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Dear Storyboard community: 

Our summer reading list keeps growing. First came the Pulitzer Prizes, and this week the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) handed out its 2026 National Magazine Awards in New York City. You can get links to the full list of winners here, but let's dive into a few moments from the winning stories. 

In the Reporting category, “‘There Will Be No Mercy,’” by Drew Philp, earned The Atavist Magazine its second consecutive National Magazine Award, for a story about hospital workers helping victims during a two-year war in Ethiopia's Tigray region — a conflict, and potentially a genocide, that was not widely covered in Western media. Philp traveled to Ethiopia for the story and met with doctors, nurses, and other staff — he interviewed “two or three dozen people” who worked at the hospital, searching for people to serve as the main characters in the story, he told the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. “We wanted to put faces on what was happening here,” he said. One of the doctors featured was Hale Teka, an OB-GYN at Ayder Comprehensive Specialized Hospital, who Philp brought to life in the story:   

Hale had long believed that people were inherently good and that the world tended toward progress. But as more and more civilians assailed by war arrived at Ayder, he lost faith in his fellow man. In more optimistic moments, Hale clung to a sliver of hope. If individuals couldn’t stop this, surely institutions would. Once word about what was happening in Tigray reached the wider world, the international community would respond. Powerful countries would step in and demand that the atrocities stop. Abiy’s government would be forced to yield.

In the Lifestyle Journalism category, Storyboard contributor Kim Cross won for a Food & Wine feature that took her to Alaska to trace the path of the Pacific's wild salmon, all the way from Bristol Bay to the world's kitchen tables. During a trip on a commercial fishing boat, Cross replays the moment she catches a five-pound salmon: 

“Your first fish!” a crewmate chirps. I smile, fighting tears. Quietly, so the crew won’t hear, I whisper the thing I say to every trout I land on a fly rod: “Thank you, fish!”

This is one moment of truth on my yearlong quest: to learn the provenance of my salmon. The searing revelation of this moment? Whatever I pay in the store ... it’s worth it! Salmon fishing is hard.

The ASME award also highlights an Instagram video that Cross shot and narrated to go with the story. She says it wasn't part of her original pitch: “I had done some GoPro and video footage as part of my reporting and in anticipation of promoting the story and doing presentations after publication. I was asked to write the script and do the voiceover, which the F&W team then edited.”

As for the written piece, Cross documents two journeys — one for the 50 million salmon swimming through Bristol Bay, and one for herself. Read to the end to see how Cross wraps up her trip with a satisfying callback.

Links of note 

• Two new cautionary tales this week about AI slop infecting the publishing world (and everything else around us). First, a short story by Jamir Nazir published in Granta magazine, which won the Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize, was accused of being at least partially AI-generated. Author Lincoln Michel and Literary Hub's Brittany Allen break down the red flags within the story itself. (The Commonwealth Foundation, for its part, is investigating the accusations.) And The New York Times discovered that a new book about AI, “The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality,” by Steven Rosenbaum, contained “more than a half-dozen misattributed or fake quotes” as a result of the author relying on AI tools for research. “As I disclosed in the book’s acknowledgments, I used A.I. tools ChatGPT and Claude during the research, writing and editing process,” Rosenbaum said in a statement. “That does not excuse these errors, of which I take full responsibility.”
• Manil Suri, author of the new memoir “A Room in Bombay,” shares how he resolved challenges with the narrative structure of his book by creating “a book X-ray” to zoom out and view the different threads as color-coded storylines, to see where there might be a disconnect. “Try this yourself on a book. The strands will generally be the storylines of the main characters. You’ll be able to see how these interact, whether there’s enough continuity, whether a character’s been ignored for too long a stretch.” (Via Carly Stern)
• Let's end with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and 2021 Nieman Fellow Sarah L. Kaufman, who offers her own advice for fighting off AI, from her new book on writing, “Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing”: “No bot — so far — can craft poetic physical language that makes us feel something. That is your territory. You can surprise and move your reader with your own irreplaceable sensitivity, your necessary nervous system, and your deliberate, intentional, refreshing verbs to connect it all.” (Hat-tip: Henry Chu)

Keep leaning in to your humanity, and keep sharing your stories, 

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
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Dear Storyboard community: 

Recently, I was chatting with Storyboard contributor Kim Cross, and we got to talking about freelance assignments and work projects. She shared a goal for her current work, which was to, essentially, close the laptop and get out in the world. Her reason? The stories are outside. 

Yes, there are millions of stories on the internet — troves of data, leads, information, and contacts that can be found online and on social media. But for a narrative journalist who is looking for real-life moments, the strategy of getting offline and getting face-to-face with friends and strangers seems like a brilliant approach, not to mention one that is also good for mental and physical health.  

Our conversation came to mind as I read Emilia Wisniewski's latest Power of Narrative recap, in which author and journalist Keith O’Brien discovers that in order to get the untold origin story of NBA legend Larry Bird, he needed to travel to Bird's hometown of French Lick, Indiana, to find connections and build trust in a way that emails, phone calls, and the internet simply couldn't match. He showed up in the town (population: 2,000). The result is O’Brien's new book, the New York Times bestseller “Heartland.”

Finding the narrative in small-town libraries and bars: How Keith O’Brien told the origin story of Larry Bird

“I need to invest in the story. If people aren’t calling me back, maybe what I need to do is just go to French Lick. And so that’s what I did: bought a plane ticket, got a rental car and booked a room at the Best Western on the edge of town. And then before I left with those numbers and those addresses that I knew were right, I reached out again … and it was then that people started getting back in touch with me.”

[ Read the story ]

Question of the week: Tell us your favorite graduation speech

It's cap-and-gown season, which seems like a good moment to share storytelling lessons from our favorite graduation speeches. 

Like wedding toasts, this is a tough genre to do well, complete with a tricky audience to keep happy. Ira Glass recently dismissed the entire category as a “doomed form” (though he's still given many of them). But these short, punchy addresses can be memorable and life-affirming — you might remember when Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich redefined the entire genre with the following words: "Wear sunscreen." 

So I’m curious: what are your favorite graduation speeches, and what storytelling lessons can we take from them? Email me your picks and why you love them: editor@niemanstoryboard.org

Links of note 

• ProPublica has launched a new podcast, “Paper Trail,” hosted by investigative journalist Jessica Lussenhop. The first episode, released Thursday, digs into the gaps in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's approach to vetting the safety and efficacy of generic prescription drugs. “It turns out the FDA doesn’t regularly test generic drugs that are coming into the U.S. to make sure they are safe and effective. It just lets the companies do the tests themselves. But the inspectors found serious issues with some of these tests, too.”
• At Brendan O’Meara's Pitch Club newsletter, freelance journalist Shawna Kenney shares the story behind a successful pitch to her local public radio station, WHQR in Wilmington, N.C., to produce “Wild Things,” a limited-run podcast series “focusing on the creatures and critters of Coastal Carolina — and the people who care for them.” Kenney discovered the station's Fourth Estate Fund as a way into her pitch, and leads with her connection to the community. “Normally I would open with a dramatic scene in pitching longform stories, and that is what I look for as an editor with Narratively. But here I was pitching a public radio station, an NPR affiliate who just lost their NEA funding. I felt it was more important to establish my long-term relationship with this region and community. I didn’t want to come off as some parachute journalist who just moved back from L.A. and knew what this little town needed.”
• It's easy to get depressed about the internet and our social media platforms being inundated with AI slop — content that, due to the gaming of algorithms, can outperform carefully reported, fact-checked journalism. But it's important to remind ourselves that in a toxic media ecosystem, credibility and trust are more important than ever. It takes years to build credibility, and just minutes to burn it all down. This Kate Davies essay, “Knitting Bullshit,” (hat-tip: Today in Tabs) takes us through the dystopian world of AI knitting podcasts, which are hosted by AI “personalities.” The AI podcasting company that created these series — publishing 3,000 different podcast episodes per week — chose knitting (among other points of interest) because “most of our content sits squarely in topics that aren’t life or death necessarily. So gardening, for example, knitting, cooking, these things we can afford to be wrong.” But for many people like Davies, knitting is incredibly important. There is always a cost to cutting corners, being cynical, and being wrong. Despite what the slop will have you believe, there are still no shortcuts. 

Keep doing your best, and keep sharing your stories,

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
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The post Your next story is outside appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Larry Bird versus Magic Johnson. March 26, 1979. The NCAA Men’s National Championship was the final college game for the two rising basketball stars, and everyone in the country watched. The rivalry narrative built up over days leading up to the game, and it was quite a compelling one. 

