Marina Leigh Archives - Nieman Storyboard https://niemanstoryboard.org/authors/marina-leigh/ Thu, 22 Jan 2026 14:04:54 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://niemanstoryboard.org/app/uploads/2024/02/cropped-NiemanFavicon-40x40.png Marina Leigh Archives - Nieman Storyboard https://niemanstoryboard.org/authors/marina-leigh/ 32 32 Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas on deconstructing ‘true crime’ in podcasting and journalism https://niemanstoryboard.org/2026/01/22/leah-sottile-ryan-haas-true-crime-podcasting-journalism/ Thu, 22 Jan 2026 14:04:27 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=16647 Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On the ‘true crime’ genre in podcasting

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

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

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

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

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

On their process for staying organized

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

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

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

On knowing when to finish reporting

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

On place as a character

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

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

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

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

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

Advice to other journalists and the importance of journalism right now

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

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

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

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

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

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

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

***

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

]]> Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On the ‘true crime’ genre in podcasting

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

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

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

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

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

On their process for staying organized

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

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

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

On knowing when to finish reporting

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

On place as a character

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

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

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

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

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

Advice to other journalists and the importance of journalism right now

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

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

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

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

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

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

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

***

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

]]> Marina Leigh Photojournalist Stephanie Keith on documenting ICE and capturing a moment that became the cover of New York magazine https://niemanstoryboard.org/2025/12/04/photojournalist-stephanie-keith-documenting-ice-new-york-magazine-cover/ Thu, 04 Dec 2025 14:21:43 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=16466 New York magazine cover. Photo by Stephanie Keith

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

Stephanie Keith

On 26 Federal Plaza and documenting ICE detentions:

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

On the role of photography in storytelling:

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

On becoming a photojournalist:

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

On documenting the truth and the importance of journalism:

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

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

On collaborating with reporters:

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

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

On photo edits and working with editors:

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

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

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

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

Reading List: Authors, Stories, and Editors Mentioned 

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

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

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

***

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

]]> New York magazine cover. Photo by Stephanie Keith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

Stephanie Keith

On 26 Federal Plaza and documenting ICE detentions:

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

On the role of photography in storytelling:

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

On becoming a photojournalist:

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

On documenting the truth and the importance of journalism:

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

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

On collaborating with reporters:

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

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

On photo edits and working with editors:

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

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

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

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

Reading List: Authors, Stories, and Editors Mentioned 

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

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

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

***

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

]]> Marina Leigh National Book Award finalist Claudia Rowe on writing about teens and the foster care system https://niemanstoryboard.org/2025/10/23/national-book-awards-claudia-rowe-writing-foster-care/ Thu, 23 Oct 2025 13:08:40 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=16273 Claudia Rowe. Photo by Meryl Schenker

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

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

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

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

On reporting and structuring the book:

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

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

On honesty and transparency in narrative nonfiction:

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

On the response to ‘Wards of the State’:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading List: Authors, Stories, and Books Mentioned 

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

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

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

***

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

]]> Claudia Rowe. Photo by Meryl Schenker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

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

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

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

On reporting and structuring the book:

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

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

On honesty and transparency in narrative nonfiction:

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

On the response to ‘Wards of the State’:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading List: Authors, Stories, and Books Mentioned 

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

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

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

***

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

]]> Marina Leigh The New Yorker’s Sam Wolson on interactive storytelling about a mother and her trans teenager leaving the U.S. https://niemanstoryboard.org/2025/09/11/new-yorker-sam-wolson-interactive-storytelling/ Thu, 11 Sep 2025 12:50:33 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=16062 The New Yorker's Sam Wolson

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On ‘There’s No Place at Home’:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On virtual reality as a storytelling medium:

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

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

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

Design Apps & Tools Mentioned

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

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

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

***

The post The New Yorker’s Sam Wolson on interactive storytelling about a mother and her trans teenager leaving the U.S. appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> The New Yorker's Sam Wolson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On ‘There’s No Place at Home’:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On virtual reality as a storytelling medium:

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

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

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

Design Apps & Tools Mentioned

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

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

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

***

The post The New Yorker’s Sam Wolson on interactive storytelling about a mother and her trans teenager leaving the U.S. appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Marina Leigh Mallary Tenore Tarpley on writing about eating disorders and navigating ‘the middle’ in recovery https://niemanstoryboard.org/2025/08/14/mallary-tenore-tarpley-writing-about-eating-disorders-recovery/ Thu, 14 Aug 2025 14:14:27 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=15946 Mallary Tenore Tarpley

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, Storyboard Editor Mark Armstrong sits down with Storyboard contributor and author-journalist Mallary Tenore Tarpley to discuss her new book, “Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery.”

“Slip” is a reported memoir, with Tarpley recounting her own diagnosis and treatment for anorexia following the death of her mother from breast cancer when Tarpley was 11 years old. She talks about the process of writing and researching the book, revisiting spaces from her childhood, and confirming memories through interviews, medical records, and journals that had been stored for years in her father’s attic. 


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

“ I've traveled so far in my recovery, and I still have a ways to go, but looking at those records reminded me of how far I have come,” Tarpley said. “There were some lines that just haunted me and stood out to me that I knew had to be in the book. There was a nurse who had said that ‘Mallary simply stopped growing physically and emotionally after her mother died.’ Because it was my mother's death that really spurred on the eating disorder. But lines like that really helped me to see other people's impressions of me at the time, and all these entries … really helped corroborate memory and just make more of the details of my past come alive.”

Tarpley also talks about how she involved her family — including her father, who plays a crucial role — in the book, and how it can be difficult to accurately and sensitively tell stories about illness when recovery doesn't always offer simple beginnings and endings. (“The middle” is a recurring theme in the book.) Her reporting also reveals how treatment for eating disorders has evolved.

In addition to her contributions to Storyboard, Tarpley is a journalism and writing professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication and McCombs School of Business, and she writes a weekly newsletter, Write at the Edge.

For resources including screenings, treatments, and free-to-low-cost support for eating disorders, please visit the National Eating Disorder Association to get help.

Excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

"Slip" by Mallary Tenore Tarpley

On ‘slipping’ and revisiting her own past:

 Sometimes places can inhabit our past, but that doesn't mean they need to invade our present. That is an important motto that I carried through with me during this process. I'll just say that there were times when I would be writing about something and I would find myself slipping.

So I talk a lot in the book about just normalizing slips in the recovery process. And sometimes I had these moments where I could see myself slipping. There was this very real moment of slippage when I was writing about my experiences binge-eating in college, and I found that as I was writing about that experience, I ended up binge-eating. I thought, I need to be really careful that I don't fall into this trap of reengaging in behaviors just for the sake of feeling like I can access those behaviors more and write about them in a clearer way.

I needed to really try to recognize that about myself, that the eating disorder remains a vulnerability and that I could get into really risky territory if I let myself think that I needed to recreate these behaviors in order to write about them accurately. So that was something I had to be very cognizant about and also kind of give myself grace in those moments where I did have slips.

On the importance of ‘the messy middle’:

 When I was in my late 20s, I was director of this very small nonprofit called Images and Voices of Hope. At the time, I was tasked with essentially helping journalists to tell what we called restorative narratives.

These were stories that showed how people in communities were making meaningful pathways forward in the aftermath of illness or trauma or tragedy. And so often in media we hear about the trauma or tragedy, and then a lot of times we move on to the next story. Maybe we get a couple little follow-up stories sprinkled in, or maybe a journalist goes back and looks at the one-year anniversary of a particular trauma or tragedy, but so often those messy middles are overlooked.

Those sort of times [are] when people are trying to figure out: “What does progress look like, and how do I navigate the day-to-day in the aftermath of something that just feels like it tore my whole world apart?” Somewhere along the way… I recognized that this could be a really helpful framework for my own story, because for so long I had told people that I was fully recovered from my eating disorder. But in my late teens and throughout my 20s, I actually had been struggling quite a lot with the effects of a relapse, and yet I was too afraid to admit that narrative, and I didn't really think that I could share that publicly, partly because so many of the narratives and books that we hear and see and read on eating disorders are written from the perspective of people who are fully recovered, such that it can make people who aren't feel as though their narratives are either not worthy of being shared or not really safe to share, because it can feel very stigmatizing if you're in this middle place.

So I decided that I wanted to think about this restorative narrative framework and apply it to my own narrative, which is then when I came up with this term, the “middle place.” I am interviewing lots of people for the book, [and I] realized that there are so many people in this middle place. For so long, I thought I was the only person because I didn't see others writing about it.

But of the 700-plus people I surveyed who have lived experience with an eating disorder, 85% said they could relate to it. So there was something there. But there was a disconnect between the sort of populous nature of this place and the actual media coverage and literature that we see about eating disorders.

In some ways [it] felt like an act of courage, too, because our society tends to prefer narratives with protagonists who prevail and who triumph over their disorders. But I really don't like the tidy narrative. I'm much more drawn to these messy narratives because I think ultimately they're more relatable. They help people feel seen and heard. And ultimately I think they can encourage other people to be more open and honest about where they're actually at with their recovery.

On the language and definition of ‘full recovery’:

 The definitions are all over the map, which, from a research perspective, makes it really hard to compare data across studies. It's also why it can be really difficult to say definitively that X percentage of people actually fully recover, because everyone's definition of full recovery looks a little bit different. So that can certainly make it confusing, not just for researchers, but for people with lived experience who are trying to figure out: “What does full recovery actually mean, especially when you live in a society like ours, which is really steeped in fatphobia and diet culture?” There's even this term called “normative discontent,” which was coined by some researchers who found that the vast majority of people in our society have some level of discontent with [their] bodies.

So when we know that that sort of is more the norm than the exception, what does that even mean then to fully recover? For me it was an indication that, one, we need a lot more language around recovery. We can't have it be so black-and-white, which it very much has been in the eating disorder field where you're either sick or you're fully recovered. And two, we need to be able to give a voice to people in this place so that they don't feel so ashamed and stigmatized. 

On including her father in the process of creating the book:

The memoirist in me wanted to seek answers and to be able to empathize with him more. So I ended up talking with him and asking him questions about that experience. [I] asked tough questions like, “Why didn't you recognize that I needed more care and love and attention during that time in our lives?” And in hearing his side of the story, I could understand him a lot better. So I chose in that particular part of the book to actually frame it as a dialogue, so that the reader could hear my questions and my father's responses. That felt like a way of being really fair and also helping my father to have a voice in the book. 

