025)

Selected by Laura Coffey, longtime editor, feature writer, author, and president of the Society for Features Journalism: 

This is the kind of story that would make me break out in stress hives if I had to write it, but a calm, careful journalist like Eli Saslow somehow makes it look easy. By the time you reach the end of this story about a digital "civil war" after Charlie Kirk's death, you come away with a deep understanding of all the players in it. It doesn't mean you agree with every character — not at all — but you understand their thinking, and you feel an upwelling of empathy for them. This story is special because it illuminates the divisive world around us with such humanity and clarity.

“Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era” (Nicholas Hune-Brown, The Local, November 2025)

Selected by Andrew Deck, staff writer covering AI for Nieman Lab: 

Nicholas Hune-Brown’s feature for the Toronto-based magazine, The Local, exposes a freelance journalist who published AI-generated fabrications in outlets like The Guardian and Dwell – a scammer Hune-Brown discovered the truth about only because he tried to commission her. Part investigation, part personal essay, Hune-Brown expertly weaves together shoe leather reporting with moments of heartbreak — the kind reserved for when your worst suspicions are confirmed. As a whole, the story illustrates the unsteady ground that journalists work on in this post-ChatGPT moment, one in which AI technologies are quietly chipping away at the credibility of the written word.

Also selected by Eva Holland: 

Of course the subject matter is bleak: an editor investigates his own freelancer, and finds a web of lies and chatbot gobbledygook. But I still really enjoyed reading it, because Nick Hune-Brown is a great reporter and a great writer, and the feature he's crafted from this mess took me on a journey. Ultimately I finished the story feeling hopeful: This is the kind of work that an LLM can't replicate.

Books

“Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins” (Barbara Demick, Random House, May 2025)

Selected by Laura Hazard Owen, editor of Nieman Lab: 

After identical twin girls are born in China in 2000, the government snatches one from her loving family and she's adopted by a family in Texas. Journalist Barbara Demick traces the girls' stories (the book begins with her getting a Facebook message from the American twin's brother) and helps make their reunion happen, while chronicling the shocking history of China's one-child rule.

“Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space” (Adam Higginbotham, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, May 2024) 

Selected by Alison MacAdam, audio story editor and 2014 Nieman Fellow: 

As a kid who watched the shuttle explode on a TV at school, the Challenger has always had special significance. This book filled in all the (many) blanks in my knowledge — from the earliest days of NASA culture-building to the shocking cover-up that followed the disaster. And I couldn't put it down; stayed up for hours reading.

"There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America" (Brian Goldstone, Crown, March 2025)

Selected by Shaun Raviv, an independent longform audio and print journalist based in Atlanta, and 2026 Nieman Fellow: 

One of the most powerful books I've ever read. If you've read “Random Family” or “Evicted,” it hits a lot of the same notes, has the same level of minute-by-minute harrowing detail, and I'd argue it gains power by being more streamlined.

Also selected by Andrea Pitzer, former editor of Nieman Storyboard, author of three books, and founder of the Degenerate Art newsletter:

Brian Goldstone's extraordinary book “There Is No Place for Us” spends years following the fates of five of unforgettable Atlanta-area families who are part of the often-invisible constellation of working homeless in America. He manages to bring to life the impossible quests these parents manage (or fail to manage) daily without romanticizing their suffering. Goldstone shows how deeply embedded the housing crisis is in modern society, and makes clear that the only way out out of our nightmare is to establish housing as a human right.

“Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy” (Julia Ioffe, Ecco, October 2025)

Selected by Franklin Leonard, founder of the Black List and June 2025 guest on the Nieman Storyboard podcast: 

It's a herculean accomplishment of excavatory history, family memoir, and storytelling.

“Lost & Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness” (Kathryn Schulz, Random House, November 2022) 

Selected by Carly Stern, a Nieman Storyboard contributor and journalist based in Brooklyn whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Vox: 

I came to this memoir in 2025 after hearing Kathryn Schulz on Ezra Klein’s podcast this year. I was moved by the eloquent way she spoke and wanted to dive into her mind. Schulz’s memoir is a thoughtful, reflective exploration on the plurality of human life and emotion — and how we can possibly hold love and loss, joy and despair, together at the same time. I found her prose to be lovely and meditative.

“Owner of a Lonely Heart: A Memoir of Motherhood and Absence” (Beth Nguyen, Scribner, 2023)

Selected by Megan Cattel, assistant editor of Nieman Reports: 

I loved “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Beth Nguyen. Her memoir retraces her childhood in Michigan, after her family fled Vietnam in 1975, leaving her mother behind in the chaos. Beth’s story isn’t guided by an ancestral archive or a treasure trove of documents; she builds meaning from fragments. She writes that family secrecy and silence “becomes a part of you … you almost forget that it wasn’t supposed to be there at all.” That willingness to confront what’s unknowable — and to shape a memoir from what’s left unsaid — is what stayed with me long after the last page.

Podcasts

“Noisy Memory” (Brian Harnetty)

Selected by Julie Shapiro, career listener, audio champion, and the co-founder of Audio Flux: 

“Noisy Memory,” from the Ohio-based musician and sound artist Brian Harnetty, spans several mediums: a book, podcast, live performance, and a playlist. At the center of each are stunning archival recordings and oral histories from small Midwestern towns that share details of daily life in the mid-20th century, and rare recordings from luminaries Sun Ra and Thomas Merton. To my ears, Brian has invented a new way to document history through collaborative musical composition, while fostering deep relationships with the communities where his source materials emanate from. His work is both sincere and playful, feels both traditional and fresh, and dazzles across all forms. 

