Christina M. Tapper Archives - Nieman Storyboard https://niemanstoryboard.org/authors/christina-m-tapper/ Thu, 05 Feb 2026 23:36:57 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://niemanstoryboard.org/app/uploads/2024/02/cropped-NiemanFavicon-40x40.png Christina M. Tapper Archives - Nieman Storyboard https://niemanstoryboard.org/authors/christina-m-tapper/ 32 32 Soledad O’Brien on character-driven storytelling in documentaries, and the power of being a witness https://niemanstoryboard.org/2026/02/05/soledad-obrien-character-driven-storytelling-documentaries/ Thu, 05 Feb 2026 14:45:31 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=16729 Soledad O'Brien

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.


[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

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.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4rC1468JuQ

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:

Show credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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.

]]> Soledad O'Brien

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.

[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

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.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4rC1468JuQ

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:

Show credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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.

]]> Christina M. Tapper NPR’s Tonya Mosley on the art of the interview https://niemanstoryboard.org/2026/01/08/nprs-tonya-mosley-on-the-art-of-the-interview/ Thu, 08 Jan 2026 14:19:47 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=16564 Tonya Mosley. Photo by Bria Celest

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. 


[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

“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

Show credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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.

]]> Tonya Mosley. Photo by Bria Celest

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. 

[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

“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

Show credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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.

]]> Christina M. Tapper Sasha Bonét on ‘leaving room for the story to shape itself’ and how a family home can become a character https://niemanstoryboard.org/2025/11/13/sasha-bonet-leaving-room-for-story-family-home-character/ Thu, 13 Nov 2025 14:16:13 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=16385 Sasha Bonét

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.”


[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

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.

“The Waterbearers” by Sasha Bonét

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:

Show credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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.

]]> Sasha Bonét

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.”

[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

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.

“The Waterbearers” by Sasha Bonét

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:

Show credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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.

]]> Christina M. Tapper Danyel Smith on developing taste as a writer and building confidence to tell your own story https://niemanstoryboard.org/2025/10/09/danyel-smith-confidence-to-tell-your-own-story/ Thu, 09 Oct 2025 13:18:53 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=16214 Danyel Smith

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. 


[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

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:

Show credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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.

]]> Danyel Smith

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. 

[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

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:

Show credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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.

]]> Christina M. Tapper Author Dana A. Williams on what Toni Morrison can teach us about editing https://niemanstoryboard.org/2025/07/17/dana-a-williams-what-toni-morrison-can-teach-about-editing/ Thu, 17 Jul 2025 12:58:37 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=15812 Dana A. Williams. (Photo by Rhonisha Franklin.)

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, we’re joined by Dana A. Williams, author of the new book “Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship,” for a conversation about Toni Morrison and her work as a trade editor at Random House, where she championed Black writers working in all genres and ultimately changed the publishing landscape. 

The book is the first to focus solely on the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer’s editing career, and it offers previously untold stories about Morrison's work and insights into the editor-writer relationship. Morrison edited more than 50 books, including works by Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, Huey P. Newton, Leon Forrest, Gayl Jones, Angela Davis, and Muhammad Ali. She even edited a cookbook.  


[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

Morrison died in 2019 at age 88. Williams, professor of African American Literature and dean of the Graduate School at Howard University, had Morrison's blessing to write the book and the privilege of interviewing her, and also conducted research in Morrison's archives at Princeton University and Random House's archives at Columbia University.   

Williams shares moments from her interviews with Morrison, warm letters between Morrison and writers like Bambara, and some of the indignities Morrison faced as an editor (being hung up on, having her credentials questioned). 

Williams also recalls how Morrison helped her land on the new book’s title. Once an editor, always an editor.

Excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

Toni at Random book
"Toni at Random," by Dana A. Williams

On interviewing Morrison:

You have to be willing to accept where she is at any given moment. There were some times when she was incredibly generous, and there were other times when she clearly had some other things that she was wanting to do. And so I had to learn: Let the story go where it will, and trust that when she says we can talk more later, you'll have that opportunity to talk more later.