In reality, the men hardly knew each other, only meeting once before the game and barely speaking to one another. Author and journalist Keith O’Brien called this a “disingenuous narrative” and set out to tell the story in a different way: starting with the Boston Celtics legend’s origin story from high school to early college.

“When you change that perspective, what you get is a really, completely different story,” O’Brien said. “And maybe more important than that, you get a completely different cast of characters.”

O’Brien, an award-winning author and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone, spoke at Boston University’s Power of Narrative conference in March about his bestselling book “Heartland” and shared lessons from his reporting process about the importance of showing up.

1. Investing in the story

At first, O’Brien tried to reach Bird through his agent. It was no surprise, though, that Bird did not want to participate; he is a notoriously private person, rarely doing interviews or projects unless he has some control over it. But — as Patrick Radden Keefe pointed out in his keynote earlier that day — access to the person centered in your story shouldn’t make or break the narrative.

O’Brien didn’t necessarily need Bird’s participation for the story. He wanted to tell a “compelling human narrative.” Perhaps Bird would have told a completely different story about those early years than the people around him that shaped his future career. To get those outside voices, he collected phone numbers and started calling around. 

In the first few rounds, nobody answered him.

“I need to invest in the story,” O’Brien said. “If people aren’t calling me back, maybe what I need to do is just go to French Lick. And so that’s what I did: bought a plane ticket, got a rental car and booked a room at the Best Western on the edge of town. And then before I left with those numbers and those addresses that I knew were right, I reached out again … and it was then that people started getting back in touch with me.”

He interviewed Bird’s childhood best friends, mentors, and family friends, meeting them everywhere from the local McDonald’s to people’s kitchens. O’Brien’s decision to travel to French Lick was pivotal for his story, gaining the trust and respect from residents who wouldn’t otherwise bother to return his phone calls.

2. Interviewing every witness to a scene

Reporting on scenes that you didn't witness firsthand can require a lot of research and specific type of reporting and interviewing. O’Brien makes it a point to talk to every person who was in the scene he wants to write about. If he knows that five people were in the room, he will speak to every person who was there, even if they don’t ultimately end up in the story.

Since he reported on events between 1973 and 1979, he understood memories can erode over time or someone could have a clear memory of events that never happened. That is precisely why he talks to every witness: to get the fullest sense of the truth in the commonalities.

“If you talk to all five people, you're going to get different details, different memories, and somewhere in the overlap of those memories, you know the truth likely resides,” he said.

For this story, he had to track down witnesses and relied on relationships he already built in town to access those people. In one instance, he was trying to track down one of the owners of a bar that Bird’s father, Joey Bird, frequented in the 1970s. The bar was long gone, but the owner could often be found in the town’s American Legion Bar.

O’Brien stepped into the bar on a weekday afternoon and 40 pairs of eyes turned to him straight away. He had to introduce himself and his intentions immediately.

“There was no slow rolling this: sit down quietly at the bar, order a drink, start to mingle. Between the door and the bar, I’m almost defensively saying who I am and why I’m here,” he said. “Within a couple minutes, everybody wanted to talk to me.”

The person O’Brien wanted to reach was not there, but he got in touch with him through the phone behind the bar and interviewed him right then and there.

3. Searching physical records

One of the important figures in Bird’s life that O’Brien identified was his father. Joey Bird was a well-known person in town but struggled a lot; a few months after his son graduated high school, he took his own life. 

O’Brien heard that his long battle with drinking came as a result of his time in the military during World War II and the Korean War. But he had to verify the claims himself. It took months to find the eldest Bird’s military records, and O’Brien said he learned a lot about Joey and Larry Bird in these records that he likely couldn’t find anywhere else.

He learned that Joey Bird enlisted in the Navy for World War II at 17 years old with a seventh grade education. He was a messman who likely didn’t go into battle and got in trouble for going AWOL during basic training and drinking on a ship. But he did see fighting a few years later in Korea, where he was an Army soldier and engaged in combat during one of the bloodiest battles of the conflict.

“Joey Bird has seen things and maybe done things that would shape him later,” O’Brien said. “I’ve learned something about my subject from these records. I’ve learned something that I think my subject himself might not even know about his own father. All of this is informative to my narrative.”

Once O’Brien was in French Lick, he stopped at the public library frequently, going through town records, yearbooks, and newspaper clippings. O’Brien said there are records in libraries that can’t be found anywhere else — not through interviews and not online. In the French Lick library, there was an entire section dedicated to Larry Bird. 

The library’s records went as far back as when Joey Bird was growing up and in the war. He was looking for letters or notes soldiers often submitted at the time. Just when O’Brien’s patience was waning after looking in the archives for hours upon hours, he finally found something in March 1951.

“This wasn't a note in a little notes column, it was on the front page, and it was a first person account that Joey Bird had written back to home about that winter in Korea. I mean, an incredible thing, right?” he said. “Libraries are critical to the work that we do.”

4. Risking time and resources for important material

O’Brien had embedded himself in the small town of French Lick (population: 2,000), interviewing multiple people every day and becoming a regular at the American Legion Bar. But there was one person he still couldn’t get a hold of who was essential for the story: Bird’s high school coach, Jim Jones.

Jones coached most young basketball players in town during the ’60s and ’70s. He taught Bird how to hold a basketball and shoot layups. He would come to Bird’s home to wake him up and take him to practice before school. “Were it not for Jim Jones, Larry Bird … might not have become the person he became,” O’Brien said.

In the weeks he was in French Lick, he could not get a hold of Jones. He thought about taking a gamble during the final days of his trip: Should he drive to Jones’s home an hour outside of French Lick and risk losing time if he didn’t answer? O’Brien believed Jones was so crucial for the story, he decided to make the drive.

He pulled into Jones’s driveway, prepared with a handwritten note card in case no one was home, and was relieved when he saw cars in the driveway. He knocked on the door and his wife answered. After a few moments, Jones came to the door and wordlessly let O’Brien through.

They talked for the next three hours in Jones’s kitchen about Larry Bird and the 1970s. When O’Brien thought they were finishing up, Jones showed him a custom Larry Bird championship-style ring and a letter from Bird to Jones, thanking him for all he’d done.

“I knew two things for certain,” O’Brien said. “First was, I had this story, whether Larry Bird was talking to me or not. I had it. And number two, I knew that I was not a stranger in this place anymore. I belonged here.”

***
Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.

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Dear Storyboard community: 

This week the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing was awarded to Texas Monthly senior editor Aaron Parsley for his harrowing and heart-wrenching first-person account of the 2025 Guadalupe River floods in Texas, written just days after the tragedy swept away his house and plunged his family into the waters. Parsley lost his 20-month-old nephew Clay in the flood. 

As Parsley wrote on Bluesky this week: “Being recognized for a story that honors my nephew Clay and the strength of my family means the world to me. I’m grateful to the Pulitzer Prizes committee, my dear friends, and incredibly talented colleagues at Texas Monthly.”

Former Storyboard editor and New Yorker staff writer Paige Williams chose the story for our Best of 2025 compilation, saying the story “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.”

With so many significant pieces published each year, how do the Pulitzers get chosen in the first place? I asked two of this year's Pulitzer Prize jurors, Storyboard contributors Erika Hayasaki and Minda Honey for insight. Hayasaki, who first served as a Pulitzer juror for Feature Writing last year (when the award went to Esquire's Mark Warren for “A Death in Alabama”), said: “We are actually jurors, not judges — which means we select the finalists, which then go to the Pulitzer Board to select a winner. The winner is a surprise to us until the announcements.” She added: 

I can’t speak specifically to what we looked for or deliberated on, but I can say that one of our jurors sent a note after thanking all of us that said: “It was like being in the world’s greatest college seminar.” 

Three of the jurors had won Pulitzers themselves, and everyone at the table brought another layer of brilliance and perceptiveness to our discussion. It did at times feel like an unparalleled craft workshop, as we dissected what makes feature stories feel immersive, closely observed, rigorously reported, or profound beyond simply the arrangement of facts. It was also invigorating to be reminded that so many excellent pieces are still being published regularly, despite all of the challenges in media.

Minda Honey added: 

The invitation to serve as a Pulitzer Prize juror came at a much needed moment. This past year — like many years, as of late — was a hard year for media workers. Similar to the journalists who experienced the mass layoffs at The Washington Post, I was part of a newsroom that was dismantled, and I've been a bit adrift professionally since being laid off last July. So it was an immense honor to learn that the leaders of our industry respect me and my writing enough to request that I serve as a Feature Writing juror for the most prestigious prize in Journalism. It was a timely reminder that who I am and the caliber of my writing has never been dependent on any single job or title. 