“The Harvard Plan” (Ilya Marritz, On the Media / The Boston Globe)

Selected by Julia Barton, founder of RadioWright, writer at Continuous Wave, and 2024 Nieman Fellow: 

Reporter Ilya Marritz, The Boston Globe, and On the Media teamed up for a second season to cover the Trump administration's assault on higher education. What I really appreciated was the way this series interweaves three stories of academics who are living through this upheaval, including one who supported Trump (in the abstract at least). And there are some reporting bombshells as well about who is representing the administration in court.

“WTF with Marc Maron: Regina King”

Selected by Theo Balcomb, audio producer and journalist who created “The Daily” at The New York Times:  

Talking about grief is not a thing that people want to do. As someone who's in deep grief myself, I yearn for places where it's OK to say how you really feel. Marc has brought grief into his listeners' lives in a profound way simply by treating it as a commonplace topic. He talks about bringing the perfect hot water kettle to his hotel room, the fight his cats are getting into, who he saw at the Comedy Store last night, and his deep grief all in the span of five minutes. In this episode, he and Regina King support each other through just the kind of grief talk people shy away from. I'm grateful for it.

“What Went Wrong” (Chris Winterbauer, Lizzie Bassett, David Boman)

Selected by Sophie Culpepper, staff writer covering the evolving local news business for Nieman Lab: 

“What Went Wrong” is a well-researched, accessible, narrative, and FUNNY deep dive into how impossible movies are to make. Its hosts, Chris Winterbauer and Lizzie Bassett (and producer David Boman), are passionate cinephiles who don’t take themselves too seriously. Through their yarns tracing how individual films made it from idea to silver screen, I’ve learned more about movies I love, but also the books they were adapted from, the time periods they were made in, and the push-and-pull between making money and making art. This podcast ostensibly about movies is a window into messy, creative people, how sausage gets made, and cultural history.

Standout episodes: “V for Vendetta,”“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” 

***

Read Part 2 of Nieman Storyboard's Best of 2025.

The post Nieman Storyboard Best of 2025: Your favorite stories of the year (Part 1) appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

The book arrived in the afternoon mail: “Jimmy Breslin: Essential Writings.” I opened to the first story, figuring I’d take a quick look. It was a longish piece written in 1960 about some jockey I’d never heard of. Despite the recent news about Kentucky Derby thoroughbreds dying, I have neither interest in nor knowledge of horse racing. I thought I’d read a few grafs of the story, then set it aside while I tended to other tasks. Instead I stood at the kitchen counter and read the whole thing, more than 5,000 words on a subject I cared nothing about. Until this guy Breslin made me care.

I knew who Breslin was. You’ve probably heard of him, too. He was a legendary New York journalist, a prolific writer of newspaper columns for the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Journal-American, the New York Daily News, and Newsday. In his day — and he had a long “day,” reporting pretty much nonstop from 1960-2012 — he was known for his unique storytelling, his thinking-outside-the-box approach to reporting, his attention to working class people and his colorful personality.

But maybe, like me, you didn’t read Breslin in real time, and you haven’t read him anthologized in a long time. Or maybe ever. Let’s correct this now! His work is masterful, and we can learn from it.

A good place to start is the new anthology, edited by Dan Barry of The New York Times, who knew Breslin and was inspired by his signature approach to journalism.

But before the tutorial, consider first the breathtaking breadth of Breslin’s work: He wrote about horse racing, boxing and baseball. He wrote about Vietnam, Watergate and the American Civil Rights Movement. He wrote about the assassinations of Malcolm X, JFK, and John Lennon. He wrote about Lyndon Johnson in an operating room undergoing gallbladder surgery and Bobby Kennedy in a taxi talking about ice cream and how his dog peed on a famous senator’s rug. He wrote about Big Mama Nunziata, the 77-year-old matriarch of the infamous Gallo crime family. He wrote about gravediggers and cops and longshoremen and waitresses, about teachers and bartenders and taxi drivers. And he wrote, for the most part, under deadline. Let that sink in for a moment.

Here are a few first lines from a sampling of his hundreds of columns:

Patricia Anne Doss, ten, stood in the red dirt and twitched her black toes to brush away the ants crawling over her feet.

All day the helicopters came down out of the terrible sun to pick up the wounded who were wrapped in bandages with blood coming through and the dead whose bodies were in chunks inside ponchos.

It was as graceless at the end as it was at the start.

The hand that rocked the bureaucracy into motion was found, of a Sunday night in June 1974, wrapped around a glass.

How could a reader not read on?

Craft behind the art

More important question: How does Breslin do it?

Let me start with the 30,000-foot answers: He loved what he did, and that showed in every piece he wrote. He respected the people he wrote about, and they felt that, so they trusted him. He had enormous, prodigious, unflagging energy. He was interested in everything. He was the summa cum laude of extroverts.

Okay, but what about craft?

The guy could write a scene. He could write a scene because, in the moment, out there reporting, on deadline, he was in the moment. He noticed everything. He looked everywhere. He listened. He talked to whomever was around. He was out there — not behind a desk, not talking on the phone — but immersed in the worlds he was reporting on. That’s known, endearingly I think, as shoe-leather work. He knew when to describe, when to explain, when to let his subjects tell the story.

Here he is writing about the printing of the final edition of the New York Mirror in “The Wake for a Newspaper” in 1963. Selig Adler was the paper’s managing editor.

Adler walked down one flight of stairs from his office to the Mirror composing room and handed the copy to Marty Tanzer, who was in charge of distributing it to the typesetters.

“What’s this?” Tanzer asked.

“Set this in type and then go get yourself a job,” Adler said. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and walked out of the composing room.

 Here he is with an opening scene of the kind of Thanksgiving Day column no one else would think of writing:

There are no ashtrays on the tables of the Automat. People who smoke sit too long at a table, and the Automat is a place for volume. So yesterday, in the Automat at 33^rd St. and Eighth Ave., the men used their empty coffee cups for putting out cigarettes during the long, deadening afternoon.