Because I involved him so much in the process, when it came time for him to read the book, I think he felt like there weren't any surprises, and he really liked the book. And that was important to me, to be able to share that initial draft with him.

Tarpley's advice to other journalists:

 We just societally aren't really accustomed to talking about the process of how we got to where we are. It's much easier to simplify narratives over time and to just say, “Well, I had this in the past, here's what it looked like, but I'm better now.” And we sometimes skirt over that middle part of the narrative.

As journalists, we don't necessarily always ask about that middle. We are more interested in the extremes, but it's in that middle that we find meaning, and it's in that middle that we can really get clarity around who someone is. Around what strength looks like for them. Around what hardship looks like for them. What resilience looks like.

So I always encourage journalists to think about these questions of how did you get from point A to point B? Or what was that like? Or how do you describe your recovery? Or what were some of the small moments for you that illustrated recovery? 

Very often we tend to think in more grandiose terms where we say, “What was the turning point that led to your recovery?” And for many of us with eating disorders and other mental health struggles, there was not necessarily one big turning point. Oftentimes it is just this slow accumulation of baby steps, but there are moments maybe that were pivotal in some way, shape, or form, and so being able to get a little bit more granular with our questioning and asking, “Tell me about a time when you recognized that you made a choice in service of recovery. What did that look like? Share the details of that with me. Walk me through that moment.” And really trying to tighten our questioning and going deep so that we can understand more about the messiness.

Reading List: Authors, Books, and Stories Mentioned 

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

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

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

***

The post Mallary Tenore Tarpley on writing about eating disorders and navigating ‘the middle’ in recovery appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Mallary Tenore Tarpley

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, Storyboard Editor Mark Armstrong sits down with Storyboard contributor and author-journalist Mallary Tenore Tarpley to discuss her new book, “Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery.”

“Slip” is a reported memoir, with Tarpley recounting her own diagnosis and treatment for anorexia following the death of her mother from breast cancer when Tarpley was 11 years old. She talks about the process of writing and researching the book, revisiting spaces from her childhood, and confirming memories through interviews, medical records, and journals that had been stored for years in her father’s attic. 

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

“ I've traveled so far in my recovery, and I still have a ways to go, but looking at those records reminded me of how far I have come,” Tarpley said. “There were some lines that just haunted me and stood out to me that I knew had to be in the book. There was a nurse who had said that ‘Mallary simply stopped growing physically and emotionally after her mother died.’ Because it was my mother's death that really spurred on the eating disorder. But lines like that really helped me to see other people's impressions of me at the time, and all these entries … really helped corroborate memory and just make more of the details of my past come alive.”

Tarpley also talks about how she involved her family — including her father, who plays a crucial role — in the book, and how it can be difficult to accurately and sensitively tell stories about illness when recovery doesn't always offer simple beginnings and endings. (“The middle” is a recurring theme in the book.) Her reporting also reveals how treatment for eating disorders has evolved.

In addition to her contributions to Storyboard, Tarpley is a journalism and writing professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication and McCombs School of Business, and she writes a weekly newsletter, Write at the Edge.

For resources including screenings, treatments, and free-to-low-cost support for eating disorders, please visit the National Eating Disorder Association to get help.

Excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

"Slip" by Mallary Tenore Tarpley

On ‘slipping’ and revisiting her own past:

 Sometimes places can inhabit our past, but that doesn't mean they need to invade our present. That is an important motto that I carried through with me during this process. I'll just say that there were times when I would be writing about something and I would find myself slipping.

So I talk a lot in the book about just normalizing slips in the recovery process. And sometimes I had these moments where I could see myself slipping. There was this very real moment of slippage when I was writing about my experiences binge-eating in college, and I found that as I was writing about that experience, I ended up binge-eating. I thought, I need to be really careful that I don't fall into this trap of reengaging in behaviors just for the sake of feeling like I can access those behaviors more and write about them in a clearer way.

I needed to really try to recognize that about myself, that the eating disorder remains a vulnerability and that I could get into really risky territory if I let myself think that I needed to recreate these behaviors in order to write about them accurately. So that was something I had to be very cognizant about and also kind of give myself grace in those moments where I did have slips.

On the importance of ‘the messy middle’:

 When I was in my late 20s, I was director of this very small nonprofit called Images and Voices of Hope. At the time, I was tasked with essentially helping journalists to tell what we called restorative narratives.

These were stories that showed how people in communities were making meaningful pathways forward in the aftermath of illness or trauma or tragedy. And so often in media we hear about the trauma or tragedy, and then a lot of times we move on to the next story. Maybe we get a couple little follow-up stories sprinkled in, or maybe a journalist goes back and looks at the one-year anniversary of a particular trauma or tragedy, but so often those messy middles are overlooked.

Those sort of times [are] when people are trying to figure out: “What does progress look like, and how do I navigate the day-to-day in the aftermath of something that just feels like it tore my whole world apart?” Somewhere along the way… I recognized that this could be a really helpful framework for my own story, because for so long I had told people that I was fully recovered from my eating disorder. But in my late teens and throughout my 20s, I actually had been struggling quite a lot with the effects of a relapse, and yet I was too afraid to admit that narrative, and I didn't really think that I could share that publicly, partly because so many of the narratives and books that we hear and see and read on eating disorders are written from the perspective of people who are fully recovered, such that it can make people who aren't feel as though their narratives are either not worthy of being shared or not really safe to share, because it can feel very stigmatizing if you're in this middle place.

So I decided that I wanted to think about this restorative narrative framework and apply it to my own narrative, which is then when I came up with this term, the “middle place.” I am interviewing lots of people for the book, [and I] realized that there are so many people in this middle place. For so long, I thought I was the only person because I didn't see others writing about it.

But of the 700-plus people I surveyed who have lived experience with an eating disorder, 85% said they could relate to it. So there was something there. But there was a disconnect between the sort of populous nature of this place and the actual media coverage and literature that we see about eating disorders.

In some ways [it] felt like an act of courage, too, because our society tends to prefer narratives with protagonists who prevail and who triumph over their disorders. But I really don't like the tidy narrative. I'm much more drawn to these messy narratives because I think ultimately they're more relatable. They help people feel seen and heard. And ultimately I think they can encourage other people to be more open and honest about where they're actually at with their recovery.

On the language and definition of ‘full recovery’:

 The definitions are all over the map, which, from a research perspective, makes it really hard to compare data across studies. It's also why it can be really difficult to say definitively that X percentage of people actually fully recover, because everyone's definition of full recovery looks a little bit different. So that can certainly make it confusing, not just for researchers, but for people with lived experience who are trying to figure out: “What does full recovery actually mean, especially when you live in a society like ours, which is really steeped in fatphobia and diet culture?” There's even this term called “normative discontent,” which was coined by some researchers who found that the vast majority of people in our society have some level of discontent with [their] bodies.

So when we know that that sort of is more the norm than the exception, what does that even mean then to fully recover? For me it was an indication that, one, we need a lot more language around recovery. We can't have it be so black-and-white, which it very much has been in the eating disorder field where you're either sick or you're fully recovered. And two, we need to be able to give a voice to people in this place so that they don't feel so ashamed and stigmatized. 

On including her father in the process of creating the book:

The memoirist in me wanted to seek answers and to be able to empathize with him more. So I ended up talking with him and asking him questions about that experience. [I] asked tough questions like, “Why didn't you recognize that I needed more care and love and attention during that time in our lives?” And in hearing his side of the story, I could understand him a lot better. So I chose in that particular part of the book to actually frame it as a dialogue, so that the reader could hear my questions and my father's responses. That felt like a way of being really fair and also helping my father to have a voice in the book. 

Because I involved him so much in the process, when it came time for him to read the book, I think he felt like there weren't any surprises, and he really liked the book. And that was important to me, to be able to share that initial draft with him.

Tarpley's advice to other journalists:

 We just societally aren't really accustomed to talking about the process of how we got to where we are. It's much easier to simplify narratives over time and to just say, “Well, I had this in the past, here's what it looked like, but I'm better now.” And we sometimes skirt over that middle part of the narrative.

As journalists, we don't necessarily always ask about that middle. We are more interested in the extremes, but it's in that middle that we find meaning, and it's in that middle that we can really get clarity around who someone is. Around what strength looks like for them. Around what hardship looks like for them. What resilience looks like.

So I always encourage journalists to think about these questions of how did you get from point A to point B? Or what was that like? Or how do you describe your recovery? Or what were some of the small moments for you that illustrated recovery? 

Very often we tend to think in more grandiose terms where we say, “What was the turning point that led to your recovery?” And for many of us with eating disorders and other mental health struggles, there was not necessarily one big turning point. Oftentimes it is just this slow accumulation of baby steps, but there are moments maybe that were pivotal in some way, shape, or form, and so being able to get a little bit more granular with our questioning and asking, “Tell me about a time when you recognized that you made a choice in service of recovery. What did that look like? Share the details of that with me. Walk me through that moment.” And really trying to tighten our questioning and going deep so that we can understand more about the messiness.

Reading List: Authors, Books, and Stories Mentioned 

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

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

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

***

The post Mallary Tenore Tarpley on writing about eating disorders and navigating ‘the middle’ in recovery appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Marina Leigh Nadia Reiman on telling stories of immigration for ‘This American Life’ https://niemanstoryboard.org/2025/07/03/nadia-reiman-stories-immigration-this-american-life/ Thu, 03 Jul 2025 12:50:30 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=15738 Nadia Reiman of “This American Life“

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, “This American Life” reporter and editor Nadia Reiman joins Storyboard Editor Mark Armstrong for a conversation about immigration, mass deportation under Trump’s presidency, and finding the human stories amid ongoing raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Reiman has worked for “This American Life” since 2018, and in 2019, she was part of the producing and reporting team for “The Out Crowd,” an episode examining the first Trump administration’s policy on asylum seekers, which was honored with the first-ever Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting. Before working at “This American Life,” she was a senior editor at “Latino USA” and producer for StoryCorps. She’s worked in radio production since 2005. 


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

Reiman explains what she’s looking for in a story: “I want it to be human. At the end of the day, it’s all a bunch of humans doing stuff to humans. [I want listeners] to feel like they’re eye-to-eye with anyone, an immigration official or a random immigrant that they’ve never talked to.”