Of all the high points of this experience, I will never forget how well taken care of I felt throughout the entire process by the Pulitzer Prize's Joseph O. Legaspi, the leadership and warmth of our committee chair Erika, and the master class in dissecting a piece of writing I received from my fellow committee members. (And shoutout to everyone who let me believe that snow boots are business casual because there was no way I was trudging around the slushy streets of NYC in anything else!)

You can see the full list of Pulitzer Prize winners here. 

With so much great reporting and storytelling across the categories, Storyboard will bring you more from this year's winners and finalists in the weeks and months to come. 

Links of note

• Congrats to the incoming 2027 Nieman Fellows: The Nieman Foundation has announced its latest class of 22 talented journalists from around the world who will spend the next year at Harvard. “These accomplished new fellows have shown through their work why journalism still matters — how it illuminates the forces shaping our lives, uncovers hidden stories, and holds the powerful to account,” said Nieman Interim Curator Henry Chu. “The year they’ll spend at Harvard will strengthen them as leaders in the field at a time when press freedom has become increasingly precarious worldwide.”
• Another spotlight on watchdog journalism: Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) has announced the winners of its 2025 IRE Awards, honoring work from large and small newsrooms across 23 categories. 
• Audio Flux, the podcast dedicated to showcasing great audio storytelling in 3 minutes or less, announced finalists for their latest “circuit,” or season. You can listen to the finalists here until May 19. 
• Curious about how a deep investigation unfolds? The Journalist’s Resource at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy is hosting a free webinar on May 12 at 1 p.m. ET with New York Times reporter Hannah Dreier, winner of the 2026 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting for the series, “Exposed and Expendable,” about wildfire fighters getting sick and dying young from exposure to poisonous smoke. You can register here.
• Just announced: I'll be in Phoenix Oct. 22-24 for the Society for Features Journalism's national conference at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. I'm excited to be interviewing New York Times national correspondent Kurt Streeter, whose work has been featured on Storyboard many times over the years. 

Keep showing up, and keep sharing your stories, 

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
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***

Photo from behind the scenes at this year's Pulitzer judging by Jose R. Lopez.

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Dear Storyboard community: 

It's journalism awards season — last week were the Peabodys, this week it's the Poynter Institute and the National Headliner Awards, and on Monday we'll have the Pulitzer Prizes (announced via livestream at 3 p.m. ET).

One thing to remember amid all the accolades is that every award-winning story starts with a germ of an idea. How can we know where a story might take us unless we look for ourselves? 

This thought struck me as I read Storyboard contributor Emilia Wisniewski's latest roundup of highlights from Boston University's Power of Narrative conference. From Ken Burns to Boston Globe journalist Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, journalists are constantly pulling on threads and following their curiosity, seeing if one phone call or a day in the archives might lead to a new discovery. 

But then, once armed with an idea, comes other matters: What form will this reporting and storytelling take? How can we get these stories in front of an audience? And who will help fund it? 

These are the critical questions writers and journalists are asking right now, as I learned during a Zoom conversation this week with journalists from the San Francisco Writers Grotto (thanks to Storyboard contributor Carly Stern for the invite). We pondered the state of nonfiction publishing, the pros and cons of building a social media following to promote your work, and whether the written longform feature is still a viable pathway to a book proposal. 

My mission with Storyboard has always been to focus on the elements that we can control — the craft, the reporting. But I'd like to hear from you: How are you thinking about your work in this current moment? Whose work is inspiring you? And what advice would you share with fellow journalists on how to keep moving forward? 

Email me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. I'd like to feature your answers in a future newsletter. 

Look beyond the headlines — and five other lessons for journalists from Power of Narrative 2026

Storytelling advice from Ken Burns, the Boston Globe, The New Yorker's Sarah Stillman, The Atavist, Jabari Asim, and Keith O’Brien

[ Read the story ]

Links of note 

• Storyboard contributor Erika Hayasaki has compiled an outstanding guide to crafting reported and braided essays, as well as “hybrid memoirs,” from her recent panel discussion for the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Hayasaki defines the reported essay as “a first-person nonfiction story grounded in reflection and reporting. These pieces weave facts, scenes, interviews, and research with personal observations and narrative storytelling.” A braided essay can also include traditional reporting, but not always. As Hayasaki quotes fellow Storyboard contributor Kim Cross: “Think of each strand of the braid as its own journey, with its own beginning, middle, and end.”   
• At New York magazine's Dinner Party newsletter, Emily Gould is collecting submissions of readers' favorite “load-bearing” blog posts from the internet's glory days — that is, pieces of writing or reporting that still stand the test of time. Gould's personal list brings back some memories for me (featuring The Awl, Jia Tolentino at Jezebel, and one of the earliest pieces we published at Longreads). Two pieces that immediately came to my mind are this 2011 essay that introduced me to Maria Bustillos's writing, and Allie Brosh's illustrated memoir, “Depression Part 2” from 2013.
• Naomi Kanakia's newsletter, Woman of Letters, shares a history of short fiction in The New Yorker, which gives us insight into the changing nature of storytelling. In the 1920s the magazine began publishing “casuals” — “short humorous pieces that were meant to convey an attitude of urbane sophistication” — with the formula, length, and style evolving from there. Kanakia herself uses her newsletter to experiment with different forms of storytelling, raising the question: what type of story works best on Substack? How might that change in the years to come?

Keep experimenting, and keep sharing your stories, 

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
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The post Tell us your best advice for journalists in the current moment appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

The 28th Power of Narrative conference returned to Boston University on March 27 and 28. Journalists, authors, podcast producers, and filmmakers came to the second floor of the George Sherman Union to share the lessons they’ve learned from their work. 

We've already shared a few notes from this year's conference, including Nieman Storyboard editor Mark Armstrong's Power of Narrative conversation with “London Falling” author and New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe. Now, here are six more takeaways from a weekend full of inspiration and education: 

1. Find the narrative, don't build it: Ken Burns

Ken Burns, whose latest PBS documentary series was 2025's “The American Revolution,” created a history of the colonies before, during, and after gaining independence from the British — fitting it all into six episodes, or 12 hours. 

Burns said the material often spoke for itself. The desire to seek out the truth is central to his work, but he’s often dealing with “grades of imperfection” since there is no such thing as objectivity, he said. But the story will tell you if it’s important to include.

“The greatest thing I love to hear is what I left out,” he said. “Bring it on … I know exactly the thing, I made a decision to leave that out. We’re not an encyclopedia.”

What also tends to speak for itself is the narrative. Burns gives an example of a mother named Rebecca Tanner of the Mohegan tribe from Connecticut who lost five sons fighting for the Patriot cause. There were many women, children, and enslaved people that fought on either side of the conflict. It's Burns's job to collect those lost or hidden stories.

“You find [narratives]. You never tried to build it. It’s there, and it’s inherent,” he said.

Burns acknowledged that current times are fraught, divided, and unpredictable. But so were the times during the Revolution, Civil War, and Vietnam War. He said there are “features of right now that are hugely terrifying and ought to be talked about.”

While Burns feels confident in telling these complex historical narratives, he said it took decades to get to that point. He realized that he knew how to do the work, even if something goes awry. And he leans into the unknown, working out the problem and coming out the other side having learned something.

“You have to first know that you have something to say, and that has to do with an incredible amount of introspection about what you want and who you are and what your capabilities are,” he said. 

2. Telling someone's story without a ‘perfect interview’: Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio and Jazmin Aguilera, The Boston Globe

The detention of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk in March 2025 was one of the earliest moments in Trump's second term that the nation witnessed increased aggression by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers on the streets across the country.

The Boston Globe followed the story since Öztürk's arrest and detainment, publishing dozens of articles. Behind the scenes, Globe team members including senior audio producer Jazmin Aguilera and immigration reporter Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio worked to bring Öztürk’s story even closer to readers and listeners, creating the two-part podcast series, “Rümeysa Öztürk: An American Story.”

The central question the team sought to answer was, “Why had the Trump administration chosen Rümeysa to arrest?”

“We very quickly started learning that she wasn’t a protester or an activist that you would usually think of using those words on campus. She’s a very quiet, soft-spoken student. She loves children, she was simply passionate about the rights of children,” McDonnell Nieto del Rio said. “We wondered how the Trump administration had even found her, and those were answers we didn’t think we were going to get directly from officials, and so we had to figure out basically other ways to do that.”

McDonnell Nieto del Rio saw that professors were suing the Trump administration over an ideological deportation policy, and she started attending hearings in Boston. She saw ICE agents take the stand to testify, and she learned that they had most likely discovered Öztürk through a website that doxed protesters.

The team then went on to acquire hundreds of pages of court documents and hours of video footage to tell a bigger story. It also helped add context to Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown, a story that was “touching everyone,” McDonnell Nieto del Rio said.