 And this — prepare yourself for the most powerful, graceful run-on sentence this side of William Faulkner — is Breslin reporting from Saigon in 1965:

The rain came down on the dullness and squalor of Saigon and drove the people from the streets, the old men who use them for bathrooms, the naked children who crouch in the dirt in front of the shack house, the women who are creased and wispy, the government clerks who ride bicycles and have only small lives in front of them, the American soldiers in short-sleeved shirts who come in washed and red-faced and try to make it a service town but are defeated by its dullness, the policemen who wear white uniforms with sooty collars, and the small round-shouldered men who are of military age but have been let out of the army after three years because the country has been at war for so long that there is no more urgency to it.

 Breslin was also a master of voice and tone. He was often smart, quick, and conversational — the guy on the barstool next to you telling a story. When Viking published an anthology of his columns in 1967, “The World of Jimmy Breslin,”  the review in the Los Angeles Times characterized Breslin’s style as “ a pound of Hemingway and a pound of Joyce and 240 pounds of Breslin.”

He could also be witty, as in this one-line send-up of the 1962 Mets:

The Mets are bad for many reasons, one of which is that they do not have good players.

And a smart-ass, as in this opening scene from a 1969 piece about Joe Namath:

The barmaid had long black hair and she was sitting on top of the bar with her chest coming out of her dress and her skirt useless against the amount of legs she was showing.” 

(One can almost forgive the sexism because the description is so good.)

He knew when to underplay, to report with clinical precision, leaving the emotion to the reader, as in this from his on-the-scene reporting of Malcolm X’s murder:

Malcolm X went straight back and the sound of his head slamming the wooden floor was mixed with screams as he lay on his back on the stage of an old ballroom on 166^th Street and Broadway and he died while two others in the crowd fired their guns, a big-slugged .45 and a .38.

DIY Breslin

After experiencing intense admiration, a soupçon of jealousy, and a dose of nostalgia for the journalism of yore, what can we learn from the work of Jimmy Breslin? Here, I believe, are the simple but powerful take-home messages:

It is possible to do this work. It is possible to write with clarity and grace, with a distinct voice, with narrative structure — on deadline. He did it.

Nothing substitutes for shoe-leather reporting. Today we live and work (and love) in virtual bubbles. But if we want to bring readers to a place, we have to be there ourselves. And not just to dash out to report a particular story. To walk the streets, to talk to passersby, to go to events, to learn about, observe and wrap ourselves in the communities we write about.

Maybe the story is outside the frame. Let other reporters look straight ahead. We can follow Breslin’s lead and look to the sides, or behind. Think of Breslin going to an Automat on Thanksgiving to observe the old men who eat there. Think of Breslin writing about the shooting of John Lennon not as a crime story, and not with John Lennon at the center, but from a cop’s eye view. Think of Breslin writing about the man tasked with digging JFK’s grave. It’s as simple — and as challenging — as turning your head, as looking elsewhere, as hearing and listening to other voices.

Tone and voice are not the sole property of fiction writers. Breslin got the facts, stuck to the facts, and then wrote the hell out of the story. He spoke to readers from the page, his voice reflecting both the subject matter and his own personality. He did this without becoming part of the story or overwhelming the story. He did this not just by knowing who he was, but by spending the time to know whom he was writing about.

Reading him does not have to be an exercise in nostalgia. It can be a lesson in what great journalism can be.

Breslin basics

Jimmy Breslin was born to a working-class Irish-American family in 1928, in Queens, New York. He began his long career as a copy boy at the Long Island Press (a college drop-out who “majored in excuses”) later working for a string of New York newspapers. His work earned him two Pulitzers, a Metropolitan Reporting Award, a Damon Runyon Award (for distinctive writing style) and many other accolades. He wrote his final column in 2012. He died in 2017.

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Lauren Kessler is an Oregon-based narrative journalist, teacher and author of 15 nonfiction books.

The post Essential Breslin: Artful narrative by a master of journalistic craft appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

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

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

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

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

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

A story subject as trusted co-host

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trusting listeners to follow the threads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He says, simply, “It’s my nature.”

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making ethical issues part of the story

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

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

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

Letting listeners in on the reporting process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then Arcand tries warns her off her quest.

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

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

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

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

Letting the reporting shift the narrative

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

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

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

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

EDITOR'S NOTE: This month, Pushkin Industries published  "The Best Audio Storytelling: 2022," an audiobook compendium of English-language nonfiction. The collection’s curator, Pushkin’s Julia Barton spoke with creators of work in the collection about their storytelling choices and challenges. This is the second of four posts that revive "Audio Danger," Barton's Storyboard series on podcasting published a decade ago. The first installment,  posted last week, updates the status of podcasting as a journalistic form.

By Julia Barton

[dc]T[/dc]he 2022 podcast “Will Be Wild” (from Pineapple Street Studios/Wondery/Amazon Music) is a powerful, deeply reported eight-part series about the people who saw the U.S. Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, coming — both those who tried to stop it, and those who took part. The series’ narrators, Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz, are veteran public radio reporters who previously co-hosted a series at WNYC Studios, “Trump, Inc.”

I admire the drive and scope of “Will Be Wild,” reported mostly in the year following Jan. 6 riots, for its remarkable sourcing even as suspects were apprehended and Congress began its investigations. Bernstein and Marritz each carve out beats of their own, alternating episodes as they help listeners navigate the disturbing cacophony of disinformation and violent rhetoric that came to a crescendo that day — and remains a ever-present threat.

As a story editor myself, I found the fifth episode, “The Tunnel,” particularly fascinating. It’s a great candidate for Pushkin’s best-of collection as a distilled and structurally remarkable example of what this series does so well throughout.