The first time that we met to talk about the book in her office in Princeton, she knew [I was] working on these five Black writers. I'm working on this fiction, and she didn't talk about a single one of them. She talked about everything else and I thought, “Oh boy, I don't know how this is gonna work out.”

And then, at the end, she goes, “And if I can be helpful, let's just set up some more time. I'm glad you're working on this. You know, I really want people to understand what happened in the editorship.” And I'm thinking to myself, “Do you really? Because I asked you some pointed questions and you pointed me in different directions.”

But again, that was, I think, her subtle way of saying this isn't just about the fiction. This is the bigger conversation. So I ended up conceding, interestingly enough, that this was going to be a bigger book than what I had initially thought.

Workshopping the book’s title with Morrison:

[Morrison] lets me make this small talk until ultimately she's like, “So how's it going?” And as a writer, she was gentle. I said, “Well, I'm not making as much progress as I would want to. Things are a little bit slower. But I have the title. And things are going to jell because [if] you get the title, you know where you're going.” And I say, “The House That Toni Built at Random.” … And she goes, “Eh, smart, but too long.” So now my one little celebration also seems to be devastated. And she says, “Toni at Random.” I say, “Well, I don't know. Can I call you Toni?” And she says, “Well, ‘Chloe at Random,’ no one would get it.” [Editor’s note: Chloe Wofford is Morrison’s birth name.]

On Morrison’s approach to book editing:

The thing that ... was true for every book, no matter what, was to clarify whatever the point that you're trying to make. So if there's a theme in fiction, be sure that it's there. Be sure that all of the stories either hang together or there are no uncertainties about a character. ... So there were always clarifying questions. And then there was the post-manuscript completion moment that we don't talk about or think about enough in terms of promotion. A really good editor makes sure that the book gets in the hands of the right people, and I think she was probably better at that than most people.

How Morrison viewed the editor's role: 

When I was talking to her about it, to say, “All right, tell me, what makes a good editor?” And she said, ‘Well, the book makes a good editor. The writer makes a good editor. It's not the editor; it's the work itself. Now what I can do to make it better varies from book to book.’” 

There were some writers, like when she talked about Toni Cade Bambara, she said, “My only job with Bambara was to make sure that the story held together and that she wasn't leaving the reader behind.” She would joke about Bambara moving so fast that if the reader didn't keep up, then the reader just got lost. So sometimes it would be slowing her down, adding a sentence or two to give the reader some time to process. 

Interestingly enough, I didn't know it at the time, but I think that was a function of Morrison's work in the theater. The time that she spent at Howard that she talked about most positively was as an actor herself. And one of the techniques for playwrights is if there's a line that punches, you have to give the audience an opportunity to pause, to catch up, before you move to the next line.

On how Morrison managed editor-writer friction:

The thing that she tells [Nigerian writer] Chinweizu [Ibekwe], who was the person who hung up on her, is the thing that resonates the most with me. She writes to him not to worry, that she cannot stay mad at people, only the institutions. 

Her interaction with writers and with other people in a general sense was, “We don't have to agree. If we have a similar type of motivation toward honoring the culture in some way, it's fine.  There will be disagreements, but in the end it's structures that I don't forgive, or that I can't bridge a gap.” So there was this fundamental sense that the author-editor relationship will be tested. But I appreciated that she didn't take any of it personally. 

On Williams's archival research:

Morrison's archives are at Princeton and I used them to fill in gaps. The Random House archives are at Columbia. I worked primarily in the Random House collection because they're filed based on who the editor was. So when I'm trying to figure out what her comments were directly on the page for Toni Cade Bambara, I would go to the Bambara manuscripts, see what the comments were. But then I also had to go to Spelman [College in Atlanta] to look at Bambara’s archive, to make sure that I wasn't missing anything, because my obsession was that there was going to be some glaring hole — some big mistake that I made that I couldn't live with myself on. 

Every archive that was available to me, I tried to get to. I wanted to make sure that there wasn't anything that I was missing.

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

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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 Author Dana A. Williams on what Toni Morrison can teach us about editing appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Dana A. Williams. (Photo by Rhonisha Franklin.)