One challenge for the team: how to tell a great narrative without a “perfect interview” with the central character. They were able to get written answers from Öztürk during the reporting process, but it wasn’t quite what they expected. They largely turned to other characters around Öztürk, such as her lawyer, a woman who was detained with her in Louisiana, and even the man who got the viral video footage of Öztürk being taken off the street by ICE officers.

“We all think the dream is to have the perfect interview with the person at the center of the piece. But I think there are a lot of other ways to go about these stories too,” McDonnell Nieto del Rio said. “And what's great about having restrictions on a story is that it forces you to be creative and find workarounds, and sometimes you'll get things from those workarounds that you wouldn't have already gotten.”

3. Look beyond the headlines for the hidden stories: The New Yorker's Sarah Stillman

The first story New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman ever reported was during her senior year in college. She saw a Fox News report while at the gym with the headline “Body Found in Lake Is Not Missing Fla. Girl,” about the 2005 search  for the missing 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford.

When Stillman saw the report, she wondered about the woman whose body was found in the lake. She went back to her dorm room and called the sheriff’s office in Florida and asked for the woman’s name, revealed to be Donna Cooke. Once she got it, she did a background check on her and found her last known address. Stillman traveled to Florida and learned about Cooke’s story — about her prostitution charges, and being brought on as a confidential informant for police, which led to her death. Stillman later wrote about confidential informants for The New Yorker, 2012's “The Throwaways.”

“One of my very first reporting experiences then became the story, not just of telling who Donna was, but also of telling how she wound up there, which had to do a lot with current U.S. drug enforcement policies around how we use confidential informants,” Stillman said. “It’s been incredibly guiding to me as a journalist, learning to watch news headlines and seeing where is something not adding up for me.”

Stillman also learned that the best stories come from learning one’s strengths. After joining The New Yorker, she went to cover Iraq and Afghanistan during the Iraq war. She didn’t know the nuanced history of the Middle East and certainly didn’t know the language, but she sought out stories using her background.

Stillman, whose family included labor workers, always thought about how labor fit into a bigger story. Through that lens, she reported on thousands of international workers being sent to Iraq to do menial jobs on military bases. She spoke with hundreds of these workers and found they had been sent to the bases under false pretenses and also found cases of sexual assault.

“So much of what I think is the most compelling kind of narrative journalism is thinking about, ‘Where are people encountering black holes, whether it’s policy or whether it’s of the existing narratives?’” Stillman said. “How do we create narratives that push back on that and actually fill in the blanks and ask for accountability?”

4. Showing the true humanity of a bombing victim: Rhana Natour and Seyward Darby, The Atavist Magazine

Over 1,000 children in Gaza lost a limb in the first two months of the war. That statistic stuck with freelance journalist Rhana Natour as she considered covering a conflict that has produced the largest number of child amputees in history. Natour spoke with photojournalist Eman Mohammed and learned that some organizations had been helping young children from Gaza come to the U.S.

She said finding stories from the Israel-Hamas war proved difficult, as international journalists could not access the region directly. But children were “coming to us” and could shed light on the war and their experience. Natour's National Magazine Award-winning story, “Coming to America,” featuring photos by Mohammed, was published in The Atavist Magazine in July 2024. It tells the story of a 14-year-old girl named Layan Albaz who lost her legs in an Israeli airstrike that also killed many of her family members. 

Natour learned she needed to equip herself with the right reporting tools to handle the story with sensitivity. She understood she was talking to a child that had gone through significant trauma in the last month. She consulted experts in childhood trauma ahead of speaking with Layan and other children. She also had Mohammed, who’s fluent in Arabic and has a deep understanding of Middle Eastern culture, to translate for Natour.

Some of these practices included “asking them frequently if you want to take a break, or the way that you approach a child,” Natour said. “The underlying suggestion is … that child doesn't want to feel obligated to tell you anything. You don't want to exhaust them through the interview process. You don’t want to do harm.”

But before Natour met Layan, she was described as “angry,” “moody,” “furious,” and “mean.” She wasn’t the sad and gracious “perfect victim” that Natour may have expected. Natour leaned heavily into writing about that anger.

“If in a story you come up against an obstacle, don't think of it as something, ‘Oh gosh, I need to somehow tuck this under the narrative.’ Maybe it’s actually part of the narrative. Maybe it makes for a richer story,” said Seyward Darby, Natour's editor on the story and editor in chief of The Atavist. “She is trying to assert agency. She's trying to process trauma. She is trying to regain a sense of control in her life. She’s furious that so many people and institutions failed her. So maybe her anger is part of the story. Maybe it is the story.”

5. Building a literary toolbox: Jabari Asim

Jabari Asim, a professor at Emerson College who has published 23 books including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays, and children’s books, likes to visualize his audience before beginning a project. He thinks of three different readers: himself (and his appetite for something he’s interested in or hasn’t seen anywhere else), someone who isn’t attracted to the subject matter at first but would read something that is well written, and someone who is adversarial to the topic he writes about.

Asim, who was previously an editor at The Washington Post and editor in chief at the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis, also visualizes the finished product. “I see the book on the shelf. I see the spine. I see my name. I see the title. I see the color scheme. So I convinced myself that on some level, somewhere, my book already exists, and now it’s just a matter of working backwards.”

He's a big believer in the “ass to chair” theory of writing — and letting every idea spill onto the pages of the notebook with little distraction. He also encouraged finding a routine or habit that unlocks a creative flow state, whether it’s a regimented routine like that of Haruki Murakami or just some good beer and pizza. Either way, “Consistency is the operating principle. Find what works for you and stick to it.”

Asim keeps a “commonplace book” that contains profound phrases, observations or ideas that convey an element of style or prose that informs his own work. The book reminds him that he is entering into a collective discussion, and his ideas may only add onto what has already been expressed, keeping him grounded. The quotes in his book include the likes of Toni Morrison, Mary Oliver, Robert Frost, Andrei Tarkovsky, and many others.

Asim said he creates rough outlines, and it evolves as he goes through multiple drafts. After having a comprehensive outline, he can shuffle parts around and jump from place to place when writing (he said this is an antidote to writer’s block for him). In his drafts, he often highlights a “golden paragraph” that showcases everything he was trying to achieve and compares that paragraph to the rest of his paragraphs to see how he can strengthen the others.

Cleanliness, precision, ease and force are Asim’s four elements for writing. For cleanliness, “Don’t give [publishers] a chance to dismiss you easily. Get rid of all typos, grammatical errors and misspellings.” For precision, quoting E. B. White, “omit needless words.” For ease, “Never let your readers see you sweat. Successful writing tends to be a fingerprints-free exercise.” For force, “Your conclusion presents the final opportunity to close the sale, to gather your narrative momentum and drive home the full eloquence and fury of your prose.”

6. Becoming less of a stranger in a small town: Keith O’Brien

Keith O’Brien, an award-winning author and journalist whose work has appeared in New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone, wanted to dig into the early years of Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird. But Bird is a notoriously private person, rarely doing interviews or projects unless he has some control over it. So it came as no surprise when Bird couldn’t be reached for O’Brien’s recently published book, “Heartland,” covering his high school career in his hometown of French Lick, Indiana.

O’Brien didn’t necessarily need Bird’s participation for the story. He wanted to tell a “compelling human narrative.” Perhaps Bird would have told a completely different story about those early years than the people around him that shaped his future career. To get those outside voices, he collected phone numbers and started calling around. Nobody answered him.

“I need to invest in the story,” O’Brien said. “If people aren’t calling me back, maybe what I need to do is just go to French Lick. And so that’s what I did: bought a plane ticket, got a rental car and booked a room at the Best Western on the edge of town. And then before I left with those numbers and those addresses that I knew were right, I reached out again … and it was then that people started getting back in touch with me.”

One of the important figures in Bird’s life that O’Brien identified was his father Joey Bird. He was a well-known person in town but struggled a lot; a few months after his son graduated high school, he took his own life. Since neither of the Birds could — or would — speak to him, O’Brien learned about Joey Bird through military records, newspaper clippings in the public library, and at the local bar in town.

O’Brien could feel that he was out of place, especially at the bar where he had to immediately introduce himself and his intentions. But he quickly started to acquaint himself with Bird’s high school friends, college teammates, and mentors. There was one person he still couldn’t get a hold of who was essential for the story: Bird’s high school coach, Jim Jones.

In a last-ditch effort, O’Brien decided to drive to Jones’s home an hour outside of French Lick. He knocked on the door and his wife answered. After a few moments, Jones came to the door and wordlessly let O’Brien through. They talked for the next three hours in Jones’s kitchen, where Jones showed O’Brien a custom Larry Bird championship-style ring and a letter from Bird to Jones, thanking him for all he’d done.

