As a reader, I have always devoured oral histories, in book form or as magazine features. They are compulsively readable, and the form itself feels honest in its narrative messiness — many different voices, agreeing or disagreeing on what really happened. 

But the joy of reading a good oral history can obscure the amount of work required for journalists to report and write one, turning hundreds of interviews into a cohesive narrative spanning years or even decades. 

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, journalist and author Tricia Romano joins me to talk about how she reported and wrote her oral history of The Village Voice, “The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture.” 

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Romano was a writer for the legendary New York City alt-weekly, and it was a Voice reunion in 2017, following the death of former Voice writers Nat Hentoff and Wayne Barrett, that led her to take on the project. 

“I'm sitting there going, ‘We have to get these people! What are we doing?’ Somebody's gotta do this,” Romano said. “I called [former Voice writer] Michaelangelo Matos. He's like, ‘You have to do it.’ And I said, ‘It has to be an oral history, doesn't it?’ Because you had to capture their voices. It wasn't my take on what the Village Voice is and was.”

Romano talks about her process for staying organized during the project, how she supplemented her book advance with grants to help fund it, and how to determine whether an oral history is the right path for your book or story idea. 

Romano, who's also a Storyboard contributor, began her eight-year career at the Village Voice as an intern. As a contributing writer, she wrote features and award-winning cover stories about culture and music. Her reported column, Fly Life, gave a glimpse into the underbelly of New York nightlife. She has been a staff writer at the Seattle Times and served as the editor in chief of the Stranger, Seattle’s alternative newsweekly. A fellow at MacDowell, Ucross, and Millay artist residencies, and her work has been published in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Daily Beast, Men’s Journal, Elle, Alta Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications.

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On the challenge of constructing an oral history

There's a small club of us in the oral history book world and like we should all join a therapy group together, because no one understands. The genius of an oral history is that, if it's done well, it looks effortless.

 Even if it's not your words, you're creating something. It's like a big giant slab of stone that you have to carve out, with only what you've got [from interviews].

On structuring the story and subplots

[Former Voice columnist]  Nelson George told me, ‘You need to map out the plot the way TV writers and filmmakers do.’ And I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ [He said,] ‘You know in every TV show, there's the overall story and then there's a subplot, and then there's the episodic plot.’ And that's how I had to look at it.

What's the big story? The big story is the story of the Village Voice, which is also the story of modern media. It's the rise and fall of modern media and internet killing the newspaper star. The subplot is what's going on inside the paper during this time. Owners coming and going, editors coming and going, the internal beefs with each other, the sort of office politics of that. 

Then the episodic stuff is the stories they're covering and what's happening in the city. And the only way to deal with that is by time — so by decades, and then by topic, really. I couldn't see how else to do it. I couldn't braid it in this super fluid way. My brain just doesn't work that way. I felt like you had to hit certain points, right? How do you cover film without stopping and saying, ‘I'm covering film’? 

There was a point where this thing was so big I debated, ‘Do I just do the 1980s?’ But no, it needs to cover the whole thing, because otherwise that [story] arc isn't there. If you just do the eighties, you leave the Village Voice and it's on top of the world. And we know it's not. It doesn't tell the story of media or newspapers or even the rise and fall of New York City as a cultural and political center. It doesn't tell the story of the decimation of the city due to gentrification.

On her decision to not write any introductions or interstitial moments from her own point of view

There's different points of view on this. I did not want interstitial writing or any intros. I kind of disagreed with my original editor about this. She wanted me to have these written intros to each chapter, and I just didn't think that was necessary. I thought it would be really disruptive to the flow. 

If you think about it like a documentary, do you prefer the kind where some narrator starts talking and interrupts the action to explain things to you? It's a different style, and there are good oral histories that use that style. … “Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993” [by Sarah Schulman], her oral history uses lots of interstitial and is much more, ‘We are recording this for history,’ holding these voices.  So it's a different form.

On the legacy of the Village Voice and the dangers of nostalgia

 A lot of the people that were reviewing [my book] this either wanted to be cool enough to write for the Village Voice, or they were, and so they just have this overwhelming fondness for this institution and sadness that it's gone. My book is this trip through nostalgia in some ways. And not all nostalgia is good, right? There's lots of stuff in this book that you would be horrified if it happened today in an office, and people would be fired instantly.

So it wasn't all rainbows and unicorns. And I tried to show that. Because for every person that is fond about their time at the Voice, there are a lot of people for whom it was a dark place. They did not enjoy it. They want to forget it. They want to get away from it because it was so stressful. The ups and downs and ins and out, and the intensity of the people there and the intensity of the fights that were happening on staff was too much.

Advice for writers and journalists considering an oral history project

 You better be in love with the subject. This needs to be like a blood oath that you're taking. You're going to suddenly wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and go, ‘Oh my God. You gotta get that quote from Robert Christgau about whatchamacallit!’ You have to really be sure this is the way you need to do it. And I think if you're going to do an oral history, the quotes have to be colorful and filled with life, and not just information.

You have to be able to coax people to talk to you and tell you their dreams, and they're like your best friends. I didn't know most of the people that I was interviewing. I think a lot of people assume that because I worked there, but a lot of the people that I interviewed were all many decades before me.

This is the story that needs to be told. We need to tell it. Make your list of people that you absolutely have to have, and make an outline after you've talked to your initial people, and just stay on top of everything. 

I think it's a really fun format. And I think if I had done this book any other way, it would've had the potential to be dry and removed. 

Reading List: Authors, Stories, and Books Mentioned 

• Tricia Romano author website
• “The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture” (Tricia Romano, PublicAffairs, 2024)
• “An Oral History of ‘We Built This City,’ the Worst Song of All Time” (Rob Tannenbaum, GQ, 2016)
• Columbia University Center for Oral History Research
• “Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk” (Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Grove Press, 2016)
• Gillian McCain
• Michelangelo Matos
• “A Village Voice Reunion, and Nobody Got Punched” (The New York Times, 2017)
• “A Brief Oral History of Wayne Barrett, the First Journalist to Doggedly Cover Donald Trump” (Tricia Romano, Vanity Fair, 2024)
• Nat Hentoff
• Michael Tomasky
• “Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape” (Susan Brownmiller, Ballantine Books, 1993)
• Nelson George
• Emma Carmichael
• Betsy Lerner
• Lenora Todaro
• “Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011” (Lizzy Goodman, Dey Street Books, 2018)
• MacDowell Fellowship (artist residency)
• Whiting Nonfiction Grant for Works-in-Progress
• Frank Owen
• Leah Greenblatt
• Bill Werde 
• Robert Christgau
• Richard Goldstein
• Maureen Corrigan
• Colleen Lawrie 
• “Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993” (Sarah Schulman, Picador, 2022)
• Stanley Crouch
• Eric Weisbard
• Joy Press
• David Schneiderman

Show credits

Hosted and produced by Mark Armstrong
Episode editor: Kelly Araja
Audience editor: Adriana Lacy
Promotional support: Ellen Tuttle
Operational support: Paul Plutnicki, Peter Canova

Nieman Foundation interim curator: Henry Chu
Music: “Golden Grass,” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)
Cover design by Adriana Lacy

Nieman Storyboard is presented by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

***

The post Journalist Tricia Romano on the pros and cons of writing an oral history appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Award-winning journalist and executive producer Soledad O’Brien joins Storyboard contributor Christina M. Tapper for this week’s Nieman Storyboard podcast to discuss her career journey from TV news to documentaries, and how she came to embrace the form for storytelling on social issues. 

As one of the most respected voices in journalism, working at NBC, MSNBC, and CNN, O’Brien founded Soledad O’Brien Productions, a media production company that develops and produces projects on race, class, gender, and identity, in 2013. Most recently, she anchored and produced the political magazine show "Matter of Fact with Soledad O'Brien" during a 10-season run for Hearst TV. O’Brien’s reporting has been honored with 10 Emmys and three Peabody Awards.

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In 2025, O’Brien served as executive producer for the Oscar-nominated HBO Max documentary short, “The Devil Is Busy,” directed by Geeta Gandbhir and Christalyn Hampton, about a day at an Atlanta abortion clinic and the fight for reproductive rights. O’Brien and her team decided to tell the story through Tracii, the head of security at the clinic. Patients and clinicians are featured in the documentary, but it’s Tracii’s story that is the thread from start to finish in this post-Dobbs era piece.

“As a character, she's very vibrant and she's very contradictory. You start with Tracii doing her daily prayer with her pastor,” O’Brien says. “When you think about abortion clinics, if I were to say to a hundred people on the street, this is a story about a very religious person and an abortion clinic, I think a lot of people would think I was talking about a protester. So we thought it was a very interesting thing that you didn't see a lot of — a deeply religious person who is not just welcoming to the women, she's the security guard. She's responsible for the women who are coming in. She's a wonderful narrator. She really drives the story forward.”