Using audio clips to illustrate different points, Reiman and Armstrong discussed three “TAL” stories from three different moments: “The Largest Deportation Operation in American History,” from November 2024, in which Jason Houser, the former chief of staff for ICE under President Biden, speculated how mass deportations might happen, after Trump was elected to a second term; “Solving for Where,” from April 2025, about a woman named Mari searching for her fiancé, a Venezuelan migrant who was taken by officers and sent to prison in El Salvador; and “Goodbye, Stranger,” from the Pulitzer-winning 2019 episode, which was produced by Reiman and reported by Molly O’Toole. 

Each of the episodes presented unique challenges in both the reporting and writing, including the use of interpreters as well as voice actors to protect anonymous sources. 

Reiman herself is an immigrant, born in Costa Rica and whose parents went to the U.S. to study. She became a U.S. citizen in 2010.  “I think partially the reason why I am interested in making immigration reporting palatable for people is because I’ve been through the immigration system myself, and I know how nonsensical and obtuse and crazy it can be,” she said. “So if I can help people make sense of it, that feels important to me.”

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

What Reiman is looking for in a ‘This American Life’ story: 

 I am in a place of luxury compared to my other immigration reporting colleagues that have to just jump and cover everything. I don’t feel like I have to jump and cover everything. I have more capacity and space where I can keep tabs on everything that’s happening and kind of start to put my finger on things that are changing, or we can say something bigger and hold out for that.

[That’s] in addition to all the things that we always look for in a story for “TAL,” which is we want to have a character, we want to be able to document them going through something, there has to be an action, there has to be kind of a clear “before and after” for that person. …

I want it to be human. At the end of the day, it’s all a bunch of humans doing stuff to humans. [I want listeners] to feel like they’re eye-to-eye with anyone, an immigration official or a random immigrant that they’ve never talked to. 

How Reiman conducts interviews for ‘TAL’:

 We’re really greedy with people’s time. I try to be really upfront with people when we go interview them and I’m like, “I’m going to talk to you, [and] I need at least three hours, and then maybe I’ll come back.” Often I just do it in chunks. I’ll do a three-hour interview, and then I’ll do another three-hour interview to end up with a 15-minute radio piece. 

But I don’t know how else to do it in the way that we need. Our questions are: “Tell me exactly what you thought at that time, and then what did you think next? What was the first thing that jumped into your mind? And then how did that make you feel?” We try to get people to tell it to us like a movie. Sometimes people just kind of talk that way, and that’s pretty magical. But in general, we as humans don’t talk that way. We just answer the question. So you need a lot of guidance to get that kind of audio.

On the difference between law and policy in U.S. immigration:

 A lot of the things in the immigration system don’t operate under rules as we understand them, as “legal” or “illegal” are not really terms that make sense in immigration, because so much of it is policy and practice and just like, “This is the way we’ve done it. There’s no written law that says we can’t or that we need to do it this way, but it’s just the way we’ve done it.” So a lot of the things that happen to people that are not immersed in it don’t make any sense. They’re like, “Is that legal?” And you’re like, “Well, yes, but also maybe not. But also it’s a policy. So it’s not a law, but it’s a policy.” There’s discretion built all over the system.

On adding depth and agency to people’s stories: 

 I think often when you’re reporting on stories where so many tragic and hard things are happening to a group of people in the community, if you just talk about what happened, you end up accidentally talking about what happened to them. And so it’s people that things happen to. … And I’m not saying that some of these things don’t happen to them outside of their control. That’s different. There are things happening to them that are outside of their control. 

But I think the way that you tell people’s stories, you end up kind of making them a little bit two- dimensional if you don’t also show the internal process, their choices, their thoughts. And so I think getting a sense of them as people, and really laying out how active Mari was from the beginning and how much of  a go-getter she is, and how she just doesn’t stop moving, and getting her to really explain to me who Mikael [her Venezuelan fiancé] is because I didn’t get to meet him. … That helps you see them as full people that are going through something rather than people that something is happening to, that have no real motion as characters.

On working with an interpreter:

[For the “Solving for Where” segment in the “Chaos Graph” episode,]  I did all the interviews in Spanish with Mari the whole time. And then once I had selected the clips that we were going to use, then I went with Anayansi Diaz-Cortes, who’s this amazing reporter who was also an amazing live interpreter. I don’t know how she does it because it’s a completely hard skill. I’ve tried to do it for people and I can’t do it, but she’s really good at it. And so she did the live interpretation. She was so good at not only the accuracy, but also getting the emotion and the feeling of the things that Mari was saying. So it made it super easy and it made it feel so much livelier to the English speakers once they heard it.

So that’s the way I do it. I also like to leave in little bits of Spanish sometimes untranslated, if they’re small enough you can follow, because I feel like it’s a nice little thing for people that speak the language to hear a little bit of it. Also, it’s a way for you to hear the original essence of the person, even when you have somebody else’s voice over it. We think about that a lot in the show — how to use interpreters and how to mix in voices in a way that you’re being authentic to the feeling of the person and also to the words, the content. 

On using voice actors to keep sources anonymous:

[For the “Goodbye Stranger” segment on “The Out Crowd” episode:]  It was a matter of public interest what was happening. And so we felt pretty sure that we wanted to figure out a way to do the story and we didn’t know how. We talked about all kinds of ways. Do we distort their voice? Do we pitch-shift it? How do we do it? Ultimately all of the processing we could do at that time to disrupt someone’s voice could be undone fairly easily. And if you make it to the point where it can’t be undone, it’s so robotic that you don’t get a sense of the person anymore. So we opted for working with actors.

It’s funny because I remember one of the first edits that we did of it, the feedback from somebody here was like, “Oh, I think that actor was too upset in this part. Can we get them to redo it so they’re not as upset?” And I was like, “That’s not the actor yet. That’s just the person. They’re just really upset.” 

On the unique voice of ‘This American Life’ in this moment:

 I’ve always liked the tone of “TAL.” It’s something that I’ve always felt was nice and honest and refreshing. I wasn’t as sharp of a writer when I first came [to the show] because I wasn’t used to writing in that way. There’s a lot of things that [host and co-creator Ira Glass] does really artfully. … And to the show’s credit, I’ve never felt like I couldn’t say something that I wanted to say that I had evidence for. There’s kind of a “say it with your chest” thing that I think is happening more and more in the show that I always respond to in the media that I like and that I consume. So I’m happy that we can do that.

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

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

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

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

***

The post Nadia Reiman on telling stories of immigration for ‘This American Life’ appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Nadia Reiman of “This American Life“

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, “This American Life” reporter and editor Nadia Reiman joins Storyboard Editor Mark Armstrong for a conversation about immigration, mass deportation under Trump’s presidency, and finding the human stories amid ongoing raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Reiman has worked for “This American Life” since 2018, and in 2019, she was part of the producing and reporting team for “The Out Crowd,” an episode examining the first Trump administration’s policy on asylum seekers, which was honored with the first-ever Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting. Before working at “This American Life,” she was a senior editor at “Latino USA” and producer for StoryCorps. She’s worked in radio production since 2005. 

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

Reiman explains what she’s looking for in a story: “I want it to be human. At the end of the day, it’s all a bunch of humans doing stuff to humans. [I want listeners] to feel like they’re eye-to-eye with anyone, an immigration official or a random immigrant that they’ve never talked to.”

Using audio clips to illustrate different points, Reiman and Armstrong discussed three “TAL” stories from three different moments: “The Largest Deportation Operation in American History,” from November 2024, in which Jason Houser, the former chief of staff for ICE under President Biden, speculated how mass deportations might happen, after Trump was elected to a second term; “Solving for Where,” from April 2025, about a woman named Mari searching for her fiancé, a Venezuelan migrant who was taken by officers and sent to prison in El Salvador; and “Goodbye, Stranger,” from the Pulitzer-winning 2019 episode, which was produced by Reiman and reported by Molly O’Toole. 

Each of the episodes presented unique challenges in both the reporting and writing, including the use of interpreters as well as voice actors to protect anonymous sources. 

Reiman herself is an immigrant, born in Costa Rica and whose parents went to the U.S. to study. She became a U.S. citizen in 2010.  “I think partially the reason why I am interested in making immigration reporting palatable for people is because I’ve been through the immigration system myself, and I know how nonsensical and obtuse and crazy it can be,” she said. “So if I can help people make sense of it, that feels important to me.”

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

What Reiman is looking for in a ‘This American Life’ story: 

 I am in a place of luxury compared to my other immigration reporting colleagues that have to just jump and cover everything. I don’t feel like I have to jump and cover everything. I have more capacity and space where I can keep tabs on everything that’s happening and kind of start to put my finger on things that are changing, or we can say something bigger and hold out for that.

[That’s] in addition to all the things that we always look for in a story for “TAL,” which is we want to have a character, we want to be able to document them going through something, there has to be an action, there has to be kind of a clear “before and after” for that person. …

I want it to be human. At the end of the day, it’s all a bunch of humans doing stuff to humans. [I want listeners] to feel like they’re eye-to-eye with anyone, an immigration official or a random immigrant that they’ve never talked to. 

How Reiman conducts interviews for ‘TAL’:

 We’re really greedy with people’s time. I try to be really upfront with people when we go interview them and I’m like, “I’m going to talk to you, [and] I need at least three hours, and then maybe I’ll come back.” Often I just do it in chunks. I’ll do a three-hour interview, and then I’ll do another three-hour interview to end up with a 15-minute radio piece. 

But I don’t know how else to do it in the way that we need. Our questions are: “Tell me exactly what you thought at that time, and then what did you think next? What was the first thing that jumped into your mind? And then how did that make you feel?” We try to get people to tell it to us like a movie. Sometimes people just kind of talk that way, and that’s pretty magical. But in general, we as humans don’t talk that way. We just answer the question. So you need a lot of guidance to get that kind of audio.

On the difference between law and policy in U.S. immigration:

 A lot of the things in the immigration system don’t operate under rules as we understand them, as “legal” or “illegal” are not really terms that make sense in immigration, because so much of it is policy and practice and just like, “This is the way we’ve done it. There’s no written law that says we can’t or that we need to do it this way, but it’s just the way we’ve done it.” So a lot of the things that happen to people that are not immersed in it don’t make any sense. They’re like, “Is that legal?” And you’re like, “Well, yes, but also maybe not. But also it’s a policy. So it’s not a law, but it’s a policy.” There’s discretion built all over the system.