“I knew two things for certain,” O’Brien said. “First was, I had this story, whether Larry Bird was talking to me or not. I had it. And number two, I knew that I was not a stranger in this place anymore. I belonged here.”

***

Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.

The post Look beyond the headlines — and five other lessons for journalists from Power of Narrative 2026 appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

When “Fela Kuti: Fear No Man” came out in the fall of 2025, I knew I would need to dedicate real time to listen. Produced by Western Sound and Talkhouse for Audible and Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, the series — which just won a Peabody Award — is a musical biography of the prolific inventor of Afrobeat, the Nigerian Fela Kuti, who died in 1997. It’s also a history of the tumultuous, often violent post-colonial powers he challenged, and what it takes for art to change minds.

The series was reported and hosted by Jad Abumrad, the creator of WNYC’s Radiolab who’s now an independent producer. Long ago, I got to report and help produce a piece with him and his team, so I know that Abumrad’s approach to narrative audio is like no one else’s. He doesn’t work from written scripts, but rather builds stories from interview tape and sound, working the connective tissue of narration around the more musical logic of characters, emotions, and ideas.

So when I finally started listening to this new series, I expected something good. What I didn’t expect was something you rarely hear much anymore in narrative podcasts: something daring and groundbreaking.

The sequence that lit up my brain occupies much of the third episode, “Enter the Shrine.” By this point in the series, we’ve learned a lot about Fela Kuti’s impact on Nigeria, and particularly on the musicians who played with him for years. We’ve learned some about his childhood in Abeokuta, in a Yoruba-speaking region north of Lagos. We’ve learned that he studied piano in London at Trinity College, before coming to Los Angeles in the late 1960s and getting exposed to the writing of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement. And we’ve learned how he returned to Nigeria in 1970 determined to bring these ideas home, setting up a housing compound and club called the Shrine that he declared to be an independent state within Lagos.

The episode “Enter the Shrine” broadens out — and slows down the plot. For more than 10 minutes in the middle of the episode, all narration falls away and we hear only a blend of voices, music and sound design that tries to replicate the “trance” that people say came over them listening to Fela Kuti’s live performances in his club. All this happens against an extended mix of his song “Army Arrangement,” a 1985 critique of Nigeria’s military junta. 

We do not hear the names of most of the people whose voices we hear swirling around us — rather they appear as a chorus, sometimes only repeating one word, at other times entire phrases. The longer this goes on, the more it infringes on a very old taboo in radio: that speakers must be identified whenever possible.

Yes, on radio we do hear the occasional “man on the street” interviews, and there are artistic “non-narrated” documentaries that flirt with unidentified speakers. Trailers and promotional clips might contain a flurry of voices to show off what a series has to offer. But generally in nonfiction audio, it’s considered rude not to identify who is speaking. That’s both for reasons of ethics, but also to avoid disorienting the listener. 

There’s one more thing to add about montages: they are labor intensive. You have to comb through a ton of tape to find the clips that “pop.” Then you have to juxtapose them against one another, trimming and rearranging clips until everything sounds right. You may add music, you may subtract it. You probably should play each version of the sequence for others to make sure you’re not deluded about whether it works. All told, building an effective montage — especially a long montage — requires a lot alchemy, and acceptance that many of your attempts will fail.

I had to know how the montage sequence in "Enter the Shrine" came about — and more importantly, all the editorial arguments that surely went into its construction. So I called up Jad Abumrad and his editor, Ben Adair. (Full disclosure: in addition to reporting an episode of “Radiolab,” I once worked with Ben Adair at American Public Media and later gave notes on a series he produced with Pushkin Industries, “Lost Hills.” I’m also one of the editors on a forthcoming narrative series with Pushkin, Audible, and Higher Ground Productions).

Right away, Abumrad and Adair told me something I’d suspected — that the elaborate, sound-rich montage sequence that’s now in their third episode was originally intended as the start of the series.

“One of the big questions of the series was like, what is the first episode? Even as I say that question out loud, my stomach gets a certain layer of acid to it,” Abumrad said. “Because we lived with that question for so long.”

He built the montage set in the Shrine, but then the notes came back: this material was too confusing without context. Who was everybody? Why were they there? And where was Fela Kuti?

Abumrad and Adair took that feedback and moved the sequence further into the series. 

Even within the episode itself, we get about ten minutes of preparation: we hear a sonic tour of Lagos, we hear where Fela’s Shrine was situated and how it’s spoken of today, and we hear about Fela’s elaborate preparations to go on stage each night — followed by a procession to the club, sometimes on a donkey.

What follows is a transcript of the montage sequence from “Enter the Shrine,” annotated with parts of our conversation. I’d advise listening to the episode (and ideally the two that come before it), and/or reading along as you listen. This transcript starts after the first ad break in the episode, approximately at the 11:25 mark.

***

Script Annotation: Episode 3, ‘Enter the Shrine’

[~11:25] Jad Abumrad: This is Fela Kuti: Fear No Man.

Before we go back into the Shrine — well first, let me give you a picture. 

[annotation a="Jad Abumrad: I do remember we had an edit. We were sitting at my kitchen table downstairs and we had the script, and I think we had, at that point, decided this was the third episode. And Ben was like, ‘You need to talk about where (the Shrine) is in Lagos and the importance of the location.’ Ben always had a really good ability to think on the level of the series. And (about) what people need to experience at any given point of the series, so that they can go where you want them to go. This particular episode finally made sense (when) we put in context that people needed."]

It is an open-air club, fits about 500 people. There’s this tin roof over the stage, but no roof over the dance floor.

And to either side of the stage are four Studio 54-ish “cages” where dancers dance. 

[annotation a="Ben Adair: We went to Nigeria for three weeks and interviewed so many people there. We interviewed three of (Fela’s) — as far as we know — four remaining wives. Two of them had never spoken to the press before."]

Also to one side there is an altar, where Fela had a picture of his mother, a picture of Malcolm X, and a picture of Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana.

But I’ll be honest, what’s most interesting to me is not so much the Shrine itself — I mean, it was a club — but rather what happened to people when they went inside of it.

[annotation a="Jad Abumrad: This episode was born from recognizing a pattern. Which was that people talk about being at the Shrine, and the experience of falling into a kind of hail of music. We just kept hearing that, and so it felt important. That (insight) came after we had really finished reporting."]

Because — do you know how people talk about psilocybin now? Right, like we all have one of those friends who did some mushrooms and it changed their life and they can't stop talking about it. And there is a way to explain those experiences — you can say, neurochemistry, right? There’s something about these drugs, they rewire your brain. Fine.

We ran into so many people who described listening to Fela's music, at the Shrine, in the same way! That it had the same effect on them. Which is a little harder to explain. Though, I will try in a moment.

But first, let's reenter the Shrine from their perspective. 

(crowd noises)

[annotation q="Julia Barton: How many hours of tape did you have for this series?" a="Jad Abumrad: At least 200… We used (the audio and video editing app) Descript to make very, very low-res builds, just string-outs of tape. Just to hear how the voices talk to each other, and if they like the order that you've put them in. Then there was a lot of ‘Ctrl+Fing’ as we zeroed in on certain keywords that people would use. It was really easy to figure out who in our many, many interviews had said what."] 

[annotation a="Once (you are mixing) in ProTools, then you close that part of your brain and you just try to respond to the music and align the tape, so it feels like it's also music."]

[annotation a="Ben Adair: Jad is also a composer. And so there's a lot happening with the music in terms of looping and tuning the voices, tuning other sorts of sound around the sound beds that are in it."]

And as you're listening, see if you can let yourself notice: What are you paying attention to? How does that change over time?

[annotation q="Julia Barton: Was this line about noticing part of the framing?" a="Jad Abumrad: That (came from) my therapist! Because we had a whole conversation where he was like, ‘I think what you're doing is a guided fantasy. And if you're going to give people a guided fantasy, you need to instruct them about how and what to notice as they're going through it.’"]

At one AM, Fela arrives on his donkey, takes the stage with 35 other musicians and he begins a riff … that will last most of the night.

Woman 1 (Marilyn Nance):

My experience in being in the Shrine was like, like the music was like inside of me. It was all around, it was just like, you know, being hypnotized. Like you are all inside the music.

Woman 2 (Nina Darnton):

A kind of hypnotic dancing.

Man 1 (Duro Ikujenyo):

React to music, dancing and listening. (repeats under)

Woman 3 (Lorraine Animashaun):

I remember being lost in music. All the people are smoking around me and they were in a mist. So you're in a different world.

(Keyboard, chorus sings)

[annotation q="Julia: You go hard on the whole chorus, man-on-the-street approach." a="Ben: (At one point) everyone was going to be introduced during this dance party — (sarcastically) ‘Let's interrupt the party to make sure that everybody's introduced to everybody else.’"]