In many ways, O’Brien’s work across TV, docs, and podcasts is not just just a record, but also an act of witnessing, which she learned to do early in life. While home from college, O’Brien returned to her former high school in Long Island, N.Y., to pick up her mother who worked there as a school teacher. During her visit, O’Brien and her mother saw the principal and vice principal at the mostly white school, talking with a young Black student.

“I remember my mom stopping and standing there, planting herself. The principal and the vice principal said, ‘Mrs. O'Brien, we got it. You can move on.’ And she just stood there and would not move on. Kind of like, ‘No, I'm good.’ I remember the kid looking at my mom, and I remember thinking, Oh there is this power transfer. My mom suddenly was the most powerful person in the room,” O’Brien recalls. “Then finally the principal said, ‘You know, don't run in the halls.’ And the kid went off. It was so interesting. Because I think [my mom] was basically telegraphing like, ‘I'm not gonna do anything, but I am here to be a witness of whatever's going to happen with this kid.’”

It’s an experience that O’Brien shared while speaking at live events in the past. Given the current political and cultural turmoil in the U.S., O’Brien retells the story to urge everyone to be a witness during these times.

“I think there's something about being unmovable. Everybody should think about it. I'm not just going to move along when I see something unfolding,” she says. “Not just for me and my work, but I think everybody kind of has that opportunity. Today, especially, in an environment where there's just a lot of stuff unfolding every day.”  

O’Brien also discusses how her CNN coverage of Hurricane Katrina shaped her career, and how to tell fair and full stories without “both sides-ism.”

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On how she develops trust with her subjects and manages their concerns

You just tell people what you want to do and you're honest about it. … Every so often you'll get someone whose dream is to be a director and they're like, “Here’s the way I see this going.” And sometimes, they've got really good points. So I listen to people if they have something they want to add.  I don't think you have to worry about them pushing back and being worried, when on the front end you've done all the work to say, “Here's what we're doing .. and here's what we're doing next.” And it makes sense, right? Because they're seeing it. There's nothing worse than feeling like someone's misleading you. 

For a lot of people, being on television, it's their first time. And it's scary [for them]…I don't give people the questions I'm going to ask [ahead of time], mostly because I might not stick to them. [I tell them], “Here's basically what we're going to cover. If you need to stop because you want to look up a statistic, you are welcome to stop and get that.” 

On determining the length and format of her projects

I've had stories that I thought were a series and someone would say, “Actually, that's a great movie.” I've had shorts that someone said, “You know, this thing is going really well, let's make it a full length.” Sometimes money dictates it… [“The Devil Is Busy’] was 31 minutes. It probably started at a little over 40 or 50, but then you start cutting it down and then you say, “Okay, this works. This makes sense.” But there's no magic formula for it, at all.

On what dictates her role for each project

 It really depends on if you've sold it and somebody says, “We need this to be a correspondent-driven piece.” Conversely, lots of places do not use correspondents at all. Sometimes people just want wraps. So a lot of times it depends on what the person wants, and often we have a big say in that. If someone's buying your project, they buy into your theory of how the story should be told.

Sometimes we come in, I'm asked to be an executive producer, we've got a bunch of projects that people have asked me to pop in and it's really their project. And sometimes I give funding, sometimes I give advice, sometimes [I] throw the party at the end. Sometimes I'm in the field shooting and doing interviews. So it really depends, for each project, what's needed. 

On how her Hurricane Katrina coverage for CNN shaped the journalist she is today

For me, it really opened my eyes to the kind of reporting I wanted to do. And in some ways it made my career. I got a lot of airtime, so I could make mistakes and get better and practice. We did a lot of live anchoring, meaning you just stand there hour after hour doing interviews. I remember bumping into [New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin]. I popped a mic on him and we did a really great walking interview through the walkway around the Superdome. You know, just off the top. No prep, no nothing. But you didn't need it, because your prep was that you had been there for a long time. I'm very proud of the work. It made me feel very proud to be a journalist. 

On ‘both sides-ism’ in journalism and telling the full story

 I find the both sides thing so frustrating…. [It’s like] the journalist feels a little guilty, “I just want to make sure I'm covered.” And so they're just not really sure of the story they're trying to tell. Fran Tarkenton, the [NFL] quarterback, said to me once, “Soledad, if you have three quarterbacks, you have no quarterbacks.” And, and I remember thinking like, “I know nothing about sports metaphors! That means absolutely nothing to me, Fran. Thank you.” But what he was trying to say was, if you don't commit to the story you're going to tell, then you have nothing. You have a big blob of trying to pop lots of different things in and you end up with nothing at all. 

[For “The Devil is Busy,” we did not] sit down and say, “Now we wanna hear from the [anti-abortion] protestors.” This is Tracii's day in her life of what she does, who she interacts with, how it works. And you do have to figure out where do the protestors come in? What is the experience you're showing in the piece? The experience that patients are having? That the clinicians are having? That Tracii and the security team are having? If you had not put the protesters in at all, it would be so unrealistic. 

Listening and Watching List:

• “The Devil Is Busy”
• “Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien” 
• “Who Killed JFK?”
• “War on La Radio”
• “The End of Affirmative Action”
• “Black and Missing”
• “The Perfect Neighbor”
• “Katrina: Come Hell and High Water”
• Geeta Gandbhir
• Christalyn Hampton

Show credits

Hosted and produced by Mark Armstrong
Episode producer and interview by Christina M. Tapper
Episode editor: Kelly Araja
Audience editor: Adriana Lacy
Promotional support: Ellen Tuttle
Operational support: Paul Plutnicki, Peter Canova

Nieman Foundation interim curator: Henry Chu
Music: “Golden Grass,” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)
Cover design by Adriana Lacy

Nieman Storyboard is presented by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

***

The post Soledad O’Brien on character-driven storytelling in documentaries, and the power of being a witness appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, journalists Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas join Storyboard Editor Mark Armstrong to discuss the second and final season of their serialized podcast “Hush,” from Oregon Public Broadcasting. 

Sottile and Haas first began working together on the 2019 OPB/Longreads podcast “Bundyville,” and they've continued their collaborative work as journalists and podcasters ever since. This week, they've announced that they will be starting an independent publication called The Western Edge. (For updates, you can follow Sottile and Haas on Bluesky or on their individual Substacks.)

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Season One of “Hush” investigated the case of Jesse Lee Johnson, a man who spent 25 years in prison, 17 of them on death row, in Oregon for a murder he did not commit. The second season investigates the case of Sarah Zuber, an 18-year old girl who was found dead just 400 feet from her front door in 2019 in the rural town of Rainier, Oregon. 

Sottile and Haas use the second season to discuss the ethical questions around the entire genre of “true crime,” dating all the way back to Truman Capote's 1966 book “In Cold Blood.” When does covering a crime cross the line from public interest to sensationalism? 

Sottile and Haas discuss how they address these questions in their own work, and how they use the principles trauma-informed reporting to interview family members who have experienced an unthinkable tragedy, and are seeking help from journalists to get answers. 

They also explain their process as a producer-reporter team. “ If I'm going to come to [Ryan] with an idea, I really wanna make him excited about it,” Sottile says. “So I'm going to provide some audio that's like, ‘Check out what I got, dude.’ I tend to know from working with Ryan for a long time, some of the questions that he's going to ask as an editor. That's one of the beautiful things about working with somebody long-term is you're like, okay, he's going to want to know what sort of investigative documents we can look into, what kind of records we can do, what agencies we can hold to account, what's the place that we're going to be looking at?” 

Sottile is the author of two books: “Blazing Eye Sees All” and “When the Moon Turns to Blood.” Her journalism has been published by The Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Outside, BBC, The Atlantic and High Country News, where she is a correspondent. In addition to “Hush” and “Bundyville,” Sottile also hosted the podcasts “Burn Wild” and “Two Minutes Past Nine.”

Haas is an independent producer who worked with Oregon Public Broadcasting for more than a decade with a focus on government accountability in the Pacific Northwest, particularly in the criminal justice system. He has won numerous awards, including a National Headliner for the first season of “Hush.” He has also produced the podcasts “Dying for a Fight,” and the National Magazine Award-nominated “Bundyville.”

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On the ‘true crime’ genre in podcasting

 SOTTILE: Both of us, probably me more than Ryan, bristles at that label of “true crime.” Particularly because I think it makes a lot of people ignore the work. I think if people don't like true crime, or they think true crime is just about lionizing serial killers or gazing into the abyss, then they're just going to disregard it.

So we had a lot of questions around: We do not feel that we make true crime, but how can we be sure that this show isn't seen as true crime? So what you realize pretty quickly in the show is that we directly interrogate what true crime is.