On adding depth and agency to people’s stories: 

 I think often when you’re reporting on stories where so many tragic and hard things are happening to a group of people in the community, if you just talk about what happened, you end up accidentally talking about what happened to them. And so it’s people that things happen to. … And I’m not saying that some of these things don’t happen to them outside of their control. That’s different. There are things happening to them that are outside of their control. 

But I think the way that you tell people’s stories, you end up kind of making them a little bit two- dimensional if you don’t also show the internal process, their choices, their thoughts. And so I think getting a sense of them as people, and really laying out how active Mari was from the beginning and how much of  a go-getter she is, and how she just doesn’t stop moving, and getting her to really explain to me who Mikael [her Venezuelan fiancé] is because I didn’t get to meet him. … That helps you see them as full people that are going through something rather than people that something is happening to, that have no real motion as characters.

On working with an interpreter:

[For the “Solving for Where” segment in the “Chaos Graph” episode,]  I did all the interviews in Spanish with Mari the whole time. And then once I had selected the clips that we were going to use, then I went with Anayansi Diaz-Cortes, who’s this amazing reporter who was also an amazing live interpreter. I don’t know how she does it because it’s a completely hard skill. I’ve tried to do it for people and I can’t do it, but she’s really good at it. And so she did the live interpretation. She was so good at not only the accuracy, but also getting the emotion and the feeling of the things that Mari was saying. So it made it super easy and it made it feel so much livelier to the English speakers once they heard it.

So that’s the way I do it. I also like to leave in little bits of Spanish sometimes untranslated, if they’re small enough you can follow, because I feel like it’s a nice little thing for people that speak the language to hear a little bit of it. Also, it’s a way for you to hear the original essence of the person, even when you have somebody else’s voice over it. We think about that a lot in the show — how to use interpreters and how to mix in voices in a way that you’re being authentic to the feeling of the person and also to the words, the content. 

On using voice actors to keep sources anonymous:

[For the “Goodbye Stranger” segment on “The Out Crowd” episode:]  It was a matter of public interest what was happening. And so we felt pretty sure that we wanted to figure out a way to do the story and we didn’t know how. We talked about all kinds of ways. Do we distort their voice? Do we pitch-shift it? How do we do it? Ultimately all of the processing we could do at that time to disrupt someone’s voice could be undone fairly easily. And if you make it to the point where it can’t be undone, it’s so robotic that you don’t get a sense of the person anymore. So we opted for working with actors.

It’s funny because I remember one of the first edits that we did of it, the feedback from somebody here was like, “Oh, I think that actor was too upset in this part. Can we get them to redo it so they’re not as upset?” And I was like, “That’s not the actor yet. That’s just the person. They’re just really upset.” 

On the unique voice of ‘This American Life’ in this moment:

 I’ve always liked the tone of “TAL.” It’s something that I’ve always felt was nice and honest and refreshing. I wasn’t as sharp of a writer when I first came [to the show] because I wasn’t used to writing in that way. There’s a lot of things that [host and co-creator Ira Glass] does really artfully. … And to the show’s credit, I’ve never felt like I couldn’t say something that I wanted to say that I had evidence for. There’s kind of a “say it with your chest” thing that I think is happening more and more in the show that I always respond to in the media that I like and that I consume. So I’m happy that we can do that.

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

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

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

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

***

The post Nadia Reiman on telling stories of immigration for ‘This American Life’ appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Marina Leigh The Black List’s Franklin Leonard on the power of ‘Based on a true story’ in Hollywood https://niemanstoryboard.org/2025/06/19/the-black-list-franklin-leonard-based-on-true-story-hollywood/ Thu, 19 Jun 2025 12:56:00 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=15650 The Black List's Franklin Leonard

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, The Black List founder and CEO Franklin Leonard joins Storyboard Editor Mark Armstrong for a conversation about the state of storytelling in Hollywood, and how true stories intersect with entertainment. 

Leonard was working as a development executive for Leonardo DiCaprio's production company when he started The Black List 20 years ago, first as a survey of the best unproduced screenplays. The list became an immediate sensation, getting passed around Hollywood, and it has since grown into a company and online community for people to upload and review unproduced screenplays and unpublished novels. 

Hundreds of scripts from the annual Black List survey have been produced as feature films and earned Academy Award nominations —including more than 50 wins and four Best Pictures: "Spotlight," "Slumdog Millionaire," "The King's Speech," and "Argo." 


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

Leonard says the business of filmmaking has changed dramatically in the past 20 years, but the principles of storytelling remain the same. And he credits the writers, explaining that “ it's not The Black List that gets these things made. It's the writing that gets these things made. It's just The Black List that gets these things read. …

" I am awed by people who can walk into a room by themselves and sit with a laptop or a legal pad or a pile of paper and will worlds into existence," he said. "It is truly godlike, and it is, I know from my own experience, brutally painful."

Many of those same screenplays and films have been "based on a true story," and they first started out as news stories, longform magazine features, podcasts, or books. ("Argo," for example, first began as a story by Joshuah Bearman in Wired magazine.) Leonard and Armstrong talk about how journalism and Hollywood can intersect  — whether it's reporters trying their hand at screenwriting, working with producers to adapt their stories for film and TV, or even becoming the main characters in films like "Spotlight," about the Boston Globe's investigation of abuse in the Catholic Church. 

The search for "IP," or intellectual property, from true stories can also backfire. For example, former football star Michael Oher sued his former guardians and criticized his depiction in and earnings from the Oscar-winning film "The Blind Side," based on writer Michael Lewis's 2006 book. 

Leonard is also a television and film producer, and he has worked in feature film development at Universal Pictures and several production companies. He’s been a juror at the Sundance, Toronto, and Mumbai Film Festivals, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, an advisor for the 2022 Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Exhibition "In America," and a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). 

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On the freedom (and pain) of being a writer:

 I am awed by people who can walk into a room by themselves and sit with a laptop or a legal pad or a pile of paper and will worlds into existence. It is truly godlike, and it is, I know from my own experience, brutally painful. … I just think it's really important that we acknowledge that. I don't think we talk enough about that. We know how hard it is to be an athlete. We know how hard it is to be an actor because we see those things in front of our faces, but we don't see what it takes to write something great. But that doesn't mean that it's any less remarkable.

One of the advantages that writers have is that you don't need anybody else to do your work. If you're a writer and you need a job, you can lock yourself in a room and write a script and sell it. And I think the ability to do that is something that I think even some writers underappreciate. There's always going to be a market for that because there's a desperate need for good stories well-told that studios can then sell to an audience. 

On The Black List’s origin and accidental virality:

 I felt like I was doing a bad job because I wasn't finding a lot of [scripts]  that I could walk into [my boss’s] office and say, "Read this." I knew that either I was bad at my job, which was finding good scripts, or the job itself was just reading and passing on mediocre-to-bad scripts. And either way it was something that I needed to solve. … I guess I kind of defaulted to this sort of strategic thinking that I picked up when I was a business analyst at McKinsey & Company right out of college. I contacted 75 of my peers anonymously via email. I said, "Send me a list of your 10 favorite unproduced screenplays. In exchange I will share with you the combined list that everybody mentioned." Copied and pasted those responses into a spreadsheet. Literally Microsoft Excel. Ran it through a pivot table, outputted it to PowerPoint, slapped a quasi-subversive name on it, and emailed it back out from my anonymous email address. I think it was Blacklist2005@hotmail or something. And it went viral in the industry almost immediately.

'Based on a true story' and IP in Hollywood:

 I think the "Based on a true story" thing is just a subset of the IP conversation, right? The reason why "Based on a true story" is compelling to Hollywood is the same reason why Marvel is compelling to Hollywood, or why people want to make the Hot Wheels movie. I know people will sort of clutch their pearls about that, but it's the same dynamic.

And the question is, how many people know this true story? That's really how valuable the element is. … It's potentially complicated. There are always rights issues, and is this part of the public domain? How are we going to treat the true-life subjects of this story, if they're still alive or if they're not alive? How are we going to handle their progeny? There are upsides, but there are also challenges. 

 This will be my big confession time: narrative nonfiction is really my go-to as a reader personally. Ryszard Kapuściński … I've read everything he's written. Two of my favorite screenplays that were on The Black List [were] the Jackie Kennedy biopic script that became the movie ["Jackie"] with Natalie Portman by Noah Oppenheim, who was a journalist himself,  and David Seidler's “The King's Speech.”  David Seidler got permission to write the story of “The King's Speech,” I believe, from the Queen Mother, but literally had to wait until she died before he was allowed to do anything with it. 

On the intersections of journalism and storytelling:

 [Director and writer Anthony Minghella said], “On some level what you want to do with any story that's based on a true thing or a novel is to deeply consume it and have reverence for it, and then you have to put it aside and retell the emotional story as accurately as you can.” Those aren't his exact words  — that was what I took from it  — but that rang really true to me. And oftentimes that's hard for a journalist because you've been educated as journalists to report the facts. And that's not the job of a screenwriter. That's not the job of a television writer. The job of a film and television writer is to take the audience on an emotional journey.

So reconciling those two things can be difficult. And to be clear, I do think that if you're [writing] a movie or television show based on a true story, there are obligations. And there are no official rules on it, but I think that tension, the goal of journalism to tell the truth and the goal of film and television to tell an emotional truth, they're often aligned, but they're very often in conflict, and navigating those things can be a real challenge, especially if you come from one camp and want to transition to the other.

Leonard’s advice to writers:

 The best advice I've ever heard for being a screenwriter is [from Scott Myers], and it's six words: read scripts, watch movies, write pages. I'm always loath to be prescriptive about, “Well, listen to this person or read this person or watch this.” I think it's just to read and watch a lot. The best writers I know are voracious readers, and they're omnivorously voracious. They read high and low. They read deeply on many, many different subjects. And I think the same thing is true of filmmakers. The filmmakers that I love watch everything.

Watch List:

Reading List: Authors, Books, Stories, and Filmmakers Mentioned 

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

Nieman Foundation 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.

***

The post The Black List’s Franklin Leonard on the power of ‘Based on a true story’ in Hollywood appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> The Black List's Franklin Leonard

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, The Black List founder and CEO Franklin Leonard joins Storyboard Editor Mark Armstrong for a conversation about the state of storytelling in Hollywood, and how true stories intersect with entertainment. 

