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***

Dear Storyboard community:

Last year, Storyboard contributor Mallary Tenore Tarpley took us through her personal story of navigating “the middle place” in illness and recovery — the place where storytelling often oversimplifies the journey or seeks tidy narratives. Her deeply reported memoir, “SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery,” uses her childhood journals to chronicle her diagnosis and treatment for anorexia following the death of her mother from breast cancer when Tarpley was 11 years old. 

This week, Tarpley is back with a new story annotation about illness and recovery, written by Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker. In “Mary Had Schizophrenia and Then Suddenly Didn’t,” Aviv tells the story of a woman diagnosed with schizophrenia whose symptoms disappeared 20 years later, after her treatment for cancer. Aviv's story was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Feature Writing earlier this month, and for Storyboard she shares how she restructured the piece only five days before publication. 

The story goes deep into Mary's life with her daughters, Christine and Angie, as they tried to make sense of their mother's illness. Aviv quotes from the journal Christine kept as a teenager: “My mom has erotomanic delusion disorder with a splash of persecutory delusions.” 

This is key to Aviv's work: her ability to build trust and connection with her sources, such that they feel comfortable sharing highly personal information like medical records and journal entries. In her New Yorker story “Alice Munro’s Passive Voice,” published in 2024, Aviv worked closely with the author’s daughter and included personal letters about suffering sexual abuse by Munro's partner. 

After they read that piece, “I think [Mary's daughters] were familiar with my approach, and that helped a lot,” Aviv told Tarpley. “Christine had this archive of childhood materials that she'd been keeping. She jokes that it was like she had been waiting her whole life for a fact checker.”

The result is a nuanced portrait of a life with mental illness, what happens when that illness mysteriously goes away, and a possible breakthrough connected to an autoimmune disorder treatment.  

Tarpley tells Storyboard that Aviv’s work provided inspiration for how she wrote about recovery in her own book. "Aviv's New Yorker story about the Newtown Bee [the local newspaper that covered the Sandy Hook school shooting] was the impetus for my work on restorative narrative,” said Tarpley. “The restorative narrative genre is what led me to then develop the middle place concept.”

For more story annotations featuring Rachel Aviv, check out our Storyboard archive: 

• How Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker exposed the “troubled teen industry” (2022)
• Shining light on a “shadow” special-ed program in the Georgia public schools (2019)
• Rachel Aviv on her New Yorker story, “Your son is deceased” (2016)

Rachel Aviv on reporting and writing her Pulitzer finalist story about a schizophrenia diagnosis

The New Yorker staff writer talks about finding the right story structure and working with a family to access medical records and journals.

[ Read the story ]

Links of note 

• “It’s not what they say about your story. It’s what you ask them about it.” In his newsletter, writer-journalist Paul Kix offers advice for getting good feedback from your editor by asking the right questions. “It’s been a lesson I’ve learned much too late, not to get defensive when I get an edit: The pieces I’d written in the first 10 years of my career could have probably been vastly better. And not because the editor is always right. The editor is mostly right, at best. But the editor is always onto something.” 
• The Rejection Questionnaire: Writer-filmmaker Naz Riahi has a new series in her newsletter, focusing on how writers and artists handle (and embrace) rejection. As author Shoshana von Blanckensee writes: “Receiving buckets of rejections is a skin-thickener. Over time, they become easier and easier. It helped me to reframe the rejections as stepping stones in the direction of a yes.”
• And a perfect final motivator: Author Jami Attenberg is kicking off her annual #1000wordsofsummer, which begins Saturday, May 30, and runs through June 12. The event, now in its ninth year, raises money for charity and brings writers together with a simple goal: write 1,000 words a day. People can share their work and progress on social media using the hashtag #1000wordsofsummer. As Attenberg writes in the FAQ: “Since I began writing books in earnest, I have used 1,000 words a day as my regular writing goal. It’s about four typed pages double-spaced. If I write 1,000 words a day, five days a week, give or take time for edits, research, and other job responsibilities, I can finish a messy-as-hell first draft in about six months. It usually takes me another six months to get it in enough shape to be able to share it with other people.” 