HAAS: There is a difference between what we as a society understand as true crime and journalism about crime. I think those are two distinct things. And there can be benefits to both, but I do think there is a lot of media out there that is reading Wikipedia pages about serial killers and it's like, OK, what is the benefit of both the people creating [it] and the people consuming it. What are we learning from that? I think if you're going to get into a crime and something that is tragic and has happened to a person, you should at least think a little bit about: what is the benefit of this? I think Justin St. Germain [an Oregon State University professor who teaches courses on nonfiction and true crime] puts it really well in our show and he says, “what's the benefit of this beyond your own careers?” And I think if you're being ethical, you should be asking yourself that question.

On pre-reporting and determining if a story is worth pursuing

HAAS:  I think that's always our instinct. “Okay, this seems like a good idea. Let's do an interview” or “let's get some documents and look at them.” And I feel like even with this second season, after we did our first interview, we were like, “Oh yeah, there's material here, this is worth pursuing.” I think it's always hard because you don't want to overinvest in pre-reporting, but it often is that pre-reporting that's going to dictate whether something feels like there's enough there to pursue.

On their process for staying organized

 SOTTILE: We do two things: We establish a timeline and a character sheet. The timeline can be an early tool that I think is good for anybody wanting to do any kind of narrative book or story or podcast where you're just literally going in and saying the order of how things happened, but critically, linking where you found that information, because anything of size, you're going to forget where the reporting came from. 

So for us, especially, a year on, you think you're going to remember where you found this one thing about some boot prints. [You won't] remember later. That's a thing that we can kind of both collaborate on as we're chipping away at the project. 

Then we start identifying who the critical people are to interview. So in the case of Season One, it was obvious we wanted to interview Jesse Johnson. We wanted to interview his legal team. We wanted to interview the police who worked on his case, and who's alive, who's available, can we find them?

On knowing when to finish reporting

HAAS:  I think we're always open to changing things if something big enough came in. But I think that is the hard thing about this type of podcasting is there is a certain point where you have to cut it off or you'll just never get it done, because you could always be gathering more reporting. That's a conversation I have with reporters all the time as an editor. You have to know when to stop. You have to know when it's time to produce a story. And that's a hard thing to do. But if you don't do it, the public never hears your story.

On place as a character

SOTTILE:  I think a big thing for us in all the work that we've done together is to really dig into place as character. So in the first season, we talk extensively about Salem, Oregon, as the capital and Marion County and its politics. 

But I think that this was initially exciting for me even before we got into the nitty gritty of what happened to Sarah Zuber — just understanding Rainier and Columbia County. It's just kind of a place you pass through on the way to the coast for a lot of people. So it was sort of exciting to think about understanding the culture there. 

On transparency and sharing your process with a non-journalist audience

HAAS:  It can be hard as a journalist, because sometimes you're just like, “Does anyone actually give a crap about this?” But I hear feedback all the time [from] people [who] are non-journalists, like, “Wow, it's so interesting. It's great to hear you guys talk about how you're coming to these ideas and how you're pursuing your reporting.” So it always surprises me how interesting that stuff is to people.

I don't think I'm particularly charming, but I do appreciate that people are interested in that, and it does help. It helps us because I think we can just be transparent with people and I appreciate that. I think it gives us a lot of credibility when we do reach conclusions within our stories. 

Advice to other journalists and the importance of journalism right now

HAAS:  Leah and I are the type of journalists who are like, “Hey, we're willing to get in the muck and get dirty.” I don't need someone to transcribe my tape. I don't need someone to do all of that. I think we want to continue to do this type of work, whether that's at OPB or elsewhere or on our own. I think now is the time where journalists who are passionate about journalism should stand up, and commit to investing in that. 

I read an essay over the weekend that really resonated with me, which was like, Look, so many journalists get criticized because we want financial stability like anybody else. I think any journalist wants financial stability and the people who run a lot of media organizations are not interested in investing in that. And so we need to figure out a way to just do that on our own. The importance of journalism matters now more than ever.

I think we are at a moment where people need to understand the world around them, and I think that's what's attractive to Leah and me, covering regional journalism and local journalism here in the Northwest. People deserve to understand this place where we live. And as Leah said, we can't wait for people from the East Coast who have most of the media control to be interested. We have to do it ourselves.

Reading & Listening List: Authors, Stories, and Podcasts Mentioned 

• Leah Sottile: Bluesky, Substack
• Ryan Haas: Bluesky, Substack
• “Hush Season Two: The Case of Sarah Zuber”
• Justin St. Germain, Oregon State University professor
• “Dying for a Fight”
• “In Cold Blood,” Truman Capote
• Oregon Public Broadcasting
• “Hush Season One: The State of Oregon v Jesse Lee Johnson”
• “Bundyville”
• “Twin Peaks”
• Justice for Sarah Zuber Facebook Page
• “When the Moon Turns to Blood” (Leah Sottile)
• “Blazing Eye Sees All” (Leah Sottile)
• “A Living Manifesto on Journalism in 2026 and Beyond” (Leah Sottile, December 2025)

Show Credits

Hosted and produced by Mark Armstrong
Associate producer: Marina Leigh
Episode editor: Kelly Araja
Audience editor: Adriana Lacy
Promotional support: Ellen Tuttle
Operational support: Paul Plutnicki, Peter Canova

Nieman Foundation interim curator: Henry Chu
Music: “Golden Grass,” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)
Cover design by Adriana Lacy

Nieman Storyboard is presented by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

***

The post Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas on deconstructing ‘true crime’ in podcasting and journalism appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

On this week’s episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, award-winning journalist Tonya Mosley joins Storyboard contributor Christina M. Tapper for a discussion about interviewing, live coverage, and how to tell complex family stories. 

Mosley is the co-host of NPR’s “Fresh Air,” where she has in-depth conversations with newsmakers like politician and author Stacey Abrams, actor George Clooney, and artist Mickalene Thomas. It’s not just Mosley’s ability to have conversations with a wide range of people that make her one of the most notable interviewers in journalism and media. It’s also her research. 

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“I have a wonderful team at ‘Fresh Air’ who puts together a research document and it's all the things that they can find out about the person, and they break it up: here's television work, here's audio work, here's what's been written about them. I read all of that,” she says. “But then the fun thing to do after that is to find the things that weren't in the document. So then I go digging myself.” 

In her own research, Mosley scours non-mainstream platforms, including Black media. It’s Mosley’s way of covering all of her bases and honoring the guest’s time.

“It’s a form of respect. I feel like a person comes and sits down with you for an hour or an hour and a half, they're stopping what they're doing to be able to talk with you,” she says. “So, I want to give them [respect] by knowing their work.”

Before joining “Fresh Air” in 2023, Mosley co-hosted NPR’s “Here & Now,” where she guided listeners through special NPR coverage of Donald Trump’s first presidency, the racial reckoning of 2021, and live coverage of the January 6th insurrection as it was happening. She is also the founder of TMI Productions, which created the award-winning podcast “Truth Be Told” and the deeply personal audio docuseries “She Has A Name.”

Set in Mosley’s hometown of Detroit during the 1980s drug epidemic, “She Has A Name” covers the disappearance and death of Mosley’s older sister Anita, whom Mosley learned about more than a decade after Anita vanished. The series combines memoir and investigative journalism, to reveal the complexity of a life lost and how a family comes together to heal. 

“When it comes to people of color, [we’re] so one dimensional [when depicted] in movies and shows, but also in journalism. I wanted to show that Anita was a human being,” Mosley says. “She was like all of us. She had her struggles and you needed to know what brought her to those struggles. I wanted to build, throughout my entire career, a sense of empathy for all people through a shared understanding that we're complex. We're not all good and we're not all bad. It felt really gratifying to be able to do that in a story about my family and with this platform of a podcast where you actually have the time to do it.”

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On listeners adjusting to her as a co-host of ‘Fresh Air,’ with longtime host Terry Gross

I say I have a thick skin, but it's still something that I work through. But I also have to understand that people have their own tastes. And something really interesting has happened to me. I was in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, for a live show with Tim Robbins. Before the show started, we had listeners come and take pictures with myself and with Tim Robbins. And I love doing those types of events because this was one of the first times I met with listeners who were just wanting to talk to me about my work. It's expected that, previously, I would get folks who were saying to me, “Whoa, you have big shoes to fill with Terry Gross.” …But a lot of those listeners [at the live show] told me they're learning new things through the types of questions I ask in my point of view. 

And it's implicit what they're saying… “You are a voice that's different. You're a Black woman who's of a certain age, and I'm learning to see the world through your eyes.” And that's such a powerful thing because we have the privilege of hearing other people do that for so long. The Terry Grosses of the world, the Howard Sterns, all of those people who have had this privileged space of guiding conversations. And so I'm just, I'm just gratified by it.

On her pre-show rituals

One of the rituals I'm doing, in this moment, is giving me enough time for pure silence. I'm not looking at anything and I'm not listening to anything. And that has been very helpful to help me quiet my mind and prepare for the conversation… I like to have on a nice outfit. I like to have my favorite coffee out of my favorite mug. And, those things just make me feel put together and prepared. Because I think the more confident I feel, the more I can let myself go and just listen and be there with the person.