Leonard was working as a development executive for Leonardo DiCaprio's production company when he started The Black List 20 years ago, first as a survey of the best unproduced screenplays. The list became an immediate sensation, getting passed around Hollywood, and it has since grown into a company and online community for people to upload and review unproduced screenplays and unpublished novels. 

Hundreds of scripts from the annual Black List survey have been produced as feature films and earned Academy Award nominations —including more than 50 wins and four Best Pictures: "Spotlight," "Slumdog Millionaire," "The King's Speech," and "Argo." 

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

Leonard says the business of filmmaking has changed dramatically in the past 20 years, but the principles of storytelling remain the same. And he credits the writers, explaining that “ it's not The Black List that gets these things made. It's the writing that gets these things made. It's just The Black List that gets these things read. …

" I am awed by people who can walk into a room by themselves and sit with a laptop or a legal pad or a pile of paper and will worlds into existence," he said. "It is truly godlike, and it is, I know from my own experience, brutally painful."

Many of those same screenplays and films have been "based on a true story," and they first started out as news stories, longform magazine features, podcasts, or books. ("Argo," for example, first began as a story by Joshuah Bearman in Wired magazine.) Leonard and Armstrong talk about how journalism and Hollywood can intersect  — whether it's reporters trying their hand at screenwriting, working with producers to adapt their stories for film and TV, or even becoming the main characters in films like "Spotlight," about the Boston Globe's investigation of abuse in the Catholic Church. 

The search for "IP," or intellectual property, from true stories can also backfire. For example, former football star Michael Oher sued his former guardians and criticized his depiction in and earnings from the Oscar-winning film "The Blind Side," based on writer Michael Lewis's 2006 book. 

Leonard is also a television and film producer, and he has worked in feature film development at Universal Pictures and several production companies. He’s been a juror at the Sundance, Toronto, and Mumbai Film Festivals, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, an advisor for the 2022 Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Exhibition "In America," and a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). 

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On the freedom (and pain) of being a writer:

 I am awed by people who can walk into a room by themselves and sit with a laptop or a legal pad or a pile of paper and will worlds into existence. It is truly godlike, and it is, I know from my own experience, brutally painful. … I just think it's really important that we acknowledge that. I don't think we talk enough about that. We know how hard it is to be an athlete. We know how hard it is to be an actor because we see those things in front of our faces, but we don't see what it takes to write something great. But that doesn't mean that it's any less remarkable.

One of the advantages that writers have is that you don't need anybody else to do your work. If you're a writer and you need a job, you can lock yourself in a room and write a script and sell it. And I think the ability to do that is something that I think even some writers underappreciate. There's always going to be a market for that because there's a desperate need for good stories well-told that studios can then sell to an audience. 

On The Black List’s origin and accidental virality:

 I felt like I was doing a bad job because I wasn't finding a lot of [scripts]  that I could walk into [my boss’s] office and say, "Read this." I knew that either I was bad at my job, which was finding good scripts, or the job itself was just reading and passing on mediocre-to-bad scripts. And either way it was something that I needed to solve. … I guess I kind of defaulted to this sort of strategic thinking that I picked up when I was a business analyst at McKinsey & Company right out of college. I contacted 75 of my peers anonymously via email. I said, "Send me a list of your 10 favorite unproduced screenplays. In exchange I will share with you the combined list that everybody mentioned." Copied and pasted those responses into a spreadsheet. Literally Microsoft Excel. Ran it through a pivot table, outputted it to PowerPoint, slapped a quasi-subversive name on it, and emailed it back out from my anonymous email address. I think it was Blacklist2005@hotmail or something. And it went viral in the industry almost immediately.

'Based on a true story' and IP in Hollywood:

 I think the "Based on a true story" thing is just a subset of the IP conversation, right? The reason why "Based on a true story" is compelling to Hollywood is the same reason why Marvel is compelling to Hollywood, or why people want to make the Hot Wheels movie. I know people will sort of clutch their pearls about that, but it's the same dynamic.

And the question is, how many people know this true story? That's really how valuable the element is. … It's potentially complicated. There are always rights issues, and is this part of the public domain? How are we going to treat the true-life subjects of this story, if they're still alive or if they're not alive? How are we going to handle their progeny? There are upsides, but there are also challenges. 

 This will be my big confession time: narrative nonfiction is really my go-to as a reader personally. Ryszard Kapuściński … I've read everything he's written. Two of my favorite screenplays that were on The Black List [were] the Jackie Kennedy biopic script that became the movie ["Jackie"] with Natalie Portman by Noah Oppenheim, who was a journalist himself,  and David Seidler's “The King's Speech.”  David Seidler got permission to write the story of “The King's Speech,” I believe, from the Queen Mother, but literally had to wait until she died before he was allowed to do anything with it. 

On the intersections of journalism and storytelling:

 [Director and writer Anthony Minghella said], “On some level what you want to do with any story that's based on a true thing or a novel is to deeply consume it and have reverence for it, and then you have to put it aside and retell the emotional story as accurately as you can.” Those aren't his exact words  — that was what I took from it  — but that rang really true to me. And oftentimes that's hard for a journalist because you've been educated as journalists to report the facts. And that's not the job of a screenwriter. That's not the job of a television writer. The job of a film and television writer is to take the audience on an emotional journey.

So reconciling those two things can be difficult. And to be clear, I do think that if you're [writing] a movie or television show based on a true story, there are obligations. And there are no official rules on it, but I think that tension, the goal of journalism to tell the truth and the goal of film and television to tell an emotional truth, they're often aligned, but they're very often in conflict, and navigating those things can be a real challenge, especially if you come from one camp and want to transition to the other.

Leonard’s advice to writers:

 The best advice I've ever heard for being a screenwriter is [from Scott Myers], and it's six words: read scripts, watch movies, write pages. I'm always loath to be prescriptive about, “Well, listen to this person or read this person or watch this.” I think it's just to read and watch a lot. The best writers I know are voracious readers, and they're omnivorously voracious. They read high and low. They read deeply on many, many different subjects. And I think the same thing is true of filmmakers. The filmmakers that I love watch everything.

Watch List:

Reading List: Authors, Books, Stories, and Filmmakers Mentioned 

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

Nieman Foundation 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.

***

The post The Black List’s Franklin Leonard on the power of ‘Based on a true story’ in Hollywood appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Marina Leigh Tech reporter Drew Harwell on the very online life of a 24/7 Twitch streamer https://niemanstoryboard.org/2025/06/05/washington-post-drew-harwell-twitch-streamer/ Thu, 05 Jun 2025 12:49:00 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=15572 The Washington Post's Drew Harwell

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell joins Storyboard Editor Mark Armstrong for a conversation about his feature story on “Emilycc,” a Texas-based Twitch streamer who has livestreamed her entire life, 24 hours a day, for the last three years. 

For his story, “Inside the life of a 24/7 streamer: ‘What more do you want?’,” Harwell traveled to Texas to meet Emily, and he wrote it with the understanding that he was bridging two very different worlds — the streaming community on Twitch and the readers of The Washington Post. 


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

 “A lot of people saw [the story] as extremely bleak," Harwell said. "And I think it is bleak in a way, when you think a lot of the story is about the loneliness of our culture. I found it also interesting [that] some viewers of Emily read it and thought, ‘This is more depressing than it needs to be. It's too dramatic — you know, her life is fine. She's playing video games all day. What's the big problem?’”

Emily later read the Post story aloud on her livestream, and Harwell said she acknowledged some of the loneliness and isolation she feels. “And I thought that made her a great character in a way, because she was raw about her own emotions in a way that you don't necessarily always see from people.”

Harwell joined The Washington Post in 2014, and his work has been honored by the Gerald Loeb Awards (2024) and the George Polk Awards (2021). Before joining the Post, Harwell wrote for the Tampa Bay Times, immersing himself in the Florida paper’s narrative tradition. 

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On walking his story subjects through the reporting process: 

 I had the conversation with [Emily] of everything that goes into this, which is often a really uncomfortable conversation with sources because the news reporting situation is so unusual for people. They find it extremely weird to have somebody kind of around them jotting notes in a notepad. So I always try to validate their feelings for how weird it might seem, but to also remind them, that at the end of this, there's going to be a story, [and] people will be able to understand your life in a new way. 

I walked her through this whole conversation, and it was funny because she was completely normal with it in a way that no other source has really been, because she has been watched for three years. So for me to be there was just one more set of eyeballs in the stack of eyeballs that's already on her all the time. 

As we went through the writing process and fact-checking, and the “no surprises” calls, she was game to talk about these really uncomfortable moments in her life with her parents, and with her loneliness and her isolation and her sadness, and the things I was hesitant about bringing up, because some people don't want those in the paper. She was all for it because she had basically opened herself to that.

On being livestreamed while reporting: 

All of my interviews with her were streamed. So [during] my preview calls with her, I could see the chat watching my questions to her in real time, and I would ask a question and somebody would say, ‘Oh, that's a stupid question.’ ... And I'm like, oh my God, I shouldn't even watch this. 

There's actually one moment where she stepped away to go to the bathroom, and I was just kind of sitting at her desk and the camera was on me. People were watching me just kind of sit there by myself, and I was watching the screen and they started talking to me. So I was like, OK, I guess I should be talking back.

I was probably streamed for 30 seconds in isolation, and I could feel my face just getting warm. Like I was flushing. And it was actually great, because I got this understanding of what her life is like 24 hours a day for multiple years.

On being a journalist in an era of media distrust:

 People talk a lot about distrust in the media and how that's changed over the years. I think some of that is a function of bad things that have happened from journalists over the years. We are not perfect. But also, we as an institution have been attacked and criticized from a partisan perspective for many years, right? We've had this persona placed onto us, and we haven't really done a good job of necessarily just saying that we're all just a bunch of random normies basically.

We have notepads. We go out and ask people questions. We are trying to be a reflection of what we see. We're just people like you. We're just observers. I think it is generational, but also there are some throughlines in terms of when people think of the legacy media, the mainstream media, they may think of a bunch of elite Ivy-trained people who never leave their bubble and may parachute in and give this story that is wrapped up in their own biases. And there's certainly that in journalism. But there are also a lot of people who are just curious and just want to tell good stories. 

