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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

On the challenge of constructing an oral history

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

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

On structuring the story and subplots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advice for writers and journalists considering an oral history project

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

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

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

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

Reading List: Authors, Stories, and Books Mentioned 

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

Show credits

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

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

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

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

On determining the length and format of her projects

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

On what dictates her role for each project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listening and Watching List:

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

Show credits

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

[ 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 

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

Show Credits

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

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

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

***

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

Author and essayist Grace Talusan is part of a cohort of professors who teach one of Brown University’s most popular humanities classes: “Introduction to Creative Nonfiction.” She encourages her students to find joy in essay writing, assigning exercises that spark creativity.

But before the holiday break, tragedy gripped the Brown campus in Rhode Island, as a gunman opened fire on students who were prepping for exams, killing two and wounding nine others. I interviewed Grace about her teaching and writing before the shooting, checking in with her again in the hours and weeks after. Still reeling, she is now focusing on helping students use writing to process and try to heal.

In the spring, Grace plans to bring back a course called “Writing Wonder, Joy, and Awe,” which she created a few years ago as a direct response to the constant barrage of news that her students lived with — wars, pandemics, climate disasters like fires and floods. She designed the class for students to have a place to “rest their eyes and turn their attention, even for just minutes a day, to the beauty all around us.” 

“I’m still in shock about the mass shooting, just a block from where I teach, and processing the terrible loss and violence,” Grace told me. “When I teach this class in the spring, I hope it can be a respite for our students.”        

Grace created “Writing Wonder, Joy, and Awe” around nonfiction from Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ross Gay, and Brian Doyle, writers who pay attention to wonder and delight in some of their writing. The class begins with the exercise in Gay’s “Book of Delights” that became the book itself: “Write in your notebook for 30 minutes a day about a delight.”

Grace has written about her own experiences of delight, like making yogurt, as well as traumatic events in her life. She is the author of “The Body Papers,” which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction. She serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle (this year as chair of the Autobiography committee), which recently announced its longlists.

In 2024, Grace published “How to Drown in America,” about an incident with her then-boyfriend Alonso (now her husband), when they found themselves in a near-death experience while on a canoe excursion in Maine. As the only non-white people on the trip — surrounded by dozens of people bearing Confederate flags — the couple almost died together that day in the Saco River.

For years, Grace tried to write the story of their drowning. First, she tried it as fiction. Then, she shared it as a part of an oral performance on stage. But over time, her perspective about the experience deepened into an idea for a more multilayered essay.

The piece is not just a survival story. It examines her own privilege as an Asian American woman who is married to a Black American man. Time gave her essay perspective and depth. Grace uses this insightful perspective in her nonfiction. 

My writing groups refer to this writing technique as “the older wiser narrator.” In a personal essay, the older wiser narrator reflects back on memories and moments with insight, perception, and hindsight on events that the younger “in-the-moment” self experienced. An essay can effectively draw from both voices. 

Here is an example from Grace’s piece, with her as the older wiser narrator:

No one uses the term, “melting pot,” anymore, but people said this word aloud around me all the time and I believed that if I continued being a good immigrant kid, America would reward me. I was not ready to discard this delusion in my early 20s. I still wanted to believe that race didn’t matter.

And then there is Grace as the in-the-moment (younger) narrator, inside the scene:

We were a half-hour into our river adventure, our canoe floating on the Saco River, when the first Confederate flag — attached by a metal pole to a canoe shared by two white men with crewcuts and sunburned noses — glided beside us. They were so close I could have touched their freckled arms. I saw Alonso brace himself, but no one said a word; the twangy music from the other canoe radio was the only sound. Alonso paused his paddling and the canoe with the flag sped ahead on the current. 

In our conversation below, which has been edited for length and clarity, Grace offers more ideas to write creatively, and find joy and healing in the practice. 

In your essays, you go to scary places. You go to uncomfortable places. Maybe you could talk a little bit about getting to those places with honesty, and also how you teach that to your students.

Everything I do is with the idea that practice is going to get us there. This is what I say to my students: “If you are going to try something hard, do it in the smallest way possible first. Take the smallest bite of the sandwich.”