Keep writing (at any word count), and keep sharing your stories,

Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
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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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***

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
Follow the Nieman Storyboard Podcast 
On Bluesky: @niemanstoryboard.org

***

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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***

Dear Storyboard community: 

What are the ingredients that make a memorable podcast?

This week I'm excited to welcome back Storyboard contributor — and 2024 Nieman fellow — Julia Barton, who guides us through an annotation of a podcast script from one of 2025's most acclaimed narrative podcasts, “Fela Kuti: Fear No Man.” The series, hosted by “Radiolab” creator Jad Abumrad, explores the life, music, and legacy of Fela Kuti, the Nigerian musician, political activist, and pioneer of Afrobeat. On Thursday, the series was honored with a Peabody Award. 

We talk a lot in this newsletter about how reporting, research, and proximity to the right materials can dictate the shape of a story, or whether we even have a story to tell. I'm fascinated by the constraints Abumrad and his editor, Ben Adair, had to navigate to create this series — including limited access to Kuti in his own words (he died in 1997) — but also by the unusual amount of freedom they had to use, and even remix, some of his music. It can be very difficult to clear music rights for a podcast, and as Barton tells me, “their access to Fela’s music really made the whole series work.” The goal for the podcast, Adair said, was "making a documentary you could dance to.” 

It's been a precarious time for narrative nonfiction podcasts, which are facing the same financial, political, and audience challenges affecting other forms of journalism. But “Fear No Man” reminds us what's possible. 

Barton's advice for storytellers who want to explore audio narrative? “Think about why your story is best told in audio, and try to collaborate with an experienced producer on your pitch. Or if you are already an experienced producer, collaborate with a story editor. Most of the pitches I've seen that make it to production have either a strong audio component already figured out, or they have a strong team behind them. Ideally both.”

How Jad Abumrad transports listeners to a legendary club in Lagos for the acclaimed podcast, ‘Fela Kuti: Fear No Man’

“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?”

[ Read the story ]

Links of note 

• At her Notes from a Small Press newsletter, Belt Publishing founder Anne Trubek considers the current challenges in nonfiction book publishing — in which fewer non-memoir titles are being published, and advances are not always substantial enough to justify the reporting and research required to write the books. Trubek suggests some changes, including making book proposals less demanding and for imprints to publish shorter books: “Our ‘signature’ series of researched nonfiction are called (internally) ‘Notches’ and they max out at 60,000 words, with an average of 45,000, and some as few as 30,000. This makes book writing much less onerous for the writer (and the resultant volume, 5 x 7” trim size, less intimidating to readers, plus: cute!). Writers are more likely to be able to complete a manuscript without leaving their day job, or any of the other obstacles.”
• The Sidney Hillman Foundation has announced the winners of the 76th annual Hillman Prizes for “journalism in service of the common good.” The full list, including categories for books, documentaries, magazines, newspapers, and broadcast, is available here.
• “Access is nice. Access is alluring. Access is also dangerous. It is a drug prone to causing grandiosity, narcissism, and delusion.” Ahead of this weekend’s White House Correspondents Association Dinner, in his newsletter, How Things Work, Hamilton Nolan writes about the temptation of access in journalism. “It is a way to make the people you write about happy, and to make your job as a journalist much easier. Unfortunately it also eliminates much of the value of journalism.”

Keep sharing your stories (on your own terms),

Mark Armstrong
Editor
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.

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***

Dear Storyboard community: 

At a Longreads event several years ago in New York City, a magazine writer was asked about one of his most famous longform features. The story included a harrowing flashback sequence with many precise details, and the audience was curious about how a journalist could recreate it with such confidence and clarity. 

“How did you report that scene?” someone asked.

“Well,” he replied, “there was a video.”

It was like a magician revealing the mundane secret behind his best trick. The story's terrifying and heart-pounding climax came from simply watching a video and writing what he saw. 