On narrative and story length:

 Most of my stories are not 100 inches [around 4,000 words]. Most of them are a quarter of that. And I think you can still do great narrative in there. Narrative is not an inch count. It's not a “disappear for six months” thing. It's a thing you can apply in every story. It's the way you ask questions, it's the way you write things, it’s the value you place on real-world stuff: going to the place, learning the details, seeing everything, asking the name of the dog, getting the color of the car, really caring about those details. You should apply those in the ways that they work as much as you can, because that's what makes storytelling fun. That color and nuance, you can't replace that.

On the value of compelling storytelling:

 Being at a writer's paper like [the Tampa Bay Times], it could start to feel like, Oh, are we all just navel-gazing? But people really love those stories. I really love those stories. As a reporter, to be doing those, they were always so fun and those were the kinds of stories that stuck with people.

Reading List: Authors, Books, and Stories Mentioned 

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

Nieman Foundation 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.

***

The post Tech reporter Drew Harwell on the very online life of a 24/7 Twitch streamer appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> The Washington Post's Drew Harwell

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell joins Storyboard Editor Mark Armstrong for a conversation about his feature story on “Emilycc,” a Texas-based Twitch streamer who has livestreamed her entire life, 24 hours a day, for the last three years. 

For his story, “Inside the life of a 24/7 streamer: ‘What more do you want?’,” Harwell traveled to Texas to meet Emily, and he wrote it with the understanding that he was bridging two very different worlds — the streaming community on Twitch and the readers of The Washington Post. 

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

 “A lot of people saw [the story] as extremely bleak," Harwell said. "And I think it is bleak in a way, when you think a lot of the story is about the loneliness of our culture. I found it also interesting [that] some viewers of Emily read it and thought, ‘This is more depressing than it needs to be. It's too dramatic — you know, her life is fine. She's playing video games all day. What's the big problem?’”

Emily later read the Post story aloud on her livestream, and Harwell said she acknowledged some of the loneliness and isolation she feels. “And I thought that made her a great character in a way, because she was raw about her own emotions in a way that you don't necessarily always see from people.”

Harwell joined The Washington Post in 2014, and his work has been honored by the Gerald Loeb Awards (2024) and the George Polk Awards (2021). Before joining the Post, Harwell wrote for the Tampa Bay Times, immersing himself in the Florida paper’s narrative tradition. 

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On walking his story subjects through the reporting process: 

 I had the conversation with [Emily] of everything that goes into this, which is often a really uncomfortable conversation with sources because the news reporting situation is so unusual for people. They find it extremely weird to have somebody kind of around them jotting notes in a notepad. So I always try to validate their feelings for how weird it might seem, but to also remind them, that at the end of this, there's going to be a story, [and] people will be able to understand your life in a new way. 

I walked her through this whole conversation, and it was funny because she was completely normal with it in a way that no other source has really been, because she has been watched for three years. So for me to be there was just one more set of eyeballs in the stack of eyeballs that's already on her all the time. 

As we went through the writing process and fact-checking, and the “no surprises” calls, she was game to talk about these really uncomfortable moments in her life with her parents, and with her loneliness and her isolation and her sadness, and the things I was hesitant about bringing up, because some people don't want those in the paper. She was all for it because she had basically opened herself to that.

On being livestreamed while reporting: 

All of my interviews with her were streamed. So [during] my preview calls with her, I could see the chat watching my questions to her in real time, and I would ask a question and somebody would say, ‘Oh, that's a stupid question.’ ... And I'm like, oh my God, I shouldn't even watch this. 

There's actually one moment where she stepped away to go to the bathroom, and I was just kind of sitting at her desk and the camera was on me. People were watching me just kind of sit there by myself, and I was watching the screen and they started talking to me. So I was like, OK, I guess I should be talking back.

I was probably streamed for 30 seconds in isolation, and I could feel my face just getting warm. Like I was flushing. And it was actually great, because I got this understanding of what her life is like 24 hours a day for multiple years.

On being a journalist in an era of media distrust:

 People talk a lot about distrust in the media and how that's changed over the years. I think some of that is a function of bad things that have happened from journalists over the years. We are not perfect. But also, we as an institution have been attacked and criticized from a partisan perspective for many years, right? We've had this persona placed onto us, and we haven't really done a good job of necessarily just saying that we're all just a bunch of random normies basically.

We have notepads. We go out and ask people questions. We are trying to be a reflection of what we see. We're just people like you. We're just observers. I think it is generational, but also there are some throughlines in terms of when people think of the legacy media, the mainstream media, they may think of a bunch of elite Ivy-trained people who never leave their bubble and may parachute in and give this story that is wrapped up in their own biases. And there's certainly that in journalism. But there are also a lot of people who are just curious and just want to tell good stories. 

On narrative and story length:

 Most of my stories are not 100 inches [around 4,000 words]. Most of them are a quarter of that. And I think you can still do great narrative in there. Narrative is not an inch count. It's not a “disappear for six months” thing. It's a thing you can apply in every story. It's the way you ask questions, it's the way you write things, it’s the value you place on real-world stuff: going to the place, learning the details, seeing everything, asking the name of the dog, getting the color of the car, really caring about those details. You should apply those in the ways that they work as much as you can, because that's what makes storytelling fun. That color and nuance, you can't replace that.

On the value of compelling storytelling:

 Being at a writer's paper like [the Tampa Bay Times], it could start to feel like, Oh, are we all just navel-gazing? But people really love those stories. I really love those stories. As a reporter, to be doing those, they were always so fun and those were the kinds of stories that stuck with people.

Reading List: Authors, Books, and Stories Mentioned 

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

Nieman Foundation 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.

***

The post Tech reporter Drew Harwell on the very online life of a 24/7 Twitch streamer appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Marina Leigh Journalist Kim Cross on reconstructed narratives and the women who led a cycling revolution in Afghanistan https://niemanstoryboard.org/2025/05/08/kim-cross-narratives-women-cycling-afghanistan/ Thu, 08 May 2025 12:45:18 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=15436 Kim Cross. Photo by Robert Poe

On this week's episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, New York Times bestselling author, journalist, and athlete Kim Cross joins Storyboard Editor Mark Armstrong for a conversation about reporting for narrative nonfiction — focusing on reconstructed narratives and her feature story for Bicycling magazine, "The Alchemists," about the Afghan women who broke gender barriers in cycling before the Taliban took over their country. 

"They, as teenage girls, had convinced their culture to change its mind about the fact that women were not allowed to ride bicycles," Cross said.


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

Cross is a Storyboard contributor and the author of books including the bestselling "What Stands in a Storm," "The Stahl House," and "In Light of All Darkness." Her stories have appeared in The New York Times, Outside, Bicycling, Garden & Gun, and ESPN, among other publications. Her work has been recognized in “Best of” lists by The New York Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, The Sunday Long Read, Longform, Apple News Audio, and Best American Sports Writing. Cross also teaches feature writing through Harvard Extension School, and she's teaching a workshop on reconstructed narratives May 28-June 1 in Archer City, Texas.

Cross's 2024 story “The Alchemists” opens with 18-year-old Reihana Mohammadi going on her last bike ride in Afghanistan before fleeing the country as the Taliban was taking over. Cross recounts how she reported and wrote the scene as a flashback, using interviews, videos, and even Google Earth to pull out key details. 

She also tells Armstrong about the challenge of being a freelance journalist. At a time when pay rates remain extremely low and publications have either slashed their freelance budgets or disappeared entirely, Cross says creativity and self-care are important tools when it comes to deciding which projects to pursue. 

Excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On the correspondence between writing and mountain biking:

I do think about momentum and pacing a lot in my writing, and I think that just like cycling, you don't want to just go one speed. It depends on the terrain. You have to sometimes push really hard and then take a recovery interval. And with narrative, I think that if you are just going all out, full speed, you can really tire the reader.

And so I try to build in little breaks for maybe a moment of exposition to catch your breath after a dramatic scene. And I think that the result is the reader is pulled through the story. 

On 'The Alchemists' and doing the story justice:

[“The Alchemists”] was a story not just about cycling, but about women's rights and about women helping other women. So there was this constellation of women outside of Afghanistan who were working together to try to make it possible for these women in Afghanistan to get out safely. I started reporting it, and I have to admit I couldn't fit the Taliban and [Cross's book project on] a child kidnapping and murder in my brain at the same time. When I wrote the story, it just wasn't good enough. … I knew that when I turned it in, and we ended up letting it sit for a while. And I felt enormously guilty about this.

I felt like I was letting my editor down and I was letting the women down who had helped me. It sat for about two years. In that time, the story sort of changed. Initially, it had been focused on the evacuation, and then after the evacuation kind of became old news, then it called for a total rewrite and a refocusing on what was lost when these women had to leave their country.

And it was this legacy that they had built. They, as teenage girls, had convinced their culture to change its mind about the fact that women were not allowed to ride bicycles. And they did it in a really lovely way, not by opposing the culture, but by recruiting men as their allies and having conversations and saying, you know, it's not just about a sport, it's actually this vehicle for emancipation. 

On describing things you yourself didn’t see:

I call it a reconstructed narrative, where you have to reconstruct scenes that, as a reporter, you are not able to witness. Often it starts with this sequence that I call interviewing for narrative — I did a piece about this for Storyboard because I wanted to break it down for my writing students. 

You have to first identify your character, and once you identify the character, you have to then ask really open-ended questions to understand, well, what happened? What were the main beats of the story? … How did it affect you? How did it begin? How did it go? How did it end? And then I tighten it down and start working on a timeline.

I think about pivotal moments and defining moments. … I think of a pivotal moment as a moment when something happens, usually externally to the character that changes what happens next. There's a cause-and-effect relationship between that pivotal moment and something they choose to do next or something that happens to them next.

A defining moment is more internal. It's like an a-ha moment when the character realizes something, and that realization causes them to change the course of action. So I try to identify those and then I start structuring them into a timeline because I think that even though the story doesn't need to be sequenced in chronological order, I need a timeline so I can refer to flashbacks in an accurate way, and I then start building into that timeline external events to the narrative that might give the reader some sense of time and place.

On thinking outside herself:

In reporting, [I focus on] radical acts of empathy and not just listening really hard to someone who you might disagree with, with the intention of understanding and not arguing. I've learned to try to interrogate what I think I know about something and [ask myself]: How do I know what I think I know? How might someone else think they know something completely different, and how can both be kind of true? There's so much that has to do with point of view and context.