Framing a story through a tunnel

The episode starts with Bernstein and ex-District of Columbia police officer Michael Fanone watching footage from his body-cam on Jan. 6. Fanone, normally an undercover vice-squad officer, had responded to distress calls on his radio and volunteered to back up officers under attack at the Capitol. He wound up in the short tunnel that leads to a landing overlooking the National Mall — the same tunnel presidents walk through before taking the oath of office at inauguration.

“We were calling this episode ‘The Tunnel’ very early on” in production of the series, Bernstein says.

[caption id="attachment_175093" align="alignright" width="450"] Andrea Bernstein[/caption]

The reporting method Bernstein uses at the top of the episode, that of watching or looking through records of an event with the subject, is one that works especially well in audio. It allows people to re-enter their memories of an event and narrate them in present tense. In this case, Fanone’s memory is horrific and painful: Rioters pull him from the line of officers, rip off his badge and radio, and threaten to kill him. Then someone Tases him in the back of the neck. We can hear him scream. After the crowd finally releases him, we hear Fanone back safely in the company of his fellow officers. But he has suffered a traumatic brain injury and, as he finds out soon in the hospital, a heart attack from being Tased.

“Both Hannis Brown (the series’ sound designer) and I felt that putting together this episode was one of the most intense things we’ve ever done,” Bernstein says. “Listening (to the body cam video) over and over and over and over again… Mike Fanone is narrating to me everything that happens, but of course, he’s being attacked. So I have to ingest his version, but also look at the whole scene.” Which meant re-examining the attack as recorded by multiple other videos that surfaced of the same incident.

Days of reporting for 10 minutes of story

These hours and days of intense reporting are in service of the first 10 minutes of the episode. The story then turns to the man who held the Taser that gave Fanone a heart attack: Danny Rodriguez, who had traveled with right-wing insurrectionists to D.C. from California and who believed, he tells FBI interrogators, that President Trump needed them to “save democracy.”

[caption id="attachment_175057" align="alignleft" width="450"] Former Washington Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone (left) with fellow officer Daniel Hodges and U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry
Dunn at a hearing of the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault of the U.S. CapitolJune 21, 2022.[/caption]

Bernstein says she had been pursuing an interview with another of Fanone’s attackers. But then a judge allowed journalists access to raw video of Rodriguez’s four-hour interrogation. After watching that, Bernstein had a realization, one that went far beyond the violence of the man’s encounter with Officer Mike Fanone.

“In the course of my last six to seven years of reporting, I have interviewed probably hundreds of people who have had an encounter with Donald Trump,” she says. “And each of them comes to kind of the same conclusion as Danny Rodriguez: ‘I was caught up in what (Trump) was saying, and I thought I would be the one to carry it out.’ And then all of them find themselves cast aside.”

That insight leads to a second, powerful layer to this episode: As narrator, Bernstein wants us to pay attention not only to what happened but to how disinformation and the former president’s charismatic hold on his followers led to violence. After introducing the interrogation tape, Bernstein turns to the audience and explains that listeners will not be hearing all of it, but directs them to the show notes to find links to the whole thing. Bernstein makes journalistic transparency and context a part of her story, as she narrates in the podcast:

Because part of the story of January 6th and the lead up to it and the aftermath, is about fake news and media manipulation, we want you to know we’ve kept the meaning of what people said intact.

I found that a deft move, simple and direct, but also a reminder that part of our job as listeners is to think about how a story is being constructed. Bernstein then lets us listen in on Rodriguez’s alternately self-loathing and self-aggrandizing version of events. By the time he’s done confessing to the FBI, we’ve spent 10 minutes with him, the same amount of time that we spent with Mike Fanone. The symmetry is subtle, but powerful.

The rest of the episode unpacks the biographies of both men, raising many ironic connections along the way. Both are close in age, around 40. Fanone voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Rodriguez was fond of attending “Back the Blue” rallies. But he also has a history of encounters with the law. He might have been, in another version of his life, the kind of petty criminal Mike Fanone arrested or, just as likely, used as an informant in one of his undercover vice-squad investigations. (Earlier this year, Rodriguez pleaded guilty to several federal counts and still awaits sentencing.)

A deadline ending

Every piece in Pushkin’s “Best of” collection has storytelling moments that I might send a young producer or editor to listen to for inspiration, like a small master-class. “The Tunnel” is full of such moments, but the one that stays with me comes at the end of the episode. Bernstein is just about to wrap up the story of Mike Fanone, who’s reflecting on the “gift” of Jan. 6, which he says opened his eyes to how angry he’d been and the cost of that anger on the body politic. This is his comment from the podcast:

“We really need as a country to re-embrace compassion and empathy in our interactions with one another."

And that could have been a triumphant ending. After all, Fanone had testified before Congress and been on the cover of TIME.

But close to the episode’s production deadline, Bernstein had the instinct that she needed to talk with Mike Fanone one last time. By then, he’d resigned from the D.C. police force and become an on-air contributor to CNN. He’d received several death threats and seemed to be struggling to figure out how to negotiate his new notoriety. There were rumors he was writing a memoir (which was indeed published in October 2022, long after “Will Be Wild” came out).

In March 2022, Bernstein met with Fanone again and played him tape from their previous interview, the one where he’d spoken about the need for compassion and empathy. He told her he’s still proud of his conduct and that of the other officers in the tunnel on Jan. 6. But of his earlier self on tape, he says in a grim tone:

“I was still optimistic that we could change as a country. Unfortunately, I think things have just gotten worse.”