[annotation q="Julia: So did you do anything before the sequence to help alleviate that anxiety?" a="Ben: Yeah (we added) two episodes before it."]

Woman 4 (Rosa Cuoto):

This idea of the spiral (spiral, spiral). And circles (circles, circles). It's another way to deal with time.

Man 2 (Dele Sosimi):

I would describe it as in a swirl. You know, when, when you have a cyclone, it starts off as this little thing that builds up and it builds up. The more you allow it to circulate, it just starts to get bigger.

(Vocal montage mix begins, repeating elements from voices above)

[annotation a="Ben: We had permission to use some (of Fela Kuti's) music very liberally. We could use it to remix. Or we could remix it, and we could edit it however we wanted. A lot of artists would never allow that."]

VOICES:

(Spiral, spiral, spiral)

(Get bigger. Get bigger, get bigger, get bigger)

(Circle)

(Get bigger, get bigger, get bigger)

(Circle)

(Get, get bigger, get bigger, get bigger)

(music fades under)

[annotation a="Jad: It was really just trying to get into the internal mindscape of the people who would be lost in the trance. Like the way in which the building could start to breathe, you know, and everything could start to spiral and spin around your head. You lose track of where you end and someone else begins, which was an idea everyone kept talking about."]

Man 3 (Bode Omojola):

Fela starts his music to enchant. This repetitive pattern, the power of the musical ostinato. It's part of that enchanting strategy. You've been captured.

(Enter horn section, vocal montage interspersed)

Man 4 (Brian Eno):

I thought this is really an amazing new form of music. It was, it was almost like a field of sound that sits there for a long time. And you explore it. You kind of enter it, and live in it. This is a place, this isn't a song.

[annotation a="Ben: In the case of this episode, I do think that the audience missed a few people (in the montage) who were really important. There's a great quote from Brian Eno that comes right in the middle of it. Knowing that's Brian Eno, I think it has a little more weight to it. In the bonus episode (Episode 13), he expands on that, and it's super interesting to hear the huge effect that Fela's music had on him as a musician and as a producer."]

Man 5 (John Darnton):

And meanwhile the rhythm section’s keeping going (going, going, going).

(horn section reenters)

Man 4:

This is a place. And when you start listening to it, you are entering into that place.

Woman 1:

Hypnotized. Like the music was like inside of me, it was all around. And it was just like being hypnotized.

(Montage of multiple voices)

Man 6 (Michael Veal):

And so with Fela, you could tell that there was a different kind of intention behind this paradigm of groove. The music is so nasty, you have to dance. But that's just the ground level. 'Cause why would you play a song for 30 minutes or 40 minutes unless you really have something to say?

(horn section mixed with full vocal montage)

[annotation a="Jad: One of the members of our team, Ruby Walsh, had made a draft where she had ‘Army Arrangement’ and a couple of people (speaking) on top of it. The moment that we both heard it, we were like, is this the first episode? It had a sparkle to it, an energy that felt inviting in a way. She really fought for us to make it the first episode and that spark was us recognizing that she was right."]

Man 5:

And then suddenly —

(vocal montage repeats, begins to fade under)

Man 5:

After half an hour, 40 minutes…he starts singing.

[annotation a="Jad: The danger in this kind of thing would be to simply talk about the music, right? But the music itself is so pregnant with all of the ideas. You have to put people in it. So we had this idea of: the series was like a river, and each of the episodes was a little eddy in the river. The river was the music, right?"]

[annotation a="Ben: The producer in me was like, what? How? How is this gonna work? But we kept coming back to it, because it is exactly right: the music has to be the guiding force. Jad talks in a bunch of different moments in the podcast about this torrent of music that Fela was creating, that was just streaming out of him and around Lagos and around the world. So why not have that be the guiding principle?"]

(vocal section of “Army Arrangement” featuring Fela Kuti begins)

Whether you like or you don’t like
After you hear this true talk
Whether you like or you don't like
After you hear this true talk
If you like it good (Ge ge)
If you no like it you hang (Ge ge)
If you like it good (Ge ge)
If you no like it you hang (Ge ge)
If you hang you go die (Ge ge)
You go die for nothing (Ge ge)
We go carry your body, go police station
You die wrongfully

(song pauses)

Man 7 (Saul Williams):

When his voice came in, I was like, what the hell? There are words too?

(Fela sings):

All of them Kirikiri
Ten to fifteen years in jail
After one year inside jail
Civilian government take over

(music continues under, partly blurred)

Man 7 (Saul Williams):

Hold up, hold up. What is this?

Man 5 (John Darnton):

He sings in a gravelly, low pitched voice — and sings about things that no one else ever even mentioned. Any newspaper, any columnist.

Woman 5 (Stephanie Shonekan):

He talks about the United Nations, he talks about Thatcher, he talks about Reagan. It’s really, everything is like a history lesson.

Man 5 (John Darnton):

You see it sinking in. You could see ideas in the air floating from the stage, like thought balloons, and then sinking into somebody's skull.

(Music transition to celeste-like notes)

Woman 5:

I just felt, Where has my mind been all, you know, all, all my life? Complete surprise. Like —

Man 8 (Moses Ochonu):

I, I was immediately captivated.

Woman 5:

— why did we not know this? Why aren't we thinking about this stuff?

Man 9 (Lemi Ghariokwu):

When Fela sang into a microphone, I saw the — the light.

Woman 5:

I was just like, you know, like —

Man 8:

It sucks you in. And then it has that lightbulb effect on you. You come into yourself, and you know, it's a moment of, uh, introspection too, because you, you realize that you haven't been as attuned as you probably should have.

Woman 5:

All the stuff he was singing was just new to me. You know, I was just learning so much about Nigerian history through Fela, that I had not learned in school.

(music, celeste-like to an ad break)

[annotation q="Julia: Can you talk about how little tape there is of Fela in the series?" a="Jad: He’s not one of those guys that you get to know by listening to him talk."]

[annotation a="Ben: Even when he's recorded, he's usually giving a lecture or giving an interview. He is reciting political points. Even the tape that exists is not really, like Jad’s saying, tape where he reveals himself."]

[annotation a="Jad: It was a real frustration through the process. I felt like we were circling, and we couldn't get close enough. We couldn't get in his head. (After building the first episode) I realized I should stop thinking of Fela as a psyche that I need to get inside of. He's an energy source that is flowing through people. And this series is about watching the energy."]

[ad break]

This is Fela Kuti: Fear No Man. Before we go on, the voices you just heard before the break, in addition to Michael Veal and John Darnton, were Stephanie Shonekan and Bode Omojola, both professors of ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland and Mount Holyoke, respectively. Afrobeat musicians Dele Sosimi, and Duro Ikujenyo. Activist, filmmaker, musician Saul Williams. Musician and producer, Brian Eno. Artist Lemi Ghariokwu. Photographer Marilyn Nance. Designer Lorraine Animashaun, and our advisor, Moses Ochonu, who's a professor of history and my colleague at Vanderbilt University. 

[annotation a="Ben: There's that whole section, I don't know how long — a minute and a half? — of just saying the names of all the people that you heard. And that irked some people. And (at one point) they wanted us to bring that up (into the montage)."]

He was one of the last voices you heard, and I asked him –

Jad [in tape]: You said that the music made you feel like you needed to tune into things you hadn't been tuning into. Like what?

Moses Ochonu: Uh, you know, when I was growing up in Nigeria, you know, we would hear about corruption, about thousands of naira being embezzled by some politician or government officials. And we would open our mouths in shock because our brains couldn't compute how one person would make off with thousands of naira. How would the person carry this money? What, what would they put it in? In some boxes and in some cars? You know, physically, how would they move this money? You know, we just couldn't fathom it.

And then over time we started hearing about millions, not thousands anymore, then billions. And now, as we speak, the corruption numbers have entered the trillions.

That over time has had a numbing effect, a dulling effect. The shock value, the kind of shock that I felt as a child growing up in Nigeria, the moral outrage that I felt, that's gone, that's long gone.

Jad: And that is what would come back when you heard his songs.

Moses: Right. Exactly.

Moses said that Fela's music would remind him of the insanity that he had been sane-washed into believing was normal. And I think there's something really interesting about how the music can move him to that thought. 

Music is all about structure, right? Structuring the relationship between notes and chords and melodies. But here, you have structure on an entirely different level, almost like a phenomenological structure. 

[annotation a="Jad: I was talking to my therapist and I was trying to tell him the story of this episode — and he was like, ‘So why? What did they all experience?’ We ended up getting into a whole thing about that, and I was like, ‘Oh, I need to put this in.’ … This sort of music lecture, about the ostinato, that sort of unpacks what you've just experienced."]