That has helped me write scenes with [a] stronger point of view and … seeing the actual world, the story world, through the eyes of a character. And not just feeling what they feel, but looking at it with the logic that they look at it with. So I think that fact-checking my own assumptions has led to wonderful discoveries. Where, “Oh, I thought I knew that,” but then it has opened doors to worlds upon worlds. I think patience is something that we don't always give enough credit to, or for, in that again, sometimes people are not ready and sometimes the story is not ready. You have to respect that and back away and give it some space and some time to marinate. I think that that's really hard, especially when you're in the hustle, and that's why having multiple things going on at once is so important.

Reading List: Authors, Books, and Stories Mentioned 

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

Nieman Foundation 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.

The post Journalist Kim Cross on reconstructed narratives and the women who led a cycling revolution in Afghanistan appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Kim Cross. Photo by Robert Poe

On this week's episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, New York Times bestselling author, journalist, and athlete Kim Cross joins Storyboard Editor Mark Armstrong for a conversation about reporting for narrative nonfiction — focusing on reconstructed narratives and her feature story for Bicycling magazine, "The Alchemists," about the Afghan women who broke gender barriers in cycling before the Taliban took over their country. 

"They, as teenage girls, had convinced their culture to change its mind about the fact that women were not allowed to ride bicycles," Cross said.

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

Cross is a Storyboard contributor and the author of books including the bestselling "What Stands in a Storm," "The Stahl House," and "In Light of All Darkness." Her stories have appeared in The New York Times, Outside, Bicycling, Garden & Gun, and ESPN, among other publications. Her work has been recognized in “Best of” lists by The New York Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, The Sunday Long Read, Longform, Apple News Audio, and Best American Sports Writing. Cross also teaches feature writing through Harvard Extension School, and she's teaching a workshop on reconstructed narratives May 28-June 1 in Archer City, Texas.

Cross's 2024 story “The Alchemists” opens with 18-year-old Reihana Mohammadi going on her last bike ride in Afghanistan before fleeing the country as the Taliban was taking over. Cross recounts how she reported and wrote the scene as a flashback, using interviews, videos, and even Google Earth to pull out key details. 

She also tells Armstrong about the challenge of being a freelance journalist. At a time when pay rates remain extremely low and publications have either slashed their freelance budgets or disappeared entirely, Cross says creativity and self-care are important tools when it comes to deciding which projects to pursue. 

Excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On the correspondence between writing and mountain biking:

I do think about momentum and pacing a lot in my writing, and I think that just like cycling, you don't want to just go one speed. It depends on the terrain. You have to sometimes push really hard and then take a recovery interval. And with narrative, I think that if you are just going all out, full speed, you can really tire the reader.

And so I try to build in little breaks for maybe a moment of exposition to catch your breath after a dramatic scene. And I think that the result is the reader is pulled through the story. 

On 'The Alchemists' and doing the story justice:

[“The Alchemists”] was a story not just about cycling, but about women's rights and about women helping other women. So there was this constellation of women outside of Afghanistan who were working together to try to make it possible for these women in Afghanistan to get out safely. I started reporting it, and I have to admit I couldn't fit the Taliban and [Cross's book project on] a child kidnapping and murder in my brain at the same time. When I wrote the story, it just wasn't good enough. … I knew that when I turned it in, and we ended up letting it sit for a while. And I felt enormously guilty about this.

I felt like I was letting my editor down and I was letting the women down who had helped me. It sat for about two years. In that time, the story sort of changed. Initially, it had been focused on the evacuation, and then after the evacuation kind of became old news, then it called for a total rewrite and a refocusing on what was lost when these women had to leave their country.

And it was this legacy that they had built. They, as teenage girls, had convinced their culture to change its mind about the fact that women were not allowed to ride bicycles. And they did it in a really lovely way, not by opposing the culture, but by recruiting men as their allies and having conversations and saying, you know, it's not just about a sport, it's actually this vehicle for emancipation. 

On describing things you yourself didn’t see:

I call it a reconstructed narrative, where you have to reconstruct scenes that, as a reporter, you are not able to witness. Often it starts with this sequence that I call interviewing for narrative — I did a piece about this for Storyboard because I wanted to break it down for my writing students. 

You have to first identify your character, and once you identify the character, you have to then ask really open-ended questions to understand, well, what happened? What were the main beats of the story? … How did it affect you? How did it begin? How did it go? How did it end? And then I tighten it down and start working on a timeline.

I think about pivotal moments and defining moments. … I think of a pivotal moment as a moment when something happens, usually externally to the character that changes what happens next. There's a cause-and-effect relationship between that pivotal moment and something they choose to do next or something that happens to them next.

A defining moment is more internal. It's like an a-ha moment when the character realizes something, and that realization causes them to change the course of action. So I try to identify those and then I start structuring them into a timeline because I think that even though the story doesn't need to be sequenced in chronological order, I need a timeline so I can refer to flashbacks in an accurate way, and I then start building into that timeline external events to the narrative that might give the reader some sense of time and place.

On thinking outside herself:

In reporting, [I focus on] radical acts of empathy and not just listening really hard to someone who you might disagree with, with the intention of understanding and not arguing. I've learned to try to interrogate what I think I know about something and [ask myself]: How do I know what I think I know? How might someone else think they know something completely different, and how can both be kind of true? There's so much that has to do with point of view and context.

That has helped me write scenes with [a] stronger point of view and … seeing the actual world, the story world, through the eyes of a character. And not just feeling what they feel, but looking at it with the logic that they look at it with. So I think that fact-checking my own assumptions has led to wonderful discoveries. Where, “Oh, I thought I knew that,” but then it has opened doors to worlds upon worlds. I think patience is something that we don't always give enough credit to, or for, in that again, sometimes people are not ready and sometimes the story is not ready. You have to respect that and back away and give it some space and some time to marinate. I think that that's really hard, especially when you're in the hustle, and that's why having multiple things going on at once is so important.

Reading List: Authors, Books, and Stories Mentioned 

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

Nieman Foundation 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.

The post Journalist Kim Cross on reconstructed narratives and the women who led a cycling revolution in Afghanistan appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Marina Leigh Pulitzer winner Mary Schmich’s journey from newspapers to podcasts with ‘Division Street Revisited’ https://niemanstoryboard.org/2025/04/24/mary-schmich-podcasts-division-street-revisited/ Thu, 24 Apr 2025 13:02:43 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/?p=15349 Mary Schmich

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, Storyboard Editor Mark Armstrong welcomes Mary Schmich, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former columnist for the Chicago Tribune and host of the podcast "Division Street Revisited," which follows the stories of seven people featured in Studs Terkel's 1967 oral history book, "Division Street: America." 

Schmich teamed up with former colleague Melissa Harris, who came up with the idea for the show, and a group of acclaimed journalists to research and produce the podcast. In Terkel's original book, the people profiled used pseudonyms — so Schmich, Harris, and the team tracked down their real identities and surviving family members, and pulled audio recordings from a recently digitized archive of Terkel's work. Terkel himself was a legend of American (and Chicago) journalism, for oral histories including "Division Street," "The Good War," "Hard Times," and "Working."  


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

Schmich's career spans art and journalism 

Schmich has won the Pulitzer Prize and the Studs Terkel Award for her work as a columnist at the Chicago Tribune. She grew up in Georgia and Arizona as the oldest of eight children, and she graduated from Pomona College and attended journalism school at Stanford. From 1985 until 2021, she worked at the Chicago Tribune, where she was a features writer, a national correspondent and, for 29 years, a columnist. "Over the years, I cultivated three essential mantras, which [were]: Panic is my muse. Deadlines crowd out doubt. It always gets done," Schmich said.  

One day in 1997, Schmich sat down to write her column and imagined a graduation speech that she'd give, with the timeless advice: "Wear sunscreen." Through a twist of fate, director Baz Luhrmann put her speech to music and transformed it into a worldwide hit song in the late '90s. 

On today's episode of Storyboard, Schmich delves into the importance of “Division Street Revisited,” the histories she and her collaborators traced, and the larger communities that these individuals’ stories represent. She also talks about Terkel's approach to interviews, the difference between reporting for print and for podcasts, the disappearing role of the newspaper metro columnist, and the storytelling lessons she picked up from writing the serialized “Brenda Starr” comic strip from 1985 to 2010.

Today, Schmich also teaches yoga and co-hosts the annual “Songs of Good Cheer” singalong at the Old Town School of Folk Music. She was a 1996 Nieman Fellow at Harvard.

Excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

Advice to journalists and producers on making a podcast:

There's two categories of advice, right? One, there's the journalistic, artistic advice, and two, there's the ‘get real’ advice. It's not easy to make a podcast — a narrative storytelling podcast. It's not easy to find the money to do it. It's not cheap if people are going to get paid and if you’re going to have people who are really good at all the elements that you need to make the thing good. So a certain realism about it is helpful. On a journalistic, artistic level, the advice would be not all that different from the advice you'd give  to someone about telling any good story. What are the elements that make a good story? It's the same essential elements, right?

You've got character. You've got setting. You've got action. You've got meaning. How do you weave those? It's always a puzzle. Which is part of the fun.

On the medium of podcasting:

I like it a lot. It's just fun to learn something new. To tell a story in a somewhat different way. To be more alert to sound. There are things you can convey with sound that when you're just writing them down, you have to try to do with words. If the birds are chirping in the background, or the guy out front is banging in the dumpster, you have to describe that if you're writing it in a column. In the podcast, it's just there and people can get the vibe without your having to make up the words. There's a lot to be said for intonation, right? People's voices carry so much that when you're just writing them down as quotes, it’s different.

On Studs Terkel's approach to interviewing: 

 I admired the energy that he brought to the conversation, that simultaneously left space for the person  to talk. And there is an art in that, to be an active listener, to talk but not too much. All of these interviews are fun to listen to because Studs is clearly having fun. You just hear him cackling away. He had some questions like … "If you were God, how would you change the world?" "What are you afraid of?" I think a lot about that question. … Somebody should do a podcast just called "What Are You Afraid Of?" And go talk to people. 

[In Schmich's own work,] I don't remember ever quite that bluntly saying, "What are you afraid of?" I mean, I'm always looking for “What are you afraid of?” I'm often aiming for specifics and I like to give people plenty of space to just say what they're thinking and feeling. But the value of the blunt, broad question was brought home to me by what Studs does.