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, we’re joined by Dana A. Williams, author of the new book “Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship,” for a conversation about Toni Morrison and her work as a trade editor at Random House, where she championed Black writers working in all genres and ultimately changed the publishing landscape. 

The book is the first to focus solely on the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer’s editing career, and it offers previously untold stories about Morrison's work and insights into the editor-writer relationship. Morrison edited more than 50 books, including works by Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, Huey P. Newton, Leon Forrest, Gayl Jones, Angela Davis, and Muhammad Ali. She even edited a cookbook.  

[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

Morrison died in 2019 at age 88. Williams, professor of African American Literature and dean of the Graduate School at Howard University, had Morrison's blessing to write the book and the privilege of interviewing her, and also conducted research in Morrison's archives at Princeton University and Random House's archives at Columbia University.   

Williams shares moments from her interviews with Morrison, warm letters between Morrison and writers like Bambara, and some of the indignities Morrison faced as an editor (being hung up on, having her credentials questioned). 

Williams also recalls how Morrison helped her land on the new book’s title. Once an editor, always an editor.

Excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

Toni at Random book
"Toni at Random," by Dana A. Williams

On interviewing Morrison:

You have to be willing to accept where she is at any given moment. There were some times when she was incredibly generous, and there were other times when she clearly had some other things that she was wanting to do. And so I had to learn: Let the story go where it will, and trust that when she says we can talk more later, you'll have that opportunity to talk more later.

The first time that we met to talk about the book in her office in Princeton, she knew [I was] working on these five Black writers. I'm working on this fiction, and she didn't talk about a single one of them. She talked about everything else and I thought, “Oh boy, I don't know how this is gonna work out.”

And then, at the end, she goes, “And if I can be helpful, let's just set up some more time. I'm glad you're working on this. You know, I really want people to understand what happened in the editorship.” And I'm thinking to myself, “Do you really? Because I asked you some pointed questions and you pointed me in different directions.”

But again, that was, I think, her subtle way of saying this isn't just about the fiction. This is the bigger conversation. So I ended up conceding, interestingly enough, that this was going to be a bigger book than what I had initially thought.

Workshopping the book’s title with Morrison:

[Morrison] lets me make this small talk until ultimately she's like, “So how's it going?” And as a writer, she was gentle. I said, “Well, I'm not making as much progress as I would want to. Things are a little bit slower. But I have the title. And things are going to jell because [if] you get the title, you know where you're going.” And I say, “The House That Toni Built at Random.” … And she goes, “Eh, smart, but too long.” So now my one little celebration also seems to be devastated. And she says, “Toni at Random.” I say, “Well, I don't know. Can I call you Toni?” And she says, “Well, ‘Chloe at Random,’ no one would get it.” [Editor’s note: Chloe Wofford is Morrison’s birth name.]

On Morrison’s approach to book editing:

The thing that ... was true for every book, no matter what, was to clarify whatever the point that you're trying to make. So if there's a theme in fiction, be sure that it's there. Be sure that all of the stories either hang together or there are no uncertainties about a character. ... So there were always clarifying questions. And then there was the post-manuscript completion moment that we don't talk about or think about enough in terms of promotion. A really good editor makes sure that the book gets in the hands of the right people, and I think she was probably better at that than most people.

How Morrison viewed the editor's role: 

When I was talking to her about it, to say, “All right, tell me, what makes a good editor?” And she said, ‘Well, the book makes a good editor. The writer makes a good editor. It's not the editor; it's the work itself. Now what I can do to make it better varies from book to book.’” 

There were some writers, like when she talked about Toni Cade Bambara, she said, “My only job with Bambara was to make sure that the story held together and that she wasn't leaving the reader behind.” She would joke about Bambara moving so fast that if the reader didn't keep up, then the reader just got lost. So sometimes it would be slowing her down, adding a sentence or two to give the reader some time to process. 

Interestingly enough, I didn't know it at the time, but I think that was a function of Morrison's work in the theater. The time that she spent at Howard that she talked about most positively was as an actor herself. And one of the techniques for playwrights is if there's a line that punches, you have to give the audience an opportunity to pause, to catch up, before you move to the next line.