On researching guests’ speaking style before an interview

I really do study the way people talk. That is something that in my research I'm really listening for. Does a person talk fast and are they a good edit? Because if you're listening to someone and they're talking fast, then you know that you won't be able to cut them off when you're editing after the interview. Or do they make dramatic pauses? Do they go on and on? Are they really short and succinct? That helps me so that I understand during my conversation how it actually might be.

On how to use silence during an interview

When I first became a reporter, I was in my early twenties. I had a veteran tell me when I go out to report, to get very comfortable in silence because that allows your subject to reflect. And sometimes this is like a reporter's trick — they will give and divulge more information because they realize, “Oh, maybe I didn't deliver on what you just asked me.” So they will go deeper. I'm okay with just sitting there, and we're both just sitting there quiet for a minute. It feels really odd. It feels counterintuitive, but I've never had a moment where that didn't benefit. But it doesn't work on live radio. 

On delivering live coverage

I had the benefit of being a local TV reporter for many years, and part of that job was to be live. My very first experience as a reporter, we had a breaking news story and I had to go live and something was embedded in me at that moment. I don't know why it is, but I can handle the pressure of going live. I like it and I do my best work. 

I used to have photographers say, “It's so odd when we're taping, if  [you’re] doing a standup, you have to do like five, 10 takes. You keep messing up. But then when we are live, it's on.” I think there's just something subconsciously in my mind that is like, “This is one shot.” 

In the case of January 6th, although at the moment we didn't know what this was going to signify, we knew it was a big deal. And John Lewis's funeral, [that was] a big deal…I think with age and experience, I realize I have to get out of my own way. This is not about me. This is about the listeners getting what they need to know about John Lewis's funeral. They are here to hear about this man who was a civil rights leader and remember him. I am just the vessel by which to get that information across.

It is not about my performance. My performance is only in that it is clear and the message is clear. So that's really helpful to me and that's why I guess all those rituals are helpful because it allows me to get out of my own way in, in those instances.

On including herself in her work

[In the early days of the podcast “Truth Be Told”], there were two producers there that I worked with. While we were conceptualizing it… they just kept saying to me, “Where are you here [in this show]?” And my journalistic inclination was, “I'm just the vessel. I'm not here at all.” But they really pushed me. So that first season was my first time really sharing details about myself to that degree. And it felt very uncomfortable. But the response made me realize that it was very important for one very specific reason: Black women in particular, we haven't really been included. I could say Black people in general, but particularly for me as a Black woman, it is very dangerous to be in a country where you can't see yourself interpreted like you need to be interpreted. And one of the ways you are interpreted is by seeing yourself reflected. And in that particular series, you needed to see elements of me to understand the bigger picture.

Because the truth is, I'm not just some objective person over here talking about these issues about race in America. I very much am a Black woman in America. How can I do this and not have my skin in the game in some way? And the response I got from the audience, particularly Black women, was so overwhelming… And so, when I find it necessary to further the story, that's when I inject myself. 

Reading and Listening List: Interviews, Podcasts, and Books Mentioned

• “Fresh Air”
• Roy Wood Jr.’s “Fresh Air” interview
• TMI Productions
• “Truth Be Told”
• “She Has A Name”
• Nichole Hill 
• Kristin Fraser
• Marie Mendoza
• “The Invisible Ache: Black Men Identifying Their Pain and Reclaiming Their Power”
• Dr. Robin Smith

Show credits

Hosted and produced by Mark Armstrong
Episode producer and interview by Christina M. Tapper
Episode editor: Kelly Araja
Audience editor: Adriana Lacy
Promotional support: Ellen Tuttle
Operational support: Paul Plutnicki, Peter Canova

Nieman Foundation interim curator: Henry Chu
Music: “Golden Grass,” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)
Cover design by Adriana Lacy

Nieman Storyboard is presented by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

***

The post NPR’s Tonya Mosley on the art of the interview appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, photojournalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Stephanie Keith joins Storyboard Editor Mark Armstrong to discuss her latest project, which became a powerful cover story for New York magazine: a series of photos taken in the corridors of 26 Federal Plaza in New York City, where undocumented immigrants showing up for routine hearings were being arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. 

She captured the sudden and heartbreaking moments where people were separated from their families, or taken away without their loved ones even knowing what happened. 

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Keith, who was previously part of The New York Times team that was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for coverage of a Bronx fire in 2022, embarked on her latest project without a paid assignment. She spent months covering the daily immigration hearings. “Any of the projects that I've done really successfully, it's because I went all in on the project,” she says. “You learn all about the people. You get into a rhythm, and it's not something that you can just drop in and out of.”

Keith discusses the challenges of monitoring ICE activity and explains the legal loopholes she and other photographers and press were able to find while documenting those in New York City detained by ICE, as well as the families they left behind. 

The New York magazine cover features the daughter of a man being taken away by ICE at 26 Federal Plaza. When deciding which image to use to represent not only the series, but what was happening in the corridors of that building and all across the country, Keith says, “That is at the height of anguish. It's going to make people feel something. And that’s, for me, the whole point of doing photography. It’s to make people feel something.”

After graduating from NYU with a master’s in photography in 2003, and after having and raising two children, Keith started working for news organizations in 2015 as a freelance photojournalist in New York City. In 2016, Reuters assigned her to six weeks of the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota. In 2017, The Guardian shortlisted her as a top ten wire photographer of the year. In 2019 Reuters, Buzzfeed News and The Atlantic chose her photos for their decade lists. Pictures of the Year and the National Press Photographers Association also recognized her photos in 2024, 2020, and 2019. 

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On 26 Federal Plaza and documenting ICE detentions:

 I felt that just taking photos of a single detention of someone, them grabbing them and taking them was not doing it for me. I felt like it's important to show these people, it's important to witness what's happening to them and witness their humanity, and it's a sign of respect, too. But I wanted to do more of a story, to get people more involved rather than just detention, detention, detention. I wanted to have more going on. So when this family arrived and they were already crying and hugging, they seemed like a very close-knit family. I was like, okay, I'm just gonna stay here and see what happens with this one family and just tell their story — what happened on this day. I wasn't going to be distracted by other agents on a different floor and their different detentions. I just want to see what happens to this family. 

On the role of photography in storytelling:

 My personal belief in photography is that it's super important to show the emotions of what people are going through. Because you're there to show the world what's going on, because not everyone can be there. So I want to show the emotions so that the people looking at the photos can feel the same emotion. They can feel that outrage, they can feel that sadness, the humiliation, all those things, so that they can relate to what's going on. They can relate to the people who are experiencing this.

On becoming a photojournalist:

I always thought I was going to be a documentary photographer and do documentary stories. I have a degree in anthropology and I thought, “Oh, I would just be like an anthropologist with a camera.” But that's not really a thing, it turns out, and in order to make money, you have to work for newspapers. I was very fortunate that when I got out of photography school, I was able to start working for newspapers right away. And I pretty much learned about photojournalism on the job. I always had this thing like, “I'm there for the underdog.” If there's an injustice somewhere, I want to be there to show it, because I feel like I have a very strong moral code, and I feel that I want to use my camera to show what I think is right and what I think is wrong.

On documenting the truth and the importance of journalism:

When you photograph, you’re really photographing the truth. You're not setting things up or anything, so it's important to — even if things don't change right away — it's still important to create a record of the truth. 

For example, on January 6th. If there had been no photojournalist there, can you imagine what the narrative would've looked like? Photojournalists are so important. People don't understand how important they really are for creating a history of just the truth of what happened in these situations. So I'm happy to be a part of that narrative, creating that narrative. And I hope that things change, but I'm also a realistic person. I know that we're living in the Trump era and it's going to take a lot for things to change. But inaction is a cop-out, you have to do what you can if you want to be invested in having a better future. So, I feel like this is my way of doing my part.

On collaborating with reporters:

 When you're a photographer, you're not in the courtroom. You could go in the courtroom if you put your camera away, but then you don't have your camera. So the reporter doesn't have the camera. The reporter goes into the courtroom and can really hear the case, can hear what this person says, why they need to have asylum. And a lot of these asylum cases are very important and very real. As a photographer, we're in the hallways and we're not hearing that. We don't know about what's going on in the courtroom, so we're kind of cut off from that. 

So when you work with a reporter, the reporter can be inside the courtroom and can find out what is going on with these people. They can find out the names, they can find out all this information. For me, I love that because I think it's important to know the backstory.

On photo edits and working with editors:

To photo edit a large body of work and be able to pick out the strongest photos and the quiet moments and then be able to string it together in a story, I feel like that is a whole art form, you know? I am not a photo editor, although I think if I did it more, I'd probably get better at it, but the photo editors who do that, that is their art form and they are so good at it. And I think [New York magazine creative director] Jody Quon is just an absolute master at that. And her edit of the New York magazine [feature] was fantastic and I felt so lucky and privileged to be able to have someone who's such a photo-editing artist look at my work and edit it. Her edit was definitely different than the edit that I had done, and I felt that her edit was definitely stronger than mine. So I felt like I learned a lot by looking at her edit. 