On her journey to column writing and her essential mantras:

I came into column writing at a point in my life where I didn't really think I wanted to write a column. When I was younger, I did. I was very full of opinions. And then I had to be — got to be — a real reporter for a long time. I covered the South for the Tribune. And I came to just understand how little I knew and not trust myself to have huge opinions on whatever the news of the day was. Because I came to see that if you have not reported the news, you don't understand the news. Even when you do report it, you're having trouble understanding it. But wow, you're just reading about it and reacting? What are you talking about?  

So, I mean, I always had an approach to column writing, which was a melding of opinion and storytelling. Because I do think the stories you choose to tell express ideas, express viewpoints. Sometimes better than the hammer-on-the-head opinion. 

One thing I got from column writing — a really important thing — was how to write tight and short. Because for most of my time at the Tribune, the column was literally in a box. And you couldn't break out of the box. Every now and then you could. But you had to figure out, what can I say in the space and time I have today? Over the years, I cultivated three essential mantras, which [were]: Panic is my muse. Deadlines crowd out doubt. It always gets done. 

On writing the ‘Brenda Starr’ comic strip:

I started writing a comic strip having no clue what I was doing. I learned along the way. But once again, I think all of these forms of storytelling are different and they require different skills. And yet, a story's a story. So with writing the comic strip, first of all, there's no reporting. You’re just making stuff up, right? But I think on some level it did help me to visualize stories. Obviously I wasn't doing the drawing, but I had to write in a way that would allow the artist to draw. I don't know how to get too lofty about that, but I do think it probably accentuated my sense of how characters and dialogue help to carry a story. 

On the global phenomenon that was 'Wear Sunscreen': 

 This is a column I wrote in an afternoon, in a panic, because I had nothing else to write. So, we're going back to my "deadlines crowd out doubt, panic is my muse, it always gets done" philosophy, right? I just thought, well, it's graduation time, I'll write this fake graduation speech. M&M's and a cappuccino and a deadline, and I wrote it.

And I remember thinking, Oh, I kind of like that. I wouldn't always think that, but I kind of like that. And then it just took on this unbelievable life of its own. It was early days of the internet and it went viral before I think “viral” was even a term. Attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, which helped to elevate it, because now it's attached to a famous, cult famous, writer. And then the fact that it wasn't really him elevated it a little more. 

So now you've got the whole element of, Oh my God, look at this evil internet, what it can do, the lies it can tell. And then Baz Luhrmann swoops in and puts it over some music that he'd used in his movie "Romeo and Juliet." Turns it into a spoken-word piece.

Originally around seven minutes. Did well in Australia. And then some radio station cut it down to five minutes. … And then The New York Times did a little blurb. I mean, the steps in this are fascinating, the steps to something rising in the cultural consciousness. 

Then it was off. And all of a sudden, it was just everywhere. Part of what I take from it is, just do your work, because you never know what's going to come of it. 

I always say there was a ghost in that piece. There was some unspoken stuff in that piece that people felt. 

Reading List: Authors, Stories, and Books Mentioned

Listening List

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

Nieman Foundation 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.

The post Pulitzer winner Mary Schmich’s journey from newspapers to podcasts with ‘Division Street Revisited’ appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Mary Schmich

On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, Storyboard Editor Mark Armstrong welcomes Mary Schmich, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former columnist for the Chicago Tribune and host of the podcast "Division Street Revisited," which follows the stories of seven people featured in Studs Terkel's 1967 oral history book, "Division Street: America." 

Schmich teamed up with former colleague Melissa Harris, who came up with the idea for the show, and a group of acclaimed journalists to research and produce the podcast. In Terkel's original book, the people profiled used pseudonyms — so Schmich, Harris, and the team tracked down their real identities and surviving family members, and pulled audio recordings from a recently digitized archive of Terkel's work. Terkel himself was a legend of American (and Chicago) journalism, for oral histories including "Division Street," "The Good War," "Hard Times," and "Working."  

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Schmich's career spans art and journalism 

Schmich has won the Pulitzer Prize and the Studs Terkel Award for her work as a columnist at the Chicago Tribune. She grew up in Georgia and Arizona as the oldest of eight children, and she graduated from Pomona College and attended journalism school at Stanford. From 1985 until 2021, she worked at the Chicago Tribune, where she was a features writer, a national correspondent and, for 29 years, a columnist. "Over the years, I cultivated three essential mantras, which [were]: Panic is my muse. Deadlines crowd out doubt. It always gets done," Schmich said.  

One day in 1997, Schmich sat down to write her column and imagined a graduation speech that she'd give, with the timeless advice: "Wear sunscreen." Through a twist of fate, director Baz Luhrmann put her speech to music and transformed it into a worldwide hit song in the late '90s. 

On today's episode of Storyboard, Schmich delves into the importance of “Division Street Revisited,” the histories she and her collaborators traced, and the larger communities that these individuals’ stories represent. She also talks about Terkel's approach to interviews, the difference between reporting for print and for podcasts, the disappearing role of the newspaper metro columnist, and the storytelling lessons she picked up from writing the serialized “Brenda Starr” comic strip from 1985 to 2010.

Today, Schmich also teaches yoga and co-hosts the annual “Songs of Good Cheer” singalong at the Old Town School of Folk Music. She was a 1996 Nieman Fellow at Harvard.

Excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

Advice to journalists and producers on making a podcast:

There's two categories of advice, right? One, there's the journalistic, artistic advice, and two, there's the ‘get real’ advice. It's not easy to make a podcast — a narrative storytelling podcast. It's not easy to find the money to do it. It's not cheap if people are going to get paid and if you’re going to have people who are really good at all the elements that you need to make the thing good. So a certain realism about it is helpful. On a journalistic, artistic level, the advice would be not all that different from the advice you'd give  to someone about telling any good story. What are the elements that make a good story? It's the same essential elements, right?

You've got character. You've got setting. You've got action. You've got meaning. How do you weave those? It's always a puzzle. Which is part of the fun.

On the medium of podcasting:

I like it a lot. It's just fun to learn something new. To tell a story in a somewhat different way. To be more alert to sound. There are things you can convey with sound that when you're just writing them down, you have to try to do with words. If the birds are chirping in the background, or the guy out front is banging in the dumpster, you have to describe that if you're writing it in a column. In the podcast, it's just there and people can get the vibe without your having to make up the words. There's a lot to be said for intonation, right? People's voices carry so much that when you're just writing them down as quotes, it’s different.

On Studs Terkel's approach to interviewing: 

 I admired the energy that he brought to the conversation, that simultaneously left space for the person  to talk. And there is an art in that, to be an active listener, to talk but not too much. All of these interviews are fun to listen to because Studs is clearly having fun. You just hear him cackling away. He had some questions like … "If you were God, how would you change the world?" "What are you afraid of?" I think a lot about that question. … Somebody should do a podcast just called "What Are You Afraid Of?" And go talk to people. 

[In Schmich's own work,] I don't remember ever quite that bluntly saying, "What are you afraid of?" I mean, I'm always looking for “What are you afraid of?” I'm often aiming for specifics and I like to give people plenty of space to just say what they're thinking and feeling. But the value of the blunt, broad question was brought home to me by what Studs does.

On her journey to column writing and her essential mantras:

I came into column writing at a point in my life where I didn't really think I wanted to write a column. When I was younger, I did. I was very full of opinions. And then I had to be — got to be — a real reporter for a long time. I covered the South for the Tribune. And I came to just understand how little I knew and not trust myself to have huge opinions on whatever the news of the day was. Because I came to see that if you have not reported the news, you don't understand the news. Even when you do report it, you're having trouble understanding it. But wow, you're just reading about it and reacting? What are you talking about?  

So, I mean, I always had an approach to column writing, which was a melding of opinion and storytelling. Because I do think the stories you choose to tell express ideas, express viewpoints. Sometimes better than the hammer-on-the-head opinion. 

One thing I got from column writing — a really important thing — was how to write tight and short. Because for most of my time at the Tribune, the column was literally in a box. And you couldn't break out of the box. Every now and then you could. But you had to figure out, what can I say in the space and time I have today? Over the years, I cultivated three essential mantras, which [were]: Panic is my muse. Deadlines crowd out doubt. It always gets done. 

On writing the ‘Brenda Starr’ comic strip:

I started writing a comic strip having no clue what I was doing. I learned along the way. But once again, I think all of these forms of storytelling are different and they require different skills. And yet, a story's a story. So with writing the comic strip, first of all, there's no reporting. You’re just making stuff up, right? But I think on some level it did help me to visualize stories. Obviously I wasn't doing the drawing, but I had to write in a way that would allow the artist to draw. I don't know how to get too lofty about that, but I do think it probably accentuated my sense of how characters and dialogue help to carry a story. 

On the global phenomenon that was 'Wear Sunscreen': 

 This is a column I wrote in an afternoon, in a panic, because I had nothing else to write. So, we're going back to my "deadlines crowd out doubt, panic is my muse, it always gets done" philosophy, right? I just thought, well, it's graduation time, I'll write this fake graduation speech. M&M's and a cappuccino and a deadline, and I wrote it.

And I remember thinking, Oh, I kind of like that. I wouldn't always think that, but I kind of like that. And then it just took on this unbelievable life of its own. It was early days of the internet and it went viral before I think “viral” was even a term. Attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, which helped to elevate it, because now it's attached to a famous, cult famous, writer. And then the fact that it wasn't really him elevated it a little more. 

So now you've got the whole element of, Oh my God, look at this evil internet, what it can do, the lies it can tell. And then Baz Luhrmann swoops in and puts it over some music that he'd used in his movie "Romeo and Juliet." Turns it into a spoken-word piece.

Originally around seven minutes. Did well in Australia. And then some radio station cut it down to five minutes. … And then The New York Times did a little blurb. I mean, the steps in this are fascinating, the steps to something rising in the cultural consciousness. 

Then it was off. And all of a sudden, it was just everywhere. Part of what I take from it is, just do your work, because you never know what's going to come of it. 

I always say there was a ghost in that piece. There was some unspoken stuff in that piece that people felt. 

Reading List: Authors, Stories, and Books Mentioned

Listening List

Show Credits

Nieman Storyboard podcast

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

Nieman Foundation 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.

The post Pulitzer winner Mary Schmich’s journey from newspapers to podcasts with ‘Division Street Revisited’ appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Marina Leigh