We start in three minutes of time. Then six minutes. There is so much work to do to untangle from how they have been taught to write, which is important and gets their academic writing done. I am not discounting high school teaching at all. We build on what they have learned. But what I tell them in the classroom is: “You have all of those skills already, but now I want you to untangle from all of it and be free. Do not think: Does this make sense? Is this any good? We do not care right now. We are just trying to make stuff.”

So, for the first two months, I really want them just to be making stuff. I trust that we can figure out grammar, and structure, and whatever else.

It takes them a little while to trust me, but what I want them also to feel is that energy of: “Oh, this is what I want to write about.” You cannot think your way there. You have to actually write. You have to jump to the page. You can tell me an awesome idea, but do it. You have to try it. I do not know if it is going to work or not. You have to see.

There are writers who have extensive outlines down to the scenes and every point, before they ever write. Other writers — and I am more in this camp — may have a map. I follow the map, but I have to sit down and start writing to listen to what I am actually trying to say. So you are right, it cannot be perfect at first. You just have to get it out, then go back and revise. It sounds like you are kind of like the “listen to yourself” camp.

I mean, even with reporting, you start with a list of people to talk to. But the best part is the unexpected. What happened along the way. That to me is the whole joy of reporting, you know, you should have a plan and places to go and people who will talk to you, but then things happen you never expected.

So that is what I want my students to feel and experience at least once throughout the semester. That feeling of discovery, because that is when you get the original thought, or an original way of putting things together. I keep telling them: “I want you to write like you.” That is actually very hard. What is your voice? But I think it can be found, because you can feel it when you are tapping into that part of you.

Can you talk about your class at Brown? It is so popular. We are constantly reading these articles saying every college student is using AI and they don’t want to write. But it does actually seem to me that so many do still want to write. They still want to create and share.

The beauty of my Brown students is they just genuinely want to learn. They have a genuine curiosity and interest. It’s not gone, and maybe it’s stronger now. Some of my colleagues do the class differently, but I just do a lottery. I don’t screen their samples. Just put your name in the hat and I’ll pick names to be in the class at random.

I’m reading “Joyride” by Susan Orlean right now. There are really good things about finding stories and thinking about stories. And students might be like, “I don't have three years to report a story.” But look, she’s an amazing writer, like, let’s learn from what she has to say, about how she puts a magazine story together.

How do you start to think about writing exercises to bring into your classrooms and to get students inspired, or just creating, even if they do not know where it is going?

I took a workshop with Lynda Barry many years ago, and it taught me that no matter what the instructions for the exercise are or the theme or the content, the exercise itself is a way of calming a person down and transitioning them into the room and the space. It really is transformative. No matter what is on the page. It does not matter.

I tell them, we are not going to talk for the first 15 minutes. I want us to be in this place where we are working and writing. I want them in this place where stories are. And that is what I got from Lynda Barry.

So we will do Lynda Barry’s daily diary exercise. It is an observation exercise. We should be observant. We should be paying attention to what is out in the world, specifically, how you describe things, and very concretely. It is called a Daily Diary, from her book “Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor.” We will start there. That is our warmup.

And then we will do the other exercise, which is often something I make up from the reading. We are reading Alexander Chee’s “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.” From whatever we are reading for that day, I will take something from the essay, and that is what we will do our more substantive exercise on.

So, the students just read “100 Things About Writing a Novel.” I had the students go around the room and I said:  “Okay, everyone has to pitch a line, your own headline. What would you write if you wrote an essay called ‘100 Things About…’?” They said things like “100 Things About Being an Immigrant Daughter,” “100 Things About Chickens.” They are just so fun. It is delightful to have them come up with all these ideas.

And then I said: “Okay, write yours for the next five minutes, as many items under that heading as you can. Now you have to do the person next to you. So if they had ‘100 Things About Chickens,’ you all have to do that one for five minutes.” It is always about loosening up and finding what you want to write, but not trying so hard about it, just finding it.

We did one about games. We had an alum come in. She had published an article for Orion about Wingspan, the board game. So we read it, and then she came to talk. Then I did an exercise where everyone had to write down the games that they played as a kid: car games, board games, playground games. Their faces changed. Then everyone had to talk and say what their game was. We wrote about a moment related to the game. It is a way for them to share with each other, and get vulnerable.