On how Morrison managed editor-writer friction:

The thing that she tells [Nigerian writer] Chinweizu [Ibekwe], who was the person who hung up on her, is the thing that resonates the most with me. She writes to him not to worry, that she cannot stay mad at people, only the institutions. 

Her interaction with writers and with other people in a general sense was, “We don't have to agree. If we have a similar type of motivation toward honoring the culture in some way, it's fine.  There will be disagreements, but in the end it's structures that I don't forgive, or that I can't bridge a gap.” So there was this fundamental sense that the author-editor relationship will be tested. But I appreciated that she didn't take any of it personally. 

On Williams's archival research:

Morrison's archives are at Princeton and I used them to fill in gaps. The Random House archives are at Columbia. I worked primarily in the Random House collection because they're filed based on who the editor was. So when I'm trying to figure out what her comments were directly on the page for Toni Cade Bambara, I would go to the Bambara manuscripts, see what the comments were. But then I also had to go to Spelman [College in Atlanta] to look at Bambara’s archive, to make sure that I wasn't missing anything, because my obsession was that there was going to be some glaring hole — some big mistake that I made that I couldn't live with myself on. 

Every archive that was available to me, I tried to get to. I wanted to make sure that there wasn't anything that I was missing.

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

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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 Author Dana A. Williams on what Toni Morrison can teach us about editing appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Christina M. Tapper The Marshall Project’s Akiba Solomon on how journalists write about incarceration https://niemanstoryboard.org/2025/05/22/marshall-project-akiba-solomon-how-journalists-write-about-incarceration/ Thu, 22 May 2025 14:08:46 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=15493 The Marshall Project's Akiba Solomon

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, we're joined by Akiba Solomon, an award-winning senior editor at The Marshall Project, the nonprofit news organization dedicated to covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Solomon has previously covered culture and the intersection of gender and race for Dissent, Glamour, and POZ. She currently edits Life Inside, a weekly series of essays by and about people who have personal experience of the criminal justice system. 

In 2021, Solomon edited what I consider to be one of the most insightful resources, The Language Project, about the terms journalists use to write about incarceration. Over the years I’ve used The Language Project as a reference in my own work editing writers and producing podcasts. Solomon and I discuss the importance of people-first language, alternatives for dehumanizing words that are a part of our lexicon, and how to work with writers and subjects who are incarcerated. 


[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

At the heart of it all, Solomon says, it's about journalists interrogating their language, understanding their audience, and looking for the best ways to achieve clarity in their work. "Clarity is really important in storytelling because it also conveys fairness," she told me. 

Excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On the creation of The Language Project: 

 The Language Project is a style advisory that talks about The Marshall Project's decision to not only decide that we weren't going to use terms that a significant portion of our audience find to be pejorative … but also to publicly state it, because The Marshall Project has a unique place in reporting and criminal justice reporting.

We're not an advocacy organization, but we are designed to serve not only people outside of correctional facilities but people inside of correctional facilities. And so a shared language was really necessary when we started to think about this group of folks who are directly impacted.

Even before I got to The Marshall Project in December 2019, there had been calls from folks in our audience, many of whom were formerly incarcerated, some who are currently incarcerated, who would have a hard stop at words like "inmate" or "convict" or "felon." And if you're using language where a segment of your audience has a hard stop or a segment of your audience finds it distracting or, again, pejorative, then that's something that you really need to examine.

On the politics — or not — of word choice:

I think people may have thought that The Language Project was an attempt to locate The Marshall Project politically on one pole or another. But the central argument there is, this is about clear language. This is about the fact that if you have words that a segment of your audience feels is pejorative, you're not actually going to get them to focus on what you're reporting on.

On re-assessing ‘inmate’:

Lawrence Bartley, who is now the publisher of what we call Marshall Project Inside, which includes News Inside, the print publication that goes into prisons, and Inside Story, which is a show on YouTube, had served 27 years in prison. When I got to The Marshall Project as a new colleague, he came to me and said, "We need to talk about ‘inmate.’ We need to talk about the use of these words when I'm out in the field. I have people complaining to me about it. And I have people feeling like this is sort of a mark against our journalism.”