This moment provided a memorable lesson for me: Many of the best writers are clever reporters. And reporting is more than conducting interviews and finding primary sources — it's uncovering long-buried archival material, observing details in photographs that others may have missed, and knowing how to shape all of it into a compelling story.

Author Sophie Elmhirst calls these elements the “shards” that every journalist should collect when writing narrative nonfiction. She speaks from experience: Elmhirst dug through an archive of personal diaries, photos, documentaries, and books to tell the story of a married couple, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, who survived 118 days lost at sea in 1973. 

Her resulting book, “A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck,” became a runaway New York Times bestseller and was named a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker, NPR, TIME, Vogue, and The New York Times. 

“You don’t find it as a perfect crystal vase. You find shards, and you have to fit them together,” she tells Storyboard contributor Mallary Tenore Tarpley. “You find a lot of waste material that doesn’t fit into the vase that you have to get rid of, and you do a lot of your own work to fill out the structure — to turn that shard into something.”   

This week at Storyboard, Elmhirst speaks with Tarpley about making narrative magic from deep reporting and research, and she annotates the first chapter to take us through her reporting and writing process. 

Annotation: How Sophie Elmhirst wrote a bestselling nonfiction book that reads like fiction 

“In a way, the only way you could understand how tiny and vulnerable and lost they were was to zoom right out until you could hardly see them at all. Having that sense of scale added another layer to the intimacy and claustrophobia of their life on the raft, and this was what interested me most of all — the idea of living in such inescapable proximity to your partner while surrounded by the terror of infinite empty space.”

[ Read the story ] 

Links of note 

• At Long Lead's Depth Perception newsletter, journalist and documentarian Joi Lee talks about returning to the U.S. from Qatar to cover ICE's occupation in Minnesota. “I was living in New York when Trump got elected the first time, and I covered his election, his inauguration, and then soon afterwards, I took a job at Al Jazeera in Doha [Qatar]. This time around, when I was watching news from abroad, I had this feeling in my stomach of, ‘Oh, my god. If my job is to be part of this industry that is meant to document and to act as witnesses, then what is my responsibility as an American?’” 
• New York magazine's copy chief Carl Rosen contemplates the “lexical touch-off,” the moment “when an unusual or unexpected word or phrase surfaces and everybody starts repeating it.” In this case, he's discussing the rapid proliferation of all things -maxxing (e.g. “looksmaxxing”) in our language and writing. “A few months ago, everybody maxed out (single x in all reference books) on its usage online, and by the time it began its migration to print, -maxx seemed in danger of flaming out. We did find a way to present it sparingly for greater effect, and it’s evolving into a lively intensifier — writers can absolutely, positively never, ever, get enough of those. But new is for now, not for the long run. That’s why I believe -maxx will eventually join shizzle in the Scrapyard of Surpassable Superlatives.”
• Congrats to Brendan O'Meara's Creative Nonfiction podcast, which is celebrating 13 years of interviews with authors and journalists (and started with a landline and a speakerphone). His advice to other writers, podcasters, and creators? “Double down on what makes you weird.” 

Keep being yourself, and keep sharing your stories,

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

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The post Using diaries, photos, and films to create narrative magic appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

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***

Dear Storyboard community: 

This week, I'm going to point you straight to Kerry Howley's heartbreaking and infuriating New York magazine feature story about the families of the 27 children who died at Camp Mystic during the Guadalupe River floods in Texas last year. 

The story details the confusion, then the horror and grief, as families processed what happened in those early morning hours of July 4, 2025. As the facts became clearer, lawsuits followed. Now, the anger has deepened as Camp Mystic's owners announced plans to reopen for campers this summer. 