Keith’s advice to journalists at all stages in their career:

Any of the projects that I've done really successfully, it's because I went all in on the project. Like Occupy Wall Street — I went down to Zuccotti Park every single day for months. At Standing Rock, I lived in North Dakota for six weeks straight. And for Federal Plaza I went down almost every day for like four months. So I think it's the “all-in” aspect that really produces results. You learn all about the people. You get into a rhythm, and it's not something that you can just drop in and out of.

You have to do this continuous coverage to get good results. So I think if you are really into a project, don't let any naysayers hold you back. Just believe in yourself and just go all in on your project. 

Reading List: Authors, Stories, and Editors Mentioned 

• Stephanie Keith
• “Portfolio: The Trap at 26 Federal Plaza” (Photographs by Stephanie Keith. Article by Andrew Rice and Paula Aceves, New York magazine, 2025)
• Keith's coverage of the Standing Rock protests (2016)
• Jody Quon
• Andrew Rice
• Paula Aceves

Show Credits

Hosted and produced by Mark Armstrong
Associate producer: Marina Leigh
Episode editor: Kelly Araja
Audience editor: Adriana Lacy
Promotional support: Ellen Tuttle
Operational support: Paul Plutnicki, Peter Canova

Nieman Foundation interim curator: Henry Chu
Music: “Golden Grass,” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)
Cover design by Adriana Lacy

Nieman Storyboard is presented by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

***

The post Photojournalist Stephanie Keith on documenting ICE and capturing a moment that became the cover of New York magazine appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Writer, critic, and editor Sasha Bonét joins Storyboard contributor Christina M. Tapper on this week’s episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, in a wide-ranging conversation about Bonét’s writing process for “The Waterbearers,” a memoir about mothers and daughters. Bonét and Tapper discuss surrendering to how a story unfolds, rather than forcing it, and how to turn a physical place into a key character.

Bonét, a professor of creative writing for Columbia University and Barnard College, has written for The Paris Review, Aperture, New York magazine, and Vogue. “The Waterbearers” is her book debut. At the heart of it, the book “is an American family story,” Bonét says. “In the Black American family oftentimes it is a matriarchal family, and that kind of queers the traditional American setup that we understand, which is that the man is at the head of the household. [The book goes] through my family lineage, but it's also connecting to different policies and histories that impact the way the Black family is structured. 

“I wanted to look at American history through the lens of the women that helped to really birth this nation from the beginning of the empire to understand an alternative viewpoint from the people who are often disregarded.”

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Water is a major theme in the book, and it provides Bonét a through line in telling not just her family’s matrilineal story, but also the history of Black womanhood and motherhood in the U.S. The theme didn’t reveal itself until Bonét conducted interviews with her grandmother Betty Jean, her mother, Connie, and her six aunts. 

“ The water kept coming to me.  I actually wasn't trying to chase it. It was something that, when the women in my family were sharing their stories with me, there was always water. It was a metaphor or it was present, or they were talking about their baptisms. Everything was kind of situated around their proximity to water,” Bonét says. “The water helped as a kind of grounding principle for structure, but also for how I was thinking about writing.”

Bonét says she loves to “leave a lot of room for the story to shape itself. For example, if I'm writing criticism, if I'm interviewing or doing research, I don't want to go into it with my own idea or concept. I like for it to be shaped by what I discover. I allow a lot of space for the interviews and the research to help me build an idea of what I will write about. So that was the case for the book. ... I allow myself to be carried in the direction that the research takes me.”

To help thread the stories of her family with her own experiences as a mother, daughter, and granddaughter, Bonét made her grandmother’s house in Houston, known as 5010, a central character.

“I didn't even really identify the significance of the house until I was writing about it,” Bonét says. “Physical space is really important for this family. But, also I think specifically for people who lack a kind of origin, to have a place that they can ground themselves in.  A place to gather and a place where you can always go. What a gift. I had a lot of fun with that.”

During the conversation, Bonét also shares how collage and creating a writing altar helped her bring “The Waterbearers” to life. The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On the importance of interviewing her aunts in birth order before talking to her mother:

My grandmother had 11 children. I spoke with all the daughters. I didn't interview her sons. I really wanted to get the story through the gaze of the women and the daughters. And the order in which I interviewed them was really important. Birth order, to me, plays such a significant role in how we engage with the world because we're kind of given a position that we didn't ask for. The way we are able to situate ourselves within our family of course carries over into the way we engage with everyone else outside the house.

And so I looked at the birth order and I thought, “Okay, I spoke with Granny. Who's next?” I started with the eldest. And you know, the first child is always having to be a bit of a guinea pig. [My grandmother] was very young when she had her. [My aunt] also allowed for a kind of permission because she's quite stoic and doesn't speak very much. 

And then I went around my mother because I knew she would be the hardest one to speak with. So then I interviewed all her sisters, and then I came back to her because I knew that she would want to correct. And so I said, “Well, you know, you don't have to speak with me, but I'm telling the story and I've spoken with all your sisters.” And she's like, “What? What did they say?” And then she's like, “Oh, they got it all wrong. I have to tell you what really happened.”

It was really important to think about how to organize the interviews and how to move through the family structure in a way that would allow me more openness.

On making her grandmother’s house a key character:

In a practical sense, I needed to include it because I had so many characters. … I needed a place where everyone could be in one room. I think in telling any story, whether it's in film or writing, you need a place. “Seinfeld” had a place; “Friends” had a place. There always needs to be a place where all the characters can be in one setting, and then the main characters can kind of exist outside of that. So I thought I would place them there. But then as I started situating them, I really got into writing about the house. ... You know, when you spend time at a place, you just kind of don't see it. It's like an extension of your own skin. When I sat to think about it, what is 5010? What does it represent? What does it feel like? What does it look like? I was like, oh, wow, this is so rich … and the more I thought about it, it is a character.

On managing pushback from her editor about the opening of the book:

I wanted to define “waterbearer” from the beginning. When I wrote [the prelude], I was kind of writing it for myself. Like, what even is this waterbearer? I had already finished the first draft of the book before I wrote that. …I wrote this in one sitting. I sent it to a friend and she was like, “Yes.” My editor, John Freeman, was like, “No.” [He said,] “This voice is too different. The reader who picks up your book at a bookstore is gonna read this and they're gonna think that this is what the book is like, and it's not.”

[But] I just felt so strongly about [including it]. Me and my editor have such a wonderful relationship and he usually doesn't push back on me so much when I feel adamant. … [The prelude] just flowed. And when things come to me in that way, I feel really strongly about them. … I thought, I have to honor whatever this was that came through. And you know, sometimes you have these things come through and they get past you. They kind of slip through your fingers. And then sometimes you can grab ‘em. And this was one of those moments where something came through and I was able to grab it. I felt that it was necessary. And so [John] said, “Okay.” And then there were some other people at Knopf that were like, “Yeah, we love this.” 

On creating an ancestral altar in her ‘writer’s womb’:

I just needed a place of my own — very Virginia Woolf. And because it was post-pandemic, so many office buildings were empty. So I was able to find something really inexpensive in Manhattan. It wasn't until I moved in that I realized this is the first place I've had of my own in the past 15 years since I had my daughter.

It was small. I painted it pink. I called it the “writer's womb.” It was this little place that held me. I set up an altar with all of all these women. I was writing about ancestors, but also all of these women and writers, like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou. W.E.B. Du Bois. All of these people before me who’ve kind of paved the way, and I just put them all on this altar. I would start my day at the altar and say, “Okay, I'm here. Please guide me. Give me the courage to go where you asked me to go. Give me the courage to say the truth.” ... I started with the same kind of chant, meditation, every morning to ground myself and to remind myself that I'm a part of a lineage of people who have been practicing this craft.

On ending the book with a collage:

I'd written this piece for The Paris Review about Lorna Simpson and Breonna Taylor. And I had started collaging with my daughter during the pandemic. So that was on my mind. Leslie Jamison from Columbia University read that piece and contacted me and asked me to do an online guided workshop about collaging and its relationship to writing.

This is during the pandemic. Everything's on Zoom. So I'm creating this collage for this workshop that I'm guiding. And I ended up just loving it and I just held onto it. I framed it, I named it. I actually wanted to name the book, “Water Is a Body Too.” That was the original title that I had on my proposal … I just thought it was symbolic… So I wanted it to be included in the end, as a testament to the entire process.