I'd actually never heard it put that way. I'd heard from activist communities that they don't want pejorative terms. They don't want terms that dehumanize people, but I'd never quite put together the fact that you only have a couple of seconds to convey your story to people. And so it's a waste of words if you're going to say something when you don't actually mean it. So he was one of the people [who led to the creation of The Language Project]. 

People were using these words because that was always what people did. And so you have to continually take inventory [of] your language usage and what your policies are to make sure that they match what the public is telling you. 

On working with writers who are incarcerated:

 The weekly essay series that I edit is called Life Inside, and they are perspectives from people in the criminal justice system. Most of our writers are currently or formerly incarcerated, but we also have folks who have served on parole boards. We talk to corrections officers, we talk to defense attorneys. The idea is to really give people the human stories behind a system that is often dehumanizing to all parties.

One judgment call that The Marshall Project continually makes is that we do actually identify the reason why people are currently incarcerated. We have a bio at the end of those stories. We let people who are writing for us [know] that we are actually going to run what they were convicted of, and that we also want them to add anything about themselves that they would want a reader to know.

On mug shots and rehabilitation: 

 I think since 2021, fewer and fewer local media are using mug shots as a source of income. There are places that would just run whatever mug shots came through that day, and get clicks on those pages. So I've seen some local media making the decision not to do this anymore — likely losing revenue, but understanding that part of journalism, again, is supposed to be about fairness. …

If you write about somebody, and you say, "So-and-so is an inmate at so-and-so jail," and that's the first thing that comes up when somebody searches your name, how is that person supposed to move forward? If that person was not convicted and spent a year in jail, which we know has happened — hello, Kalief Browder — you convicted them with that article. Most journalism is not corrected. It's just part of the record. We've had people write to us and say, "You wrote about me nine years ago when I was in prison. I'm out now. It is very difficult for me to get a job because this is the first thing that comes up." You really have to keep that in mind. …

Oftentimes with The Marshall Project, if we reprint something [and] we find out if that person has been let out since we wrote the story, we'll add a note. Because again, it's important to not suspend people in time [at the moment of] probably the worst thing they've ever done in their life.

On clarity in our work as journalists: 

 Clarity is really important in storytelling because it also conveys fairness. If your North Star is clarity rather than the number of people who like you or disagree with you … I think that that's the easiest way to instill confidence in readers and viewers who feel really skeptical about what you're bringing to the table.

Reading List: Authors, Books, and Stories Mentioned 

More by Akiba Solomon

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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 curator: Ann Marie Lipinski
Deputy 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.

***
Christina M. Tapper is an award-winning editor, audio producer, podcast consultant, and collage artist who has held key leadership roles at Spotify, Medium.com, and Bleacher Report. Currently, she assists a range of creators in developing podcasts.

The post The Marshall Project’s Akiba Solomon on how journalists write about incarceration appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> The Marshall Project's Akiba Solomon

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, we're joined by Akiba Solomon, an award-winning senior editor at The Marshall Project, the nonprofit news organization dedicated to covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Solomon has previously covered culture and the intersection of gender and race for Dissent, Glamour, and POZ. She currently edits Life Inside, a weekly series of essays by and about people who have personal experience of the criminal justice system. 

In 2021, Solomon edited what I consider to be one of the most insightful resources, The Language Project, about the terms journalists use to write about incarceration. Over the years I’ve used The Language Project as a reference in my own work editing writers and producing podcasts. Solomon and I discuss the importance of people-first language, alternatives for dehumanizing words that are a part of our lexicon, and how to work with writers and subjects who are incarcerated. 

[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]

At the heart of it all, Solomon says, it's about journalists interrogating their language, understanding their audience, and looking for the best ways to achieve clarity in their work. "Clarity is really important in storytelling because it also conveys fairness," she told me. 

Excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On the creation of The Language Project: 

 The Language Project is a style advisory that talks about The Marshall Project's decision to not only decide that we weren't going to use terms that a significant portion of our audience find to be pejorative … but also to publicly state it, because The Marshall Project has a unique place in reporting and criminal justice reporting.