I tell them this too: “I can see you all as sixth graders, the excitement on your face for explaining this weird tag game that you only play on your playground.” And I want people to have positive experiences with each other and with writing and creativity. I want them to have good feelings about it, because I think a lot of their feelings have probably been bad. Oh, I am a terrible writer, oh, look at this page full of corrections. I want them to feel the joy.

It is like that first step. You just start to think about the games that you played. Then it is happening in the world. And I get them to start to describe it. And then, about five minutes or so later, I will give them other prompts. I will say: “Now I want you to reveal something that seems hard. Maybe it is an insight, or an observation, or a question, or a challenge. It is hard for you, but do it. Try to get to that edge where it feels a little bit scary, or risky, or hard to say. Just try it. You do not have to share it.”

Do you do those exercises yourself too?

I do. I write about the body, and I will end up writing about writing and exercising. I am getting to be athletic again. I used to be on sports teams all my life growing up, and then I kind of got out of the rhythm of it. But now I am learning exercises again from a trainer, and it is frustrating because I am having to re-learn. But I also know that once I learn these things, I am not going to have to think about them. It is kind of like writing. It is not going to feel like a good writing session unless I have done it. Unless I have done that thing that feels hard. 

For more of Hayasaki's conversation with Grace on coming up with ideas and writing books, check out her newsletter interview.

***

Erika Hayasaki is an author and independent journalist who teaches in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine. She publishes a newsletter on nonfiction craft and freelancing, The Reported Essay.

The post Author Grace Talusan on going to uncomfortable places in your writing appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.

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

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

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

On her pre-show rituals

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

On researching guests’ speaking style before an interview

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

On how to use silence during an interview

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

On delivering live coverage

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

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

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

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

On including herself in her work

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

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

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

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

Show credits

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

[ 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.

On 26 Federal Plaza and documenting ICE detentions:

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

On the role of photography in storytelling:

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

On becoming a photojournalist:

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

On documenting the truth and the importance of journalism:

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

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

On collaborating with reporters:

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

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

On photo edits and working with editors:

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

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

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

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

Reading List: Authors, Stories, and Editors Mentioned 

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

Show Credits

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

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

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

***

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

John Hammontree knows a good story when he hears one. Hammontree, the Murrow Award-winning head of podcasts for AL.com and current Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, says the idea for a podcast about domestic terrorist Eric Rudolph initially came to him following the events of January 6^th and the fall of Roe v. Wade. 

During a lunch outing with some of his newsroom colleagues in Birmingham, Alabama, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and 2021 Nieman Fellow John Archibald held the table rapt with the story of his trip to North Carolina in search of Rudolph, who bombed Birmingham’s New Woman All Women Health Care Center in 1997. 

Rudolph was eventually convicted in connection with bombings across the South from 1996 to 1998, including the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.

After that lunch, Hammontree decided to reach out to Becca Andrews, a Western Kentucky University journalism professor and author of “No Choice: The Destruction of Roe v. Wade and the Fight to Protect a Fundamental American Right.”

Together, they got to work on making an eight-episode serialized podcast, “American Shrapnel: The Weaponization of Eric Robert Rudolph,” which was released in July and tells a story of domestic terrorism and extremist political ideology that still resonates today. 

“I knew Becca through Reckon, and through her work with Mother Jones. Her deep history of knowing the history of abortion rights, abortion access, anti-abortion movements, was a piece that we needed for this story,” Hammontree says. (Hammontree, Andrews, and I were all colleagues at Reckon News, the now-shuttered digital publication that grew out of AL.com).

Even with the right team in place, producing a podcast on Rudolph and the bombings was no easy feat — and no one had anticipated production taking three years. I chatted with the team about a familiar issue to journalists that has grown more challenging as our nation’s politics have grown more fractured: getting sources to speak on the record. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

I clocked at least six reasons various people gave you for not wanting to be interviewed: it was too long ago, privacy, fear of being targeted for speaking on the record about controversial topics, concern about their careers, faulty memory, concerns about what their families might think. To some extent, this just comes with the territory as journalists, but it seemed like for this specific project, there was an overwhelming number of refusals to speak on the record. Would you agree?

John Archibald: There were a lot, but that also comes with the fact that we interviewed a whole lot of people. There were people who were never going to talk to us. [Jeff Tickal], who was instrumental in getting [Eric Rudolph’s] car tag number in Episode 1, said, in some ways