Reading, Listening, and Visual Art List:

• “The Waterbearers” (Sasha Bonét, 2025)
• “The Artist Who Gave Up Her Daughter” (originally published in Topic, May 18, 2019, and included in “The Waterbearers”)
• “Waterbearer” by Lorna Simpson
• Femi Adeyemi
• Rakia Clark
• “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval” (Saidiya Hartman, 2019)
• “White Girls” (Hilton Als, 2019)
• Katy Morlas Shannon
• “‘His Name Was Bélizaire’: Rare Portrait of Enslaved Child Arrives at the Met” (The New York Times, August 24, 2023)
• “Water has perfect memory ...” (Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory”)
• “what the mirror said” by Lucille Clifton
• “Reimagining Black Futures” (The Paris Review, June 24, 2020)
• Leslie Jamison

Show credits

Hosted and produced by Mark Armstrong
Episode producer and interview by Christina M. Tapper
Episode editor: Kelly Araja
Audience editor: Adriana Lacy
Promotional support: Ellen Tuttle
Operational support: Paul Plutnicki, Peter Canova

Nieman Foundation interim curator: Henry Chu
Music: “Golden Grass,” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)
Cover design by Adriana Lacy

Nieman Storyboard is presented by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

***

The post Sasha Bonét on ‘leaving room for the story to shape itself’ and how a family home can become a character appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, journalist Claudia Rowe joins Storyboard Editor Mark Armstrong to discuss her most recent book, “Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care,” which has been named a finalist for the 2025 National Book Awards. “Wards of the State” is a narrative nonfiction book told through the stories of six former foster kids to examine the failures of the American foster care system. 

When Rowe began the book project, she set out to investigate the question:  “Why are so many kids getting locked up [following] foster care, which is supposed to be saving them?” She recalls that the project was inspired by the story of Maryanne, one of the main characters in “Wards of the State,” who was sentenced to 19 years for murdering a man when she was 16 years old. Rowe sat in on Maryanne’s sentencing and was “intrigued by the argument that this teenage girl's defense team was attempting to make that the foster care system was largely to blame for what she had done.”

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Rowe says this was the genesis of the book. “The data said that 59 percent of kids who age out of the system at 18 will have been locked up somewhere, somehow, by the time they're 26. … I began to wonder if the system really was doing something to encourage or even create these outcomes, just as this defense team was arguing.”

In “Wards of the State,” Claudia Rowe includes the stories and experiences of former foster care youth, as well as those involved in the system, such as a New Orleans judge named Ernestine Gray, social workers, therapists, and activists. 

Rowe also shares insights on how to work with young people in telling their stories, especially when they've experienced trauma; how to show up as a human first while still being clear about the role of a journalist; and how to navigate a foster care system that makes it difficult to access public information. 

Rowe has been writing about youth issues and government policy for more than three decades. She is the recipient of a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism and multiple honors for investigative reporting. Her work has been nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize, and she has published in The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Mother Jones, and The Stranger. In 2018, Rowe’s memoir, “The Spider and the Fly,” won the Washington State Book Award. 

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On developing the idea for ‘Wards of the State’:

The data said that 59 percent of kids who age out of the system at 18 will have been locked up somewhere, somehow, by the time they're 26. This just blew my mind, because this is a system we say is better than where they came from, and this is the result. That kind of clanged in my head as I was watching this girl being sentenced in Seattle for murder.

My idea from the beginning was to tell this story as much as possible through the eyes of young people experiencing it. I really wanted to understand, What does it feel like to be on the street when you're 15 years old? It's 2 o'clock in the morning … it might be really exciting, scary, lonely. I really wanted to understand how kids understood themselves, how they saw what was happening to them. That is a very difficult thing. Few 15-year-olds can really articulate it — certainly not younger children, right? It's really, really hard for kids to have that perspective on their experience. Also, because what I was looking at was: What happens in foster care to older kids so that when they get out, they're immediately locked up? What is going on there? So it began to make more and more sense to talk with people who were former foster youth.

On reporting and structuring the book:

I moved pieces around for a long time. The difficult parts of the book for me were structure and voice. What exactly was my narrator voice? If I want the kids to be telling their story, where is that narrator persona? This is difficult. But I think essentially what happened is I ended up structuring the book the way I discovered the answers for the questions I was trying to find … like following a thread or little breadcrumbs, or unraveling a mystery. I had questions, and I'm assuming the reader will have the same questions, and here is me trying to figure them out. And that was where I kind of got the narrator persona.

I'm just going to be, “Okay, I'm not the genius reporter who knows everything. I'm trying to figure this out just like anybody is.” And that [means] maybe I don't look smart on every page. Maybe a reader goes, “Didn't you know that? Why wouldn't you know that? You're a reporter.” Um, well, no, I didn't know it. We're not magic and we only know what we know by figuring it out. And so the figuring out is going to be part of this story. That ended up providing me some kind of narrative scaffolding. Okay, I am figuring out this mystery. It sounds really simple, but it took me a really long time to surrender to that.

On honesty and transparency in narrative nonfiction:

 This is not a memoir; this is narrative nonfiction. But I also think it's really, really important to be honest, to be transparent with the reader. And I don't think it is honest to portray a narrative in a vacuum as if these people just exist and they're not talking to someone. They are talking to someone — the interviewer — me. And I am uncomfortable with a sort of artifice that pretends they just landed there in a vacuum.

On the response to ‘Wards of the State’:

I will say that I wrote the book for a general reader who doesn't know anything about the system. I wrote it for the average person who might've heard about foster care, but has no idea about this prison overlap or how it happens or anything. So I really wanted to write a compelling, suspenseful, factual, powerful narrative.

That was my first goal, frankly. So now when I'm hearing so much from people who either work in or somehow touch the system and are really feeling like, “Yes, this is what I see, this is my experience, this is what I know,” and I'm hearing this so much all the time from people across the country who are saying this is reflecting what they know. So that is fantastic. It's a boon that I didn't expect. I wasn't going for that, but that is what's coming back for me. So that's great.

For the subjects, it is varied. I'll say that those who are in better places in their lives now, they are totally into it, fully embraced it, feel like it's really doing something. It's telling their story. I think for those who are in more precarious positions, it's a struggle. It's — like I said — it's hard to see yourself on a page. It hurts. 

 It is a very weird experience [to] be written about, to see yourself on a page. It's a weird experience for me, let alone somebody in foster care. It's a bizarre experience, and especially if you're exposing sort of the most precarious, frightening, vulnerable parts of your life.

Rowe’s advice on writing about the foster care system and embarking on a book project:

If you have the time and the bandwidth to do a longer, deeper dive, a longer project like a book, I would say take your time. … Listen keenly. Listen when the subject's story seems to be veering in a direction you didn't think it would go, and you maybe don't want it to go. You think that you know what your story is, and you want them to speak to this, but they go over here to some other place entirely. Let it happen. It's a difficult thing to do. It requires relinquishing control, and you need to let it happen because you might find a kernel of magic there. Surprise is magic in journalism, right? Surprise is the glittering stone at your feet that you didn't expect to see. That might be your lede, a fantastic theme, an idea you hadn't thought of. Let the subjects show you something that you didn't presuppose.

Reading List: Authors, Stories, and Books Mentioned 

• “Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care” (Claudia Rowe, 2025)
• “Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City” (Andrea Elliott, 2022)
• “The Spider and the Fly” (Claudia Rowe, 2018)
• “Time Out” (Claudia Rowe, 2018)

Show Credits

Hosted and produced by Mark Armstrong
Associate producer: Marina Leigh
Episode editor: Kelly Araja
Audience editor: Adriana Lacy
Promotional support: Ellen Tuttle
Operational support: Paul Plutnicki, Peter Canova

Nieman Foundation interim curator: Henry Chu
Music: “Golden Grass,” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)
Cover design by Adriana Lacy

Nieman Storyboard is presented by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

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The post National Book Award finalist Claudia Rowe on writing about teens and the foster care system appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, award-winning journalist, author, and producer Danyel Smith joins Storyboard contributor Christina M. Tapper to discuss building the confidence to tell her own story and being a model for others to do the same. 

Smith, the first woman and first Black person to serve as editor-in-chief of Vibe and who later served as editor of Billboard, is the author of “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop.” The book is part memoir, part cultural criticism, while giving Black female music artists their due. Smith is also the host of the podcast “Black Girl Songbook” and a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame selection committee member. 

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Smith prides herself as a writer who covers music icons, newsmakers, and world champion athletes, but in the last several years, Smith has turned more of her attention to memoir writing and bringing her own life experiences into the stories she’s assigned. As a journalist of more than three decades, she’s more than earned the right. But owning her space in the writing is still a process.

“ I don't know if I own it completely, yet,” Smith admits. “A huge down payment has been put down on owning that space, and I'm good on my payments. But, it's a discipline to look at things that were either so beautiful and wonderful or so terrible and so painful, and to just sit in that. It's an exercise, each time, in self-worth.”

That discipline extends to Smith’s editorship. The Oakland, Calif., native encourages the writers she works with to consider their experiences and observations as worthy of consideration in the work. 