Just a few seconds of vivid sound design separate Mike Fanone’s voice in the first interview from his voice in the second. The effect is bold but not confusing. The episode collapses the passage of time in its last moment, giving us just a taste of how it feels to be either Mike Fanone or his assailant, Danny Rodriguez. For both, one split-second encounter changed their lives forever. After that, the past — no matter how well recorded — feels like a land forever out of reach.

* * *

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

The post A podcaster follows a then-cop into the breach of the U.S. Capitol appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In coming weeks, narrative journalist and teacher Lauren Kessler will identify and explore the key elements of nonfiction storytelling, including scene, character and endings.

There was something of a Camelot — a brief and shining moment — for long-form narrative journalism in newspapers. This “American Literary Movement” (thus proclaimed by the Encyclopedia Britannica) explored and blurred the boundaries between traditional news journalism and nonfiction storytelling, resulting in iconic pieces of reporting published most notably in the New York Herald Tribune and The Washington Post. Other daily newspapers — from the Portland Oregonian to the Detroit Free Press to the St. Petersburg Times to the St. Paul Pioneer Press to the Baltimore Sun — stepped in, giving reporters the time, resources and sophisticated editorial guidance to do this work. The pieces were often long, often part of a series and usually woven through with universal human experience or emotion.

It’s hard to find much evidence of this movement in today’s shrinking newspaper landscape. As newsrooms contract and news deserts grow, magazine-style journalism is again a luxury in daily journalism. Few newspapers still publish Sunday magazines, and many have folded their features sections.

Does this mean narrative journalism in newspapers dead? With fewer newspapers, smaller staffs and the press of a 24/7 reporting cycle, you would think the answer is yes.

The answer is no.

Or rather, the answer is that the vital elements, the key components, of narrative journalism can be (and are being) incorporated into news features, investigative journalism and even breaking news. And storytelling is alive and thriving in the podcast world.

Narrative on deadline

So-called traditional journalism and the art of nonfiction narrative are not mutually exclusive. The crafting of a piece of narrative journalism and the work of reporting on deadline are not mutually exclusive. When we read a lengthy piece in The New Yorker or The Atlantic (anchors of long form narrative), we know that the work demanded days, weeks, maybe months of time and an editor who will grant that kind of time. We might think all narrative is long form. That to do it right we need words, words and more words — thousands of words. We think there will be some magic moment in our careers where we will have that time and that editor and the heady freedom of those many words, not to mention the perfect story. In the meantime, narrative is for those who write for a handful of elite magazines. In the meantime, shoulder to the wheel and fingers to the keyboard.

Allow me to disabuse you of these assumptions. I just rediscovered a glorious example of narrative written on the fly with an economy of words. This piece testifies to the short-form, deadline possibilities of narrative journalism.

It is a column written by Jimmy Breslin after he got a call at his home on December 8, 1980, that John Lennon had been shot. Breslin went out to report it. He went back to the office, the New York Daily News, to write it. It was in print and on the streets the next the next day.

This event-to-published-story speed may seem glacial now. But for a moment, forget technology. Forget that today’s Breslin — you or I — could write in the field on a phone, take photos and record audio with the same phone, upload it all and have the story posted before the ambulance bearing Lennon’s fatally wounded body reached the ER.

So forget the technology. Think instead of Breslin’s speed of thought, how astute, insightful and perceptive he was. How, in the midst of breaking news, in the chaos of an unfolding event, he saw a story. Not a “John Lennon Shot” news flash but a story — one that no one else saw. He saw it in that moment. He reported it in that moment. He wrote in on deadline.

Building a story in scenes

Breslin’s piece has everything we look for in the narrative approach to journalism: scene-setting, character development, dialog, plot, arc and detail. It has heart, but not the bleeding kind. And it does all that in less than 700 words.

Here’s how it opens:

That summer in Breezy Point, when he was 18 and out of Madison High in Brooklyn, there was the Beatles on the radio at the beach through the hot days and on the jukebox through the nights in the Sugar Bowl and Kennedys. He was young and he let his hair grow and there were girls and it was the important part of life. Last year, Tony Palma even went to see Beatlemania.

And now, last night, a 34-year-old man, he sat in a patrol car at 82nd St. and Columbus Ave. and the call came over the radio: “Man shot, 1 West 72 St..” Palma and his partner, Herb Frauenberger, rushed through the Manhattan streets to an address they knew as one of the most famous living places in the country, the Dakota apartments.

Here’s what we have so far: A snippet of culturally rich backstory. A hint of character development. A sprinkling of specifics. The inciting incident. The curtain-goes-up moment that introduces what promises to be a scene. And consider that quietly ominous end to the paragraph, a nod to the readers who, that morning, already knew what had happened the night before in front of the Dakota.

The story continues:

Another patrol car was at the scene, and as Palma got out he saw the officers had a man up against the building and were handcuffing him.

“Where’s the guy shot?” Palma said.

“In the back,” one of the cops said.

Palma went through the gates into the Dakota courtyard and up into the office, where a guy in a red shirt and jeans was on his face on the floor. Palma rolled the guy over. Blood was coming out of the mouth and covering the face. The chest was wet with blood. Palma took the arms and Frauenberger took the legs. They carried the guy out to the street.

Here’s what we have: A you-are-there scene with terse dialog, the drama of it delivered clinically. Anti-drama drama. The kind that chills you. “A guy in a red shirt.” The guy, that body — John Lennon, the focus of every other story written about that event — is in Breslin’s piece an object. Note that Breslin writes the mouth, the face, the legs — not his mouth, his face, his legs. The cops are the subject. This is their story.

The scene continues to unfold. There’s another patrol car in front of the Dakota, another cop. His name is Jim Moran, and the first thing we learn about him is that back when he joined the force in 1964 he was put on patrol guarding the Beatles at their hotel. The guy in the red shirt covered in blood? His body is put in the back of Moran’s car. Breslin writes:

 “As Moran started driving away, he heard people in the street shouting, “That’s John Lennon!”