You'll also want to read Emily Gould's interview with Howley for details on how she reported and structured the longform piece, and her decision to lead with the perspective of the families:

For a long time, I wasn’t sure if I would tell the story of that night because I wanted us to be with the parents. They’re lost and they don’t have access to where their children are and they’re literally miles from the camp — like, physically miles from where they last knew that their children were safe, and they’re not getting information, and there are these terrible press conferences where they’re just being stonewalled. I wanted us to be with them and kind of desperate to know and unable to get that information. So, then, when do you reveal what happened? Once the parents have fully pieced together the horror of what happened that night — and particularly how close those girls were to safety — that is the time to tell it. That’s why I withheld that information until the end.

Howley adds: “So many of the stories about Camp Mystic told on morning television or even the local news have a positive spin, like, ‘Oh, here’s how they found hope in their sorrow.’ And ultimately I don’t think this is a story about resilience or hope. It’s a story of a complete failure of accountability.”

Her story, and the story of these families, is one that I will remember for a long time. 

Tracy Kidder: 1945-2026

Tracy Kidder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of books including “The Soul of a New Machine,” “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” and “Among Schoolchildren,” died Tuesday in Boston. He was 80.

Kidder's wide-ranging work has inspired and guided many journalists — many of whom wrote about what they learned from Kidder in Nieman Storyboard. His book, “Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction,” written with his longtime editor Richard Todd, is featured in the Nieman Storyboard Guide to Books on Storytelling. Here are a few lessons from the Storyboard archives: 

• “Every story has to be discovered twice, first in the world, and then in the author’s study. One discovers a story the second time by constructing it.” From “20 writing and editing tips from Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd,” by Paige Williams, 2013.
• “I do explain [to sources and subjects] this is likely to be a pretty large invasion of privacy. And I do this in part because I now know quite well how much better it is for someone to say, ‘No, I’d rather not do that’ when there’s nothing invested on either side and there’s likely to be no hard feelings, than a year down the road when it might be much more painful — it would be much more painful to have to abandon the project.” From “Tracy Kidder in conversation with Darcy Frey, part 1,” 2010.
• “For me, it’s very important to find out what the actual chronology is, the absolute chronology of the story. As my editor, Dick Todd, likes to say, it’s surprising how often writers that he’s worked with don’t actually know the chronology. We have a rule, he and I, which is if you’re going to break chronology, you have to have a good reason for doing it.” From “Tracy Kidder in conversation with Darcy Frey, part 2,” 2010.

Links of note 

• Congratulations to this year's finalists for the National City and Regional Magazine Awards, honoring the best work from city magazines around the U.S., including 5280 (in Denver), Boston, Chicago magazine, D Magazine, Philadelphia magazine, St. Louis Magazine, Texas Highways, and Texas Monthly. Get the full list here.
• Submissions are open for the Gerald Loeb Awards for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. Nominations are also open for two career achievement honors, the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lawrence Minard Editor Award. The journalism competition deadline is April 30. Full submission guidelines can be found here.
• The Fund for Investigative Journalism is accepting submissions for its Spring 2026 grants, awarding up to $10,000 for “investigative stories that break new ground – which means they uncover wrongdoing in the public and private sectors and reveal information that was previously unknown or hidden.” The organization is also accepting applications for seed grants of $1,000 to $2,500, to “cover the expenses of preliminary reporting, such as open-records requests and initial reporting trips.” The due date for both is April 27. Get more details here. 
• Mallary Tenore Tarpley, in her Write at the Edge newsletter, discusses the importance of embracing rejection on the long path to publishing a book: “My perfectionistic self equated rejections with failures. They made me feel like a fraud, as though the ID I’d been carrying around as a writer was suddenly fake. My inner critic got loud, especially after so many publisher rejections. Who do you think you are? You’re never going to become a ‘famous’ author, let alone a no-name one. I remember apologizing to my literary agent at that stage, letting her know I was sorry if I had wasted her time. (She assured me I hadn’t and stuck by my side the entire time.)”
• Leah Sottile attends an elementary school career day, and explains to the curious students what it means to be an investigative journalist: “How would you explain to a child why a police officer would lie? What do you say so they can understand? I wanted this child to know that his question was a wise one, truly one of the most important questions of our lives, one question with so many answers. So what I said was: ‘that’s a really good question. You might want to become a journalist.’”