For the first 15 minutes, it's just loops, ostinatos going round and round.

Bode Omojola (Man 3): The power of the musical ostinato.

“Ostinato”in Italian by the way, means basically “stubborn.” The loops stubbornly repeat, and at first it's not so bad. It's kind of grounding, actually. But then, the natural response is then to want some change. Like, “can we go to the next section now? Please. Please? No?”

This is what the Buddhists call our monkey mind. Our monkey mind wants distraction. It wants anything to keep us from having to live with our own thoughts. But the music doesn't give us that. It doesn't change. It only builds. 

Layers get added, piece by piece, instrument by instrument. And at some point, a few minutes in, 

(repeating music resumes)

You arrive at this mysterious moment where you stop wanting it to change. This is phase two. Now that part of you that wants novelty starts to notice things like, “Whoa, listen to all the interlocking parts of this groove.”

[annotation a="Ben: One of the first very first conversations that we had about making this show, Jad had this desire he expressed about wanting to do something that sounded just so different. And the way he put that, even in the early meetings, was: Making a documentary that you could dance to. I think that becomes the most palpable in this episode, Episode 3."]

Dele Sosimi (Man 2): Whoa, the ostinatos — they're like machine gears. They don't grind. The gears are timed in between each other, so they just subtly lift fit into the little gaps and holes like Tetris.

The way that the conga plays off the shaker, call and response, the way that the three guitar lines spin around endlessly like gears in a higher-level clock. My God, this groove is a whole world.

(musical transition, celeste re-enters)

This is the trance state. Usually when we talk about trance, we mean a kind of dulling of our senses, but actually it's the opposite. It's the state of hyper focus.

You are noticing things. You're hearing things you've never heard before, because your neurons are rewired. You are open. And it is at this very moment that Fela begins to sing.

Saul Williams (Man 7): I was like, what the hell? There are words too?

In comes his voice booming like the voice of God. This is phase three. And because you are open, you really hear what he is saying.

John Darnton (Man 5): You see it sinking in. You could see ideas in the air floating from the stage like thought balloons and then sinking into somebody's skull.

And in that way, as the final piece of this progression, he gives you a new conception of what your life can be —

Lemi Ghariokwu (Man 9): I saw the light.

That you can now dance to.

[annotation a="Ben: I remember like at one of our last meetings, you know, just laughing out of nowhere. And Jad's like, ‘What are you laughing at?’ I'm like, ‘Dude, you did it. You made a documentary that we could dance to.’"]

(“Army Arrangement”/vocal montage up for several beats, then running under low)

Fela Kuti: My music, my main… my main preoccupation right now, music is a small part of it.

This is a clip from an interview Fela gave in 1988 where he describes his musical form, almost as this vehicle designed to move people, step by step by step, so that they can hear what he has to say.

Interviewer: Is your music kind of a tool?

Fela: It’s a weapon. It’s a weapon to say, so I can talk when I have the chance to. consider music to be effective like a weapon, to inform people. My music is like an attraction to inform people. It is the information side of the music that is important.

[annotation a="Jad: That was one of the best moments, where you really feel like he was philosophically addressing the thing that we had just built with music. Where he's extremely insightful is when he talks about the ‘musical contraption,’ as he called it — the thing built with his music. He knew what he was doing, you know?"] 

(Music out, replaced by a swirling sound)

In that same interview, he suggested there’s something else going on here too. That has to do with time itself.

(voice: Circle, circle, circle…)

Fela: If anyone tells me 20 years is a long time, I would tell them no. Time is meaningless unless you want to understand what time is about. There is time for everything.

***

Julia Barton is a longtime audio story editor and author of a newsletter about broadcast history, Continuous Wave. She's worked with nonfiction authors including Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, Jill Lepore, and Michael Spector to create original podcasts and audiobooks. Barton completed a Nieman Fellowship in 2024. Her work can be found at RadioWright.com.

The post How Jad Abumrad transports listeners to a legendary club in Lagos for the acclaimed podcast, ‘Fela Kuti: Fear No Man’ appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

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Editor's note: I am away this week, so we're excited to feature a guest newsletter from journalist, author, and Storyboard contributor Kim Cross. — Mark Armstrong

***

Dear Storyboard community: 

Atlanta-based artist Daniel Troppy has always worked in visual media: painting, photography, and sculptures from found objects. Following the death of his brother, painter Darrell Troppy, Daniel turned to words. “When my brother passed away, that’s when I started to write,” he told me. “And I am not a writer. I wasn’t an artist with words. But writing saved me.” 

In grief, he found catharsis in writing tiny true stories — defining moments, memories, micro-narratives — each paired with a black-and-white photograph with the mood and grain of film. Written with telling detail and brevity, the stories averaged 100 words.

Instagram became his gallery. Amid the selfies and funny cat videos, his silver gelatin prints stood out like an art exhibit in a circus: An empty swing set that echoed William Eggleston’s untitled Memphis tricycle; an old woman pushing a walker through a hallway lined with portraits; a wrinkled hand with an IV line; thinning hair in curlers.

The images were arresting, more concerned with a mood and a moment than technical precision. The writing used specific details to avoid cliché. But what was this? Journalism? Art? Documentary? Visual memoir? A serial narrative unfolding in real time? 

“They’re love letters,” Daniel told me. “Each story captures a small moment in time. A visit. A question. A memory. A feeling. I wanted to use my photography skills and write these short stories to document my parents’ end-of-life journey.” 

It was all so raw and intimate, I felt uncomfortable — and moved. Brave and unflinching, Daniel pressed the shutter in moments that might have caused me to look away. They pulled me into a world I felt I shouldn’t be privileged to see, like Sally Mann’s family portraits. There was a touch of documentary, á la Walker Evans’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” but this photographer wasn’t an outsider. He was part of the scene, invisible but present. Shooting not only with permission, but love. 

I recently interviewed Daniel about his process for my newsletter, The Waterproof Notebook. As a writer of narrative nonfiction, I’m always looking to learn from other storytelling genres — especially those that convey a story with a narrative arc in a short-form format. And social media, for better and worse, remains a place for stories to reach an audience. 

Instagram increasingly feeds us influencer sludge more than posts by people we follow. But it remains a good place to practice writing short-form stories set to a sequence of images or videos. 

Neil Shea, a longform writer for National Geographic and other publications, called Instagram “one of the world’s most successful general interest magazines.” He’s been using it to tell short-form stories for more than a decade. “Soon after I began experimenting within the app’s creative constraints, something strange happened—I found I loved writing short,” he wrote on Storyboard in 2015. “Beneath the selfie surface, Instagram provided a powerful, unexpected, and mostly underutilized storytelling tool.” Did that get old after a while? Nope! It looks like he is still going strong at @neilshea13.

I’ve been using Instagram to practice writing short, learn video editing, reveal a peek behind the writing process, and experiment with visual storytelling. A computer scientist told me the algorithm favors Reels that start with a human face, so I’ve been trying that (cringe), with some posts performing better than others. My most viral post is a carousel of 20 portraits of my mother, followed by a painfully honest confession of mixed feelings about inheriting her miniature Yorkie. (Do not stay tuned for more Yorkie content; that one brought out the trolls.)

Do you have a favorite source of short-form narrative inspiration? I’d love to hear from you. Shoot me a message over at kimhcross.com, on Instagram (@kimhcross), or on Substack at The Waterproof Notebook. 

— Kim

Links of note 

• Hannah Dreier and the staff of The New York Times have been awarded the 2026 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting for their series “Exposed and Expendable,” about wildfire fighters getting sick and dying young from exposure to poisonous smoke. 
• The Poynter Institute is offering a free 75-minute webinar on April 28 (11:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. ET) on how to cover ICE enforcement and its impact on children and families.
• Scratch magazine returns: Written by a collective of powerhouse female freelance writers — Latria Graham, Maggie Mertens, Rahawa Haile, and Manjula Martin — this weekly dispatch gets real about the financial realities and survival tactics of those fighting to make a living in publishing. 
• The Sunday Long Read True Crime Spotlight newsletter has a new editor: After a wonderful year working with SLR, I’m passing the torch to Shaun Assael, an award-winning author, magazine writer, and producer. 

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The post The art of the micro-narrative appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

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***

Dear Storyboard community: 

I returned from Boston University's Power of Narrative conference last week feeling inspired by the work journalists are doing in spite of all the obstacles standing in their way: shrinking budgets for investigative work, a Trump administration that demonizes and threatens the free press, and a billionaire class that is consolidating media power to shape coverage in its favor.  