We're not an advocacy organization, but we are designed to serve not only people outside of correctional facilities but people inside of correctional facilities. And so a shared language was really necessary when we started to think about this group of folks who are directly impacted.

Even before I got to The Marshall Project in December 2019, there had been calls from folks in our audience, many of whom were formerly incarcerated, some who are currently incarcerated, who would have a hard stop at words like "inmate" or "convict" or "felon." And if you're using language where a segment of your audience has a hard stop or a segment of your audience finds it distracting or, again, pejorative, then that's something that you really need to examine.

On the politics — or not — of word choice:

I think people may have thought that The Language Project was an attempt to locate The Marshall Project politically on one pole or another. But the central argument there is, this is about clear language. This is about the fact that if you have words that a segment of your audience feels is pejorative, you're not actually going to get them to focus on what you're reporting on.

On re-assessing ‘inmate’:

Lawrence Bartley, who is now the publisher of what we call Marshall Project Inside, which includes News Inside, the print publication that goes into prisons, and Inside Story, which is a show on YouTube, had served 27 years in prison. When I got to The Marshall Project as a new colleague, he came to me and said, "We need to talk about ‘inmate.’ We need to talk about the use of these words when I'm out in the field. I have people complaining to me about it. And I have people feeling like this is sort of a mark against our journalism.”

I'd actually never heard it put that way. I'd heard from activist communities that they don't want pejorative terms. They don't want terms that dehumanize people, but I'd never quite put together the fact that you only have a couple of seconds to convey your story to people. And so it's a waste of words if you're going to say something when you don't actually mean it. So he was one of the people [who led to the creation of The Language Project]. 

People were using these words because that was always what people did. And so you have to continually take inventory [of] your language usage and what your policies are to make sure that they match what the public is telling you. 

On working with writers who are incarcerated:

 The weekly essay series that I edit is called Life Inside, and they are perspectives from people in the criminal justice system. Most of our writers are currently or formerly incarcerated, but we also have folks who have served on parole boards. We talk to corrections officers, we talk to defense attorneys. The idea is to really give people the human stories behind a system that is often dehumanizing to all parties.

One judgment call that The Marshall Project continually makes is that we do actually identify the reason why people are currently incarcerated. We have a bio at the end of those stories. We let people who are writing for us [know] that we are actually going to run what they were convicted of, and that we also want them to add anything about themselves that they would want a reader to know.

On mug shots and rehabilitation: 

 I think since 2021, fewer and fewer local media are using mug shots as a source of income. There are places that would just run whatever mug shots came through that day, and get clicks on those pages. So I've seen some local media making the decision not to do this anymore — likely losing revenue, but understanding that part of journalism, again, is supposed to be about fairness. …

If you write about somebody, and you say, "So-and-so is an inmate at so-and-so jail," and that's the first thing that comes up when somebody searches your name, how is that person supposed to move forward? If that person was not convicted and spent a year in jail, which we know has happened — hello, Kalief Browder — you convicted them with that article. Most journalism is not corrected. It's just part of the record. We've had people write to us and say, "You wrote about me nine years ago when I was in prison. I'm out now. It is very difficult for me to get a job because this is the first thing that comes up." You really have to keep that in mind. …

Oftentimes with The Marshall Project, if we reprint something [and] we find out if that person has been let out since we wrote the story, we'll add a note. Because again, it's important to not suspend people in time [at the moment of] probably the worst thing they've ever done in their life.

On clarity in our work as journalists: 

 Clarity is really important in storytelling because it also conveys fairness. If your North Star is clarity rather than the number of people who like you or disagree with you … I think that that's the easiest way to instill confidence in readers and viewers who feel really skeptical about what you're bringing to the table.

Reading List: Authors, Books, and Stories Mentioned 

More by Akiba Solomon

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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 curator: Ann Marie Lipinski
Deputy 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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Christina M. Tapper is an award-winning editor, audio producer, podcast consultant, and collage artist who has held key leadership roles at Spotify, Medium.com, and Bleacher Report. Currently, she assists a range of creators in developing podcasts.

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