“ Once you’re an editor, aren't you essentially some type of coach or teacher? Reminding [writers] that everything that they've done and lived is important enough to be inserted into this piece, whether with the pronoun ‘I’ or just because your knowledge and creativity is going to infuse it. Even if [the story] is about something else [and] isn't about you, it's still your story and your take on things.”

Smith’s approach to writing is complemented by her journaling practice, her recent embrace of CrossFit, and her strong opinions on semicolons. The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On being your own second voice:

There's a clip of Diana Ross where she talks about self-worth… I'm paraphrasing her, but she says, when she was a teenager, she always used to say, “Well, I'm gonna do this. I'm going to work at this department store, or I'm going to learn how to do this dance, or I'm going to be a singer.” And there would be that negative voice also in her head that said, “No, you're not. Why would you think that you could do that?” And she said she really started growing up and coming into herself when she started being her own second voice and co-signing herself. Because she was worth it and because she could do it. And so you have to remind yourself, or let me use the pronoun that is always difficult for me to use: “I” need to remind myself, always, that my story is worth telling. 

On creating your personal archive: 

I have journals from when I was 11, so I'm not a big thrower away of things. And those times when I don't have something that I wish that I could put my hand on, either digitally or in an old dusty box, I’m mad at myself. Everything goes back to self-worth with me. I feel like I probably threw that away, or got rid of it in a moment of feeling like it wasn't worth keeping. I'm not saying we have to be pack rats. But to just throw away words that you've written — or for me, sometimes it's even concert stuff, or photos from old phones — I mean, I'm worth keeping.

On sharing a deeply personal story for her NPR feature on Sade: 

Sometimes I had to ask myself why I never pitched [a Sade story], because I never have. NPR pitched this to me. It was on the 20th anniversary of a particular album, and the person that came to me with the idea had been following my work for a while and was like, “You never really have written about Sade.” It seems like just a real obvious person that I would've written about Sade … one of the reasons is because she's tied up in so much pain for me.

But I trust people at NPR, the ones that I know and adore and respect. I said, “Well, if I do it … I'm going to have to say something about myself,” because my life was so tied up in her music. They were just like, “Why would you even feel like you had to announce that?”

And then I just decided if I was going to do it, then I should go on ahead and do it. It. And if I was going to do it, I should put it in the lede, because any other way would just be half-stepping.

On finding a new life for your unused material: 

For ESPN, I wrote about Whitney Houston's [Super Bowl] National Anthem. That piece was so long when I filed it. Good gracious. It was, I don't know, 12,000 words. It was a mess because I did so much reporting, and I'm the rabbit hole queen. So one of the rabbit holes that I went down was about the singer José Feliciano …He sang the national anthem in a World Series game in 1968. And he changed the cadence of the song. Also, Whitney Houston did. Whitney Houston and her team slowed it down. José Feliciano gave it so much Latin soul… 

My editor at ESPN was like, “Why is José Feliciano all up in Whitney Houston's business?” I had a whole speech about the comparison of the tempos, and she was like, ‘I don't care.’ But a year later, another ESPN editor called me… and said, ‘why did somebody tell me that you wrote something about José Feliciano that didn't get published? Because we're doing a whole piece on anthems that are sung in stadiums. And is there something that you wanna show me?’ Look at that. Look at the art gods working on my behalf!

On semicolons:

I’m not going to use a semicolon. It’s an indecisive piece of punctuation. My thing is, there's a period, and there's a comma. Pick one, or use an em dash. Very simple.

Reading, Listening, and Watching List:

• “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop” (Danyel Smith, 2022) 
• Danyel Smith’s Shine Bright HQ newsletter
• Danyel Smith on Instagram
• “Black Girl Songbook” podcast
• “More Like Wrestling” (novel by Danyel Smith, 2007)
• “Bliss” (novel by Danyel Smith, 2010)
• Christina M. Tapper at Nieman Storyboard
• Christina M. Tapper's collage art
• “The Unstoppable Genius and Glory of Black Women in Music” (ZORA, June 15, 2020)
• “SZA's Ruination Brought Her Everything” (The New York Times, February 8, 2023)
• “The story of Whitney Houston's epic national anthem performance at 1991 Super Bowl” (ESPN, Feb 11, 2022)
• José Feliciano performing the National Anthem (1968 World Series, YouTube)
• “Sade Saves” (NPR, November 11, 2020)
• “Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary” (HBO Max, 2024) 
• David Dennis Jr.
• Danielle Cadet
• Justin Tinsley
• Kelley L. Carter
• Aaron Dodson

Show credits

Hosted and produced by Mark Armstrong
Episode producer and interview by Christina M. Tapper
Episode editor: Kelly Araja
Audience editor: Adriana Lacy
Promotional support: Ellen Tuttle
Operational support: Paul Plutnicki, Peter Canova

Nieman Foundation interim curator: Henry Chu
Music: “Golden Grass,” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)
Cover design by Adriana Lacy

Nieman Storyboard is presented by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

***

The post Danyel Smith on developing taste as a writer and building confidence to tell your own story appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

What makes an editor-writer relationship work? And how can editors and writers support each other to tell their best stories? This week on the Nieman Storyboard podcast, we sit down with a reporter and editor who have achieved something of a rarity in the news business — a 16-year partnership across multiple publications. 

Michael Kruse and his editor, Bill Duryea, first met at the Tampa Bay Times (then St. Petersburg Times) in 2009. They moved together to Politico and Politico Magazine in 2015, where they continued to work together for ten years. Kruse is a senior staff writer there, and now Duryea has just joined the Washington Post as the senior editor for America. 

With Duryea's move comes an opportunity to reflect on their work together and what they've learned. They talk about lessons from their early days together — inside a newsroom like the Times where feature writing and narrative were baked into the culture. And they discuss the freedom and responsibility that comes with close collaboration, and the importance of being open to following a story wherever it might lead. 

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In an industry where it can be difficult to maintain long-term working relationships, Duryea and Kruse also share advice on how to make the most of any editor-writer relationship, even if time together and resources are limited. 

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

Duryea on his early memories of working with Kruse: 

From the early days, [it was] the assiduousness of his reporting — if this is a word, his Hoover-like ability to gather information and his willingness just to keep reporting. What struck me then were the things that have struck me ever since. That doggedness, the willingness to make another call, and another call, and another call.

Duryea on trusting each other, and the value of showing up:

Michael and I probably both subscribe to the theory that 90 percent of life, and reporting, is just showing up. If you're there, the chances are that something good is going to happen. Nothing particularly good happens by not going, right?  My trust is such in Michael, after all these years, that I just know that … if he goes, he's going to see something that maybe other people won't see. And it's just going to be worth it. Yes, there's trust, but I also think over time we developed a kind of simultaneity of excitement. 

Kruse on being empowered, and challenged, by your editor to find the story: 

There is often, in stories where you can't quite see what it's going to be, you just have a sense, you have an inkling. But I think even very early on in our relationship, there was a level of agency that I took from Bill. In some ways: If I go over to Cape Canaveral and it's nothing, like, well, “Bill told me to,” right?

There's a green light, [so] go for it. You'll probably find something, right? And that is both empowering, but it also ups the ante. There's a certain amount of pressure. I want to not come back with nothing, right? With that opportunity, with that green light, my drive to find something worthy goes up in some concurrent way. 

Duryea on working with freelance writers: 

I've worked with so many [freelancers] over the years when I was at Politico, and I developed continuing relationships doing stories together. I think that it's safe to say that if there was a continuing relationship, it was because there were things that I was able to do with that writer to create the approximation of the relationship that I had with Michael.

They were open to the constant conversation. They wanted it, needed it. They liked me talking to them about the outline or structure of a piece before they sat down to write. Some writers don't look for it; I kind of insist on it. And the writers that really enjoyed that part of the process were probably writers that I worked with more frequently.

But everything I do with a writer is an approximation of what Michael and I have been doing over many years: iterative conversations, from idea, to framing, to outlining, to editing.

Kruse on how writers can lean on their editors: 

I suppose my counsel to reporters would be: Try to see editors as partners more than bosses. Part of the job of doing the work is to foster those relationships. It feels like a team effort rather than almost adversarial. There is sort of that feel sometimes [that] “this editor is making me do this and, like, messing with my copy,” but it also is on you, too. I don't want to just file a story and then have it come back with corrections on it. That's not what this is about. This is a team effort to make the best possible stories and to do reporting the best possible way.

I'm saying this at a time when [it's] sort of more in vogue, or even available, to strike out on your own and be independent operators … you are your own entity and your own company on Substack. ... It has worked for some people, and will continue to work for some people, but for whatever reason, it's not how I'm wired. It's not how I'd like to work, ever. And so, to the extent that you're in a position to foster those sorts of relationships with an editor or editors, do it. It'll make your work better.