Moran looked in the backseat and said, “Are you John Lennon?” The guy in
the back nodded and groaned.”

It reads like a short story, a polished gem of a short story. The brilliance of the piece — on deadline, remember, in the midst of a media circus, remember — is that Breslin saw the event through a storytelling lens, not a breaking news lens. He employed classic reporting skills — observation and interviewing — but in the service of story. And so what he noticed, whom he paid attention to, what he asked, what he wrote down, was different than what the news hound was doing. Story was the beginning of the process. Story framed the process.

Story was the beginning of the process. Story framed the process.

Breslin had already made a name for himself as a street reporter interested in “the little guy,” the ordinary citizens of the city; he won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in commentary for a collection of such stories. The story he saw in front of the Dakota that night in 1980 was not about the famous man who had been shot but about the cops on the scene who picked up the bleeding body, and the cops who transported that body to the hospital.

Narrative as elements and process

Breslin’s brilliance was also his simultaneously muscular and graceful practicing of the key elements of storytelling. The guy knew how to write a scene. He knew what to look for. He knew what to include and what to leave out. He knew how to pace it. He knew how and where to insert exposition. In the craft-centered essays that will follow this one in coming weeks, I’ll focus on the essential elements of narrative journalism that Breslin and others have mastered. I’ll begin with scene-setting, the heart of the enterprise, and then move on to character development, structure/plot/movement, dialog and conversation (and even, gasp, internal monolog), and finally endings.

…forget the technology. Think instead of Breslin’s speed of thought, how astute, insightful and perceptive he was.

Breslin’s piece is a showcase for all this. It is also a reminder that narrative work begins with the concept. Narrative is a lens first, an approach to reporting second, and only then a series of (very important) writing decisions. His column is also an argument in favor of the practice of “everyday” narrative journalism: shorter pieces, even deadline pieces, not waiting for the BIG story, the multi-parter, the one that takes weeks to produce.

I want to leave you with the final scene in Breslin’s column because it is that good.

Palma walked into the emergency room. Moran was there already. The doctors had John Lennon on a table in a trauma room, working on the chest, inserting tubes.

Tony Palma said to himself, I don’t think so. Moran shook his head. He thought about his two kids, who know every one of the Beatles’ big tunes. And Jim Moran and Tony Palma, older now, cops in a world with no fun, stood in the emergency room as John Lennon, whose music they knew, whose music was known everywhere on earth, became another person who died after being shot with a gun on the streets of New York.

* * * 

Lauren Kessler is an Oregon-based narrative journalist, teacher and author of 15 books. 

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Can the past teach us anything? Is there a reason beyond “oh, that’s interesting/ quaint/awful/who knew?” to delve into the lives of journalists who did their work before we were born, perhaps many generations before we were born?

In a word: Yes.

Here’s an analogy that may illuminate my thinking (or leave you scratching your head). I love to watch truly bad movies. Z-grade, as they are called. When you remove the glitz and glitter, the sophisticated patina, the layer upon layer of post-production magic, you can see how movies are made. You can study lighting and sound, camera angles and editing. It’s all laid bare.

Here, in what you will read below, is journalism laid bare. Here is a story of reporting that broke news before the invention of any technology we take for granted today to cover events as they happen. No Googling for quick answers or context. No Twitter to tap into ongoing conversations and identify sources. No smartphones. No phones. No printing technology to reproduce photographs. What remains?

Quick thinking. Energy. Ingenuity. Agility. Commitment to getting it right.  Commitment to readers. Teamwork. Here we see what journalism, at its core, is all about.

And this bonus: I want to introduce you to an astonishing (and long-forgotten) woman whose importance to the journalistic enterprise is inarguable. She is not one of the very few female icons — Nelly Bly and Ida Tarbell come to mind —although her last name, Leslie, may be familiar to some. I should say one of her last names. This force of nature, a 19^th century boss who remade an empire, went through four husbands. Let’s join her as she practices journalism laid bare 142 years ago.

Inheriting a news empire and a big news story

On the morning of July 2, 1881, the news came across the telegraph wires that President James Garfield had been shot. This was a time when a president of the United States could walk the streets unaccompanied by either bodyguards or an entourage. Garfield, who had taken office less than four months before, strolled from the White House to the Sixth Street Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station. There, in the waiting room, he was shot from behind at point-blank range. The first bullet grazed his shoulder. The second just missed his spinal cord and lodged itself behind his pancreas. When Miriam Leslie heard the news, she literally stopped the presses.

It had been barely 18 months since she had taken over as head of the Leslie media empire, which included the flagship publication Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, a weekly founded by her husband Frank Leslie in 1855. This was a time when newspapers were the sole sources of information about national life, when magazines mapped the cultural landscape, when the artists’ renderings and woodcuts in those pages were how people saw the world, when many important books were first published as serials in the journalistic publications of the day. Later Scripps, Hearst and Pulitzer would build reputations as media moguls, but first there was Frank Leslie — and Mrs. Frank Leslie — who led and fed the industry.

Mrs. Leslie’s given name was Miriam.

Frank, her third and now deceased spouse was the celebrated success of Publishers’ Row, the Manhattan district that was the 19^th century epicenter of newspaper and book publishing. That was his public image. But upon his death he left behind a business in shambles and almost $8 million in debt (more than a quarter-billion in today’s dollars). Creditors were demanding an immediate payment of  $50,000.