Keep asking good questions, and keep sharing your stories,

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

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The post ‘I don’t think this is a story about resilience or hope’ appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

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***

Dear Storyboard community: 

If you happen to be in Boston next weekend, I'd love for you to join me on Saturday, March 28 at Boston University's Power of Narrative conference, where I’ll be interviewing The New Yorker's Patrick Radden Keefe about his forthcoming book, “London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth,” and his approach to reporting and writing award-winning stories and books including “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland” and “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.” You can register for the conference here, and attendees will also receive a copy of “Empire of Pain.” 

Keefe's latest book, to be released on April 7, expands on his 2024 New Yorker story about the mysterious death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler, who died after jumping from the balcony of a luxury apartment building overlooking the River Thames in London. Brettler's death led to a series of discoveries by his parents: he had created a secret life portraying himself as the son of a Russian oligarch and putting him into contact with the London underworld.

Having read the story, and now the book, I'm struck by Keefe's approach to both mediums — and how one complements the other in his reporting and writing process. 

We at Storyboard have been following Keefe's meticulous reporting for over a decade, and his books and stories have earned numerous awards, including the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. 

Here are two stories from the Storyboard archive analyzing some of Keefe's memorable work. And for those who can't attend in-person next week, I'll be sure to report back on our conversation. 

‘Why’s This So Good?’ Patrick Radden Keefe and ‘Where The Bodies Are Buried’ (2014)

“In 15,700 words, [Keefe] steeps readers in the daily terrors and psychological destruction wrought by decades of guerilla warfare in Northern Ireland. Readers understand by the story’s end that the grinding violence of the Troubles is not a historical conflict, but one that still fumes, indeed sometimes bursts to life, in the brick alleys and warrens today.”

‘Why’s this so good?’ Patrick Radden Keefe and the loaded gun (2014) 

“[Keefe] tells a tale about the very fallibility of storytelling, one which, bleak though its conclusion may be, we can believe.”

Links of note

• Congratulations to this year's winners of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards, honoring the best in American nonfiction book writing, announced this week by Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Awards went to danah boyd for “Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the U.S. Census,” and to Karim Zidan for “In the Shadow of the Cage”; The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize went to Jeff Hobbs for “Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America”; and the Mark Lynton History Prize went to William Dalrymple for “The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World.” See the full list of winners and finalists here.
• Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy announced its finalists for the 2026 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, honoring “the best public service investigative journalism that has made an impact on local, state, or federal public policy or the practice of politics in the United States.” The six finalists include investigative teams from The New York Times, Mississippi Today, the Tampa Bay Times, Miami Herald, ProPublica, and the Washington Post. See the full list here.
• Also, from The New York Times, an example of the power of deeply reported investigative journalism in bringing long-overdue justice for victims: “Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years.” Bringing us into their process, California editor Manny Fernandez writes: “Back in 2021, The Times received a tip about Cesar Chavez’s past. My colleague, Sarah Hurtes, and I have investigated aspects of this story for nearly five years now. After gaining the trust of several women who told us their stories, we discovered disturbing allegations that Chavez sexually abused and assaulted teenage girls and adult women.” Dolores Huerta, who co-founded United Farm Workers with Chavez, said she also was sexually abused by Chavez. “I have kept this secret long enough. My silence ends here.”
• “Agents of Chaos: Border Patrol’s year of unchecked force.” An outstanding investigative documentary short that uses visual storytelling — combining citizen-recorded videos, court documents, and body camera footage — to show how five Border Patrol agents participated in raids in Bakersfield, Los Angeles, Chicago, and then Minneapolis, and committed acts of violence on bystanders in the process. The documentary was produced by nonprofit newsroom CalMatters, Evident Media, and Bellingcat. 

Keep speaking up, and keep sharing your stories,

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

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The post A Patrick Radden Keefe reading list appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.