Reading List: Writers and Stories Mentioned 

• Michael Kruse at Nieman Storyboard
• Michael Kruse stories at the Tampa Bay Times
• Michael Kruse stories at Politico
• Bill Duryea joins the Washington Post
• “By nature, he's a social creature” (Michael Kruse, Tampa Bay Times, 2010)
• “The only bag boy at Publix with an MBA” (Michael Kruse, Tampa Bay Times, 2010)
• “Gone, but she never left home” (Michael Kruse, Tampa Bay Times, 2011)
• “Michael Kruse and the woman who disappeared in her own home” (Paige Williams, Nieman Storyboard)
• “The Breaking of an American Family” (Michael Kruse, Politico, November 2024)
• Mike Wilson
• Ben Montgomery
• Anne Hull 
• David Barstow 
• Rick Bragg 
• Kelley Benham French
• Tom French
• David Finkel 
• Neville Green
• Sue Carlton

Show Credits

Hosted and produced by Mark Armstrong
Episode editor: Kelly Araja
Audience editor: Adriana Lacy
Promotional support: Ellen Tuttle
Operational support: Paul Plutnicki, Peter Canova

Nieman Foundation interim curator: Henry Chu
Music: “Golden Grass,” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)
Cover design by Adriana Lacy

Nieman Storyboard is presented by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

***

The post Michael Kruse & Bill Duryea: Lessons from a 16-year reporter-editor partnership appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, The New Yorker’s Interactives Visual Features Editor Sam Wolson joins Storyboard Editor Mark Armstrong for a conversation about his latest story, “There’s No Place at Home: A Mother and Her Trans Teen Decide to Leave the U.S.,” about a mother and her trans teenager deciding to move to Mexico after President Trump’s efforts to restrict gender-affirming care. 

The story is an interactive visual feature that combines photorealistic 3D models — using photos taken at the family’s house in Maine — with illustrations by Lilli Carré and reporting and writing by Wolson. For Wolson, “ there was something really powerful in that raw physicality of their home and what it means to leave a home that felt really valuable to the telling of this story in a way that I don't think you would've had if you just were hearing them talking about leaving it.

“I'm a parent and I think there's something universal to the story about just asking … what would you do for your kids? If this is the decision that you have decided to make and you think it's the right choice for your family.”

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Wolson is a filmmaker, photographer, and journalist with a focus on creating work at the cross-section of documentary storytelling and emerging technology. He has worked globally as a visual storyteller, with his projects premiering at festivals including Sundance, Venice, and SXSW. 

At The New Yorker, Wolson works with reporters, engineers, illustrators, and designers who are all interested in expanding these modes of storytelling. With virtual reality and interactive visual features, it comes down to whether a story is suited to multimedia or nonlinear narratives, in which the viewer can be placed directly into a story with the freedom to move around. 

Wolson also produced  “Cleared by Fire,” an interactive project released in conjunction with Season 3 of The New Yorker's Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast “In the Dark,” about the killing of 24 civilians by U.S. Marines during the Iraq War. The immersive interactive documentary used witness testimony to build 3D renderings of scenes from different points of view.  

Wolson won an Emmy and Peabody Award for directing and producing  “Reeducated,” a VR documentary that looked inside one of the prison camps in China’s Xinjiang region, as recreated using the testimonies of three men who were held there. He worked with New Yorker reporter Ben Mauk, who wrote the longform narrative version of the story. “Longform magazine, written journalism is very good at doing what it does,” Wolson said. “VR is very good at doing what it does, but you shouldn't try to make them do what each other does. So understanding the boundaries of the medium that you're working with — the strengths — and then letting it sort of shine within its lane was a really important part of the process.”

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On ‘There’s No Place at Home’:

I'm a parent and I think there's something universal to the story about just asking … what would you do for your kids? If this is the decision that you have decided to make and you think it's the right choice for your family. There was something really resonant to me with that. 

I've also moved countries many times throughout my career and my life for various reasons, and I know what it means to pick up your life and to move to a new country. It's really hard, and the thing is I've never had to do that out of fear. I've done it out of professional and personal choice. So it encapsulated a lot of these questions — also in the context of this bigger immigration moment that we're in, where you have people being picked [up] off the street, this huge shift in immigration policy for the country. You have this family who's decided to give up on the United States in the context of so many people trying to come here. And this kind of turning on its head, in a way, felt really important.

On using pseudonyms to protect the family's privacy, and how that affects story decisions:

Constraints … are sort of the mother of invention in some ways. It's like that's where the creativity happens, is when you start having boundaries put in place. So yeah, I think the anonymity of the piece really did help define where we ended up with it.

On constructing the visual elements for ‘There’s No Place at Home’:

When I got there, her garden, for instance, was just beautiful and in bloom, and [I] quickly realized in my head that this could be an incredible sort of visual metaphor or way to potentially string together various parts of the piece, right? So I spent a lot of time in the garden.

I spent a lot of time in [the teenager] J.J.'s room interviewing them and talking to them and looking at their things and throughout the house and trying to find the place … where certain conversations happened, so capturing those rooms and then coming back, figuring out how to use those things, process those things, and then sort of weaving it all together.

When you finally bring all those pieces together, then you have to actually work with an engineer to Frankenstein this thing to life, right? Because you can have an idea of the mockups and how things move and how it comes together, but the engineer is the person who breathes life into it. And it's really an artistic process for the engineer as well, because there's interpretation in what they're doing. So then you go from there, to the engineering, and then sort of refining the story and editing and trimming until you end up with the final piece.

What sparked the idea for creating ‘Cleared by Fire’ for the ‘In the Dark’ podcast:

 When I heard what they were doing, it just checked all of the boxes for me in terms of something that I think would be valuable as an interactive project. This is a story, subject matter-wise, [that's] important and worth spending the time on.

The space is really important to it. We're moving across multiple scenes where things happen with multiple perspectives. They had tons of forensic photographs, government documents. 

They talked about a lot of reconstructing what happened that day … through the testimonies and statements of people who were there. But you might have a Marine who was there who said, like, “Oh, in this room, I didn't see what happened. I just stuck my gun in the room and I just fired around because we thought there were terrorists.” And then you might have another Marine who was like, “No, no, no, we all saw what was going on. But it was smoky in there and we couldn't see.” And then that same Marine a month later might be like, “Actually I saw women and children and I shot them because women and children can hurt you too.” And then you might actually have an Iraqi survivor in that same room who gives you a different perspective of what happened. And it kind of reminded me — going back to my film career — thinking about films like “Rashomon,” where this film is grappling with all these different perspectives of an event. … 

I think bringing that idea into a journalism space felt really interesting. And at the core of each of these was a series of conflicting testimonies. So this was the seed for me of something that felt like a really fruitful, interactive idea.

On virtual reality as a storytelling medium:

Where this becomes a more complicated question is in a project like “Reeducated,” which uses virtual reality as its medium. It's more complicated because when you put on a virtual reality headset, it makes you feel present in a space. It makes you feel like you're literally standing or sitting or existing in a space, right? In a way that when you're reading something, there's some kind of abstraction there. It's like using imagination or you're looking at a screen and it can be really engaging and really draw you in. But it's different than physically mimicking you feeling like you're inside of an environment, right? 

And when that happens as a storyteller, you do have to start to think, OK, I'm making someone feel like they're in this space. Who are they in this space? Are they part of the world? Are they an omnipotent, disembodied viewer? Do you want to implicate them in some way? So those questions become more complicated.

Reading & Listening List: Authors, Stories, Podcasts, and Artists Mentioned 

• The New Yorker
• Monica Racic
• “There’s No Place at Home: A Mother and Her Trans Teen Decide to Leave the U.S.” (Sam Wolson, The New Yorker, 2025)
• “How Lorna Simpson Broke the Frame” (Julian Lucas, The New Yorker, 2025)
• Lilli Carré
• Nicholas Konrad
• Aviva Michaelov
• Tim Klimowicz
• “In the Dark” podcast 
• “Cleared by Fire” (David Kofahl and Sam Wolson, The New Yorker, 2024)
• “Rashomon” (1950)
• “In the Dark”: Podcast reporters and producers
• David Kofahl
• “The War Crimes That the Military Buried” (Parker Yesko, The New Yorker, 2024)
• “Reeducated” (Sam Wolson, The New Yorker, 2021)
• “Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State” (Ben Mauk, The New Yorker, 2021)
• Matt Huynh
• The New York Times
• “We Who Remain” (Sam Wolson and Trevor Snapp, The New York Times, 2017)
• The Daily 360 | The New York Times 
• National Geographic

Design Apps & Tools Mentioned

• Gaussian Splatting at The New Yorker (Michael Rubloff, 2025)
• Figma
• Blender

Show Credits

Hosted and produced by Mark Armstrong
Associate producer: Marina Leigh
Episode editor: Kelly Araja
Audience editor: Adriana Lacy
Promotional support: Ellen Tuttle
Operational support: Paul Plutnicki, Peter Canova

Nieman Foundation interim curator: Henry Chu
Music: “Golden Grass,” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)
Cover design by Adriana Lacy

Nieman Storyboard is presented by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

***

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