Within days Miriam, clothed in black silk and shod in silver-tipped black kid leather slippers, was sitting behind her husband’s expansive desk in her husband’s old office on the top floor of an impressive five-story building at 57 Park Place in lower Manhattan. There she looked out over the main editorial room where on one wall was mounted a large bronze medallion of the man himself.  She was now in charge of seven publications, 16 printing presses and 300 employees — engravers and artists, writers and printers, telegraph messengers, drivers and salesmen — and a mailroom that took up an entire floor of the building. She was poised to become the most powerful woman in publishing.

But first she had to save the business. (History records that Miriam briefly changed her name to Frank when she entered the male world of business. History also records that she had an active and unapologetic sex life, and was a suffragette.)

To keep the creditors at bay, she engineered a $50,000 loan from a wealthy widow, using her own remarkable jewelry collection as collateral.  Then she efficiently — some said ruthlessly — overhauled every department in the publishing empire that was now hers. She pared the list of Leslie publications. Fewer publications, each with increased readership, was her plan. She commissioned a decorative new cover for the Illustrated Newspaper, improved the quality of its printing stock and its woodcuts and sought new writers. She worked 10-hour days, returning at 8 in the evening not to the sumptuous apartments she and her third husband had occupied but to what she later described as a “carpetless flat” where she “knew what it was to be cold and hungry.”

Within 18 months of her husband’s death, she stunned Publishers’ Row by winning the lawsuits that threatened the Leslie estate, paying off his debts and expanding the circulation of the Leslie publications from 30,000 to 200,000. She did this, breathing new life into a severely compromised enterprise, by seizing a dramatic moment in American history, a moment that gripped the nation for almost three months. She did this by pioneering a new approach to the news, an immediacy we take for granted today but was not part of the 19th century world of journalism.

A bold approach to big news

On the morning of July 2, 1881, reading the telegraphed news of the attempt on President Garfield’s life, the latest edition of Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper was already in production.  Miriam ordered a halt to the presses and pulled it. Within an hour, she dispatched two artists to Washington, one of whom returned to New York on the midnight train with sketches both had prepared.  Miriam wrote, edited and formatted a new front page.

Two days later — lightning speed for the day — the newspaper was on the stands with double-page illustrations and full coverage of the tragedy. And for the 79 days that the president lay dying, first in the sweltering heat of the White House, then propped in a bed by an open window in a house on the Jersey shore, the newspaper covered the saga with reporters and artists on the scene.

Garfield’s condition fluctuated. Fevers came and went. At the White House, in the sick room, Navy engineers rigged up fans that blew air over blocks of ice to reduce the summer heat. Doctors probed the president’s body with unwashed hands and unsterilized instruments to try to locate the bullet. Alexander Graham Bell devised a metal detector to help find the bullet. (Garfield’s metal bed frame made the instrument malfunction.) The robust president’s weight dropped from 210 to 130 pounds. Through the entire, extended ordeal, the American public followed it on the pages of Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. When the end came, Leslie’s covered Garfield’s funeral procession and services with as many illustrations as it could make room for.

A journalistic style that endures

Miriam Leslie had saved the Leslie media empire. She was heralded as a “commercial Joan of Arc” and the “Empress of Journalism.” She was called “the planet star among women in public life.” She was one of the first female power brokers in America, a media mogul, a financial wizard, a globe-trotting journalist, a bestselling author, a cultural icon, and an “ill-behaved” woman who made her way to the top at a time when women were virtually invisible in public life — except when on the arm of a man.

But her enduring legacy to us is that she ushered in a new age of of-the-moment, you-are-there journalism. The journalism she pioneered, practiced, and polished — on-the-scene, in-the-moment, heavily illustrated — is now a fundamental part of story work, in many forms and on many platforms.

* * *

Lauren Kessler is an Oregon-based narrative journalist, teacher and author of 15 books. This post was based on her continuing research into Miriam Leslie for a possible biography. Her interest was first inspired by "Purple Passage: Life of Mrs. Frank Leslie," published 70 years ago.

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

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

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

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

Reconsidering stereotypical approaches to stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A more mature approach to narrative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patient reporting and a well-paced structure

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

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

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

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

Among those topics:

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

Alex seen through knowing eyes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Line Vaaben ~

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A few years ago, Line Vaaben was eating a traditional Christmas dinner at her home in Copenhagen. Vaaben, a 2014 European Press Prize finalist, remembered a story that followed a potato from the field to a bag of french fries. Part of a 1999 Pulitzer-winning  series in The Oregonian, Richard Read used the potato’s journey to show the shifting fortunes of globalization.

Now, as Vaaben ate, she had an idea: She would follow a piglet from birth to pork roast. That spring, as birthing time approached, she found a farmer and then witnessed the birth of a piglet labeled 1069. For the next several months, she followed 1069 as it was coddled and fed, then sent to slaughter. She watched as it was drugged, killed and butchered. She carted the resulting 8 kilos (almost 18 pounds) of meat home by bus and car.

Once there, using her grandmother’s recipe, she roasted the pork in sauce and cucumbers and, with great care, served Christmas dinner. As her son wolfed tender and juicy slices of meat, Vaaben pondered her plate and the cycle of life.

In her reporting, Vaaben learned that farmers treat their livestock with great respect, but don’t name those raised for market. But at her table that day, with gratitude for the pig that had fed her journalism and now fed her family, Vaaben gave 1069 a name: Yule.

Then she stopped eating pork.

Farmers, meat industry officials and animal rights activists thanked Vaaben for the story: She had gotten it right. I haven’t read it, my Danish being nonexistent. But I’ve heard Vaaben talk about it, most recently at the Fortellingens Kraft 22, a narrative journalism conference in Bergen, Norway, this week. It was one of three of Vaaben’s stories featured in a conversation with Pulitzer-winner Tom French about the purpose, power and practice of narrative journalism.