Amid all that, reporters are still doing the work. Journalist Rhana Natour, along with her editor, Seyward Darby, took us through her award-winning 2024 feature story for The Atavist, about a 14-year-old girl from Gaza who lost her legs during an Israeli airstrike; Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Marcus Yam, a 2025 Nieman Fellow, shared lessons from covering assignments such as the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan (when spending time with a subject, “stay long enough to be boring,” he said); and The New Yorker's Sarah Stillman talked about the power of collaborating with other journalists and organizations on major reporting projects like her 2025 story, “Starved in Jail.” 

Over the coming weeks, Storyboard contributor Emilia Wisniewski will be sharing reports from the 28th annual Power of Narrative conference. She kicks things off with takeaways from my conversation with The New Yorker's Patrick Radden Keefe about his new book, “London Falling,” which was published this week. Thanks again to Patrick for a wonderful and revealing conversation.

Four lessons for journalists from Patrick Radden Keefe’s latest book, ‘London Falling’

“I'm a little bit like a vampire, because if you invite me in, I'm going to do what I do,” Keefe said. “There were some things that I think they, in the beginning, never imagined would end up in the book that ended up in the book, because if you set me free in your family history, I'm going to dig around a little bit.”

[ Read the story ]

Links of note 

• Do you know the essence of your story? In her Sound Judgment newsletter, Elaine Appleton Grant reflects on the relatable challenges students faced during her audio storytelling course at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. A big one was finding the “beating heart” of their narrative: “Especially on first drafts, the focus was often unclear, even when the setting was beautifully evoked and the writing detailed. The listener comes away from such a story feeling like there’s a hole in the middle; it has no center. In feedback after feedback, I found myself asking the question: What is the heart of your story? Why do you care about these characters, this event? When possible, I’d try to guide students toward an answer by offering nudges based on the material. But only they could define the engine driving their interest in this story.”
• An example in patience and earning trust with sources who are reluctant to go public with their stories: The New York Times's Manny Fernandez reveals how he and his colleague, Sarah Hurtes, worked with two women, Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas, to share their accounts of sexual abuse by Cesar Chavez. “Sarah and I are just two reporters. It took a lot of time to get these women to share their experiences and then to corroborate what they were telling us. That’s how I see it. I believe journalism is a calling, and it matters. When done right, it can drive change.” (via Jim Boren's Newsroom Notebook newsletter)
• Are you writing a memoir or personal essay? At her Write at the Edge newsletter, Mallary Tenore Tarpley discusses how to write about family members with empathy but without sugarcoating hard truths. “Our job as writers isn’t to protect or vilify the people we’re writing about so much as it is to render them three-dimensional — to show their flaws, their strengths, and how they shaped us for better or worse. (Even the worst among us have different dimensions.)”

Keep adding dimension, and keep sharing your stories,

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
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The post ‘Stay long enough to be boring,’ and other notes from the Power of Narrative conference appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

When Patrick Radden Keefe finds a story, he doesn't let go. He talks to every person until there’s no one left to talk to. He looks for documents and evidence to verify claims. He spends enormous amounts of time on story structure.

But, he admits, he’s somewhat of “a dilettante”: while he wants to know everything there is to know about a topic, he also wants the ability to walk away from it once the work is done.

“The best is when you sort of write your 10,000 words and then you say, ‘That's all I'm ever going to have to say on this subject ever again,’” Keefe said at Boston University’s Power of Narrative conference on March 28. “There have been four times in 20 years where I've gotten to the end of a piece and thought, ‘I'm not ready to move on.’”

That fourth time is the story of 19-year-old Zac Brettler, who led a secret double life in London before plunging to his death from an apartment balcony into the River Thames in 2019. Keefe wrote about Brettler's mysterious death, and his family's investigation into what happened, for a 2024 New Yorker story, and he has now expanded it into a book, “London Falling,” published on April 7. 

Keefe, the author of bestsellers including “Rogues,” “Empire of Pain,” and “Say Nothing,” discussed his process with Nieman Storyboard editor Mark Armstrong at the 28th annual conference. Here are four takeaways for journalists: 

1. Meeting your subjects with no strings attached

Keefe learned about Brettler while talking to a stranger — something he often does. At the time, he was working on the television adaptation of his bestseller “Say Nothing” in London, and the person (a friend of the director) told him about Brettler's family.

He went home that evening and tried Googling everything the man told him — but nothing came up. He later learned the family was intentionally trying to maintain their privacy and not speak to the press during the investigation.

When Keefe contacted Zac's parents, Matthew and Rachelle, he suggested a meeting in a local cafe with “no commitment in either direction.” This way they didn’t have to prepare for a formal interview, and Keefe could decide whether he’d want to follow the story further.

“Our initial conversation … I didn't even take out a notebook. I wasn't recording it,” he said. “It was entirely just conversation.”

Over the next two hours, the Brettler family told their story. They didn’t have an official agreement after that chat, but they were “inching towards one” and had another meeting a week later.

People who experience profound loss and trauma, Keefe said, are often willing to share their story with those who want to listen. He said it was a privilege to do this work and have people open up to him about the worst days of their lives.

“I think it felt good for them to talk about it,” he said. “I think it feels good for anybody to tell their story, particularly if it’s a story that they've, for one reason or another, kept a little bit locked away.”

2. Access can be overrated

Keefe had full access to the Brettlers for this story, and he admits that they were key in making the book happen. But there were other key figures who would not speak to him, and access to central people shouldn’t make or break a story.

“Just because people don't want to play ball doesn't mean you shouldn't write the story,” he said. “Sometimes you should write the story.” Keefe recalled his 2018 New Yorker profile of “Apprentice” producer Mark Burnett, who wouldn't speak to Keefe for the story. (Burnett's ex-wives, however, did speak to him.)

For this story, Akbar Shamji, one of the men who was with Zac Brettler the night he died, didn’t grant Keefe an interview or a meeting but did email him quite a bit. Communication ceased after Keefe and The New Yorker sent Shamji over 230 fact-checking inquiries.

Because of this, Keefe had to lean more on the Brettlers and the materials he could get from them. But, he wanted to make sure they were all in. In their second meeting, he prefaced that they could not back out of the process if they were to go on the record. As he puts it, “the train is leaving the station.”

“[It’s] one thing that I'm trying to kind of get better at over the years, or that I've made more of a point of with each passing year, is just being very transparent with people on the front end of any kind of reportorial engagement, in part because I've seen where things can go wrong,” he said.

3. Deciding if a story should be an article, a book, or both

Keefe said he uncovered a lot from his conversations with the Brettlers, but only so much can go into a 15,000-word piece for The New Yorker.

One example he gave was Zac Brettler’s grandfather, Hugo Gryn. He had survived Auschwitz during World War II and, once he landed in London, he became a well-known BBC broadcaster and a beloved rabbi. Keefe noted that Gryn was a famous figure in London, but he wasn’t mentioned in his initial New Yorker story.

“This was one of the things that made me feel as though there probably was a book here — that there was this deeper history I've always been interested in, the way any of us are formed by our family lineage, the way families come to new places,” he said.

He felt each piece had a thematically different purpose: the article told the story of Zac Brettler while the book told the story of decades of family history that led to who Zac was.

Keefe also said he often feels torn about the right time to publish. The New Yorker will be publishing a new story from Keefe soon that he had been working on since 2020 and felt it was finally the right time.

“I love the process of going from knowing nothing about something to feeling pretty smart to feeling as though I've earned the right to weigh in on something, and it's usually a good sign if I feel like I can summon the confidence, honestly, to write,” he said. “That's a kind of helpful inflection point, and I certainly wouldn't publish before getting that point.”

4. How much to share with sources before publication?

A rule of thumb for many newsrooms is to not allow sources to read pieces before publication, and Keefe generally follows that same rule. But the Brettlers were an exception.

Because the material was deeply personal for the family — history, secrets, and inner thoughts — it didn’t feel right to Keefe to have reviewers read the book before they did. So it made sense for him to send three early copies of the book to Zac Brettler’s mom, dad, and brother.

“Those were stressful days for me,” he said.

He felt it was necessary to give an advance copy to the Brettlers to prepare them for the “weird” experience ahead of them. In tandem with being transparent at the beginning, he wanted to be clear about the feeling they might get when they see someone in public reading about their intimate family details.

“I'm a little bit like a vampire, because if you invite me in, I'm going to do what I do,” Keefe said. “There were some things that I think they, in the beginning, never imagined would end up in the book that ended up in the book, because if you set me free in your family history, I'm going to dig around a little bit.”

***

Read more: Nieman Storyboard's Patrick Radden Keefe reading list

***
Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.

The post Four lessons for journalists from Patrick Radden Keefe’s latest book, ‘London Falling’ appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.