An autopsy as narrative

Vaaben is one of the most respected journalists in Denmark. If more of her work were published in English, her reach would go well beyond. Like most journalists with 20-plus years in the field, she has covered most everything. But she soon gravitated to narrative, not just as a craft but as a meaningful exploration of the human condition in all its wonder and complexity, messiness and mystery.

One of her stories is “He should have been a boy.” It follows Daniel, who was born as Linda, on his journey to become the person he felt he really was. That piece has, thankfully, been translated to English. As is the narrative Vaaben wrote after gaining access to the autopsy of a murder victim, and then the crime scene itself. The story, published in Dagbladet Information, begins like this:

He is lying on a steel table. A middle-aged man with skin the colour of wax. His chest is punctuated by a series of gaping knife wounds, which gleam a deep red, and from a neck wound a little blood seeps out and creates a pool on the shining metal. The smell of the place is reminiscent of an open fridge, a whiff of decay, cold and sweet.

Vaaben takes readers into a cellar room at Aarhus University Hospital, where we meet forensic pathologist Asser Hedegård Thomsen, who has studied the 1,417 homcides committed in Denmark between 1992 and 2016, and performed more than 50 himself.

Vaaben’s story is graphic but never gratuitous. As the story unfolds, readers are aware of the respect the autopsy team gives to the dead, and the commitment they have to letting science help find justice. Consider this passage:

The autopsy feels most brutal when you dwell on details that remind you of a lived life: the lifelines in the hands, the stubble speckled with grey, the toenails that need cutting. But as the autopsy progresses the man gradually become more flesh and less human. Asser Hedegård Thomsen is fully aware that it is invasive.

“When I carry out my work, I do things that I would prefer not to do. I have no desire to open up this man’s skull, but I do it because I have to. And I don’t walk in off the street and do it for fun. They have called me because there is a job that needs to be done.”

Once in a while in his thoughts he might comfort the person lying on the table.

“I can find myself thinking, ’There, there. It’s a shame that the two of us have to meet like this.’ Especially when it’s children, it’s heartbreaking. But then I remind myself that this knowledge is needed. And we do try to do it in a thorough and decent way.”

Just as the forensic team scours for telling details from the victim’s body, Vaaben scours for details that brings their story — and their purpose — to life for the reader. She zooms in close, noticing small things that hold deep meaning. She ends back at the crime scene, where a man’s life ended, and watches as a police officer named Jørn checks the space and seals it until the investigation is done:

In the victim’s house, the blinds are drawn. Jørn shines a torch round the sitting room. On the coffee table there is a mouthful of coffee in a cup next to a remote control, a completed lottery coupon and half a packet of cigarettes.

“It’s a clean and tidy home,” he says. “Apart from all the blood, that is.” And there is plenty of that. Especially on the carpet in the sitting room, where a thick and sticky spread indicates where the victim had been lying. There is also blood on the sofa and the armchair and small star-shaped splashes on the walls several yards away. One of them has hit a little framed black-and-white photo of the victim as a child.

A wall calendar signals that the dead man had an appointment with the doctor next week. In the kitchen, an apple lies all by itself in a fruit bowl and in a bag the crust of a homemade loaf of bread. But in the knife rack one knife is missing.

Jørn empties a carton of whole milk out of the fridge and brings the rubbish bag outside. The crime scene will be sealed off for several months, until the case is finally concluded.

“It could be a long time before anyone comes in here again,” he says.

Lessons learned and shared

I first met Vaaben several years ago when she attended a writing workshop at the Poynter Institute. She has since attended two of my own writing workshops and attends every serious conference she can. She not only absorbs experience and wisdom, she applies it. She used a fellowship to collect lessons from some of the top narrative journalists in the world for a textbook. She co-authored, with the forensic pathologist from the autopsy story, a soon-to-be-released book on femicide in Denmark. Those, too, are only available in Danish, but Vaaben has shared some of her hard-earned wisdom in previous Storyboard posts. Here are a few more, in capsule form, from the Bergen conference:

On her belief in narrative: “Narrative storytelling is the most powerful tool we have. You write directly into people’s bodies and emotions.”

On the best narrative journalists: “Of course they are very curious people, but they also are very patient. They know it’s not about them.”

On finding ideas: “Steal ideas you’ve seen in other stories and make them your own.”

On fearless reporting: “I’m not afraid of asking questions. Some are hard to ask. But my curiosity will always win.”

On being on the scene: “You don’t know what’s going to happen until you’re there. There’s always a bonus there, something that surprises or disgusts or amazes you. Reality is just stunning.”

On reporting for detail: “We use our eyes and ears a lot, but we need to use all the senses. Smell is the king of senses.”

On handling her emotions in the field: “I’m a very emotional person. But at work, I’m very professional. I’m aware of everything going on, but I don’t cry and I try not to faint. When I get back and go through my notes, then I’m under the floor. And I cry when I read other stories.”

On her relationship with story subjects: “It’s tempting to become their social worker, to give them advice. But don’t do that. Sit on your hands and keep your mouth shut.”

On the terror of writing: “I gather all this incredible material for a story. But when I finally sit down to write, I curl up in a ball of panic. I’m aware that there’s only one person who can fuck-up this right now, only one person who stands between all this wonderful material and a masterpiece. And that’s me.”

On getting past the terror: “Structure. Map out where your story is going.”

On her role as narrator: “My (writing) voice is very quiet. Normally I don’t want to be present in my stories; I want the story to speak for itself. And the more dramatic the events, the more I pull back and just lay out what happened.”

On quotes and dialog: “I’m trying to get rid of quotes, and only use those that are like a smash in volleyball. Journalists can usually tell the story better than most sources.”

On endings: “I want endings that linger with you and that you keep thinking about.”

On purpose: “I’m trying to change the world narrative by narrative, not by covering politics, but by changing people’s views. I want to challenge people’s views on other human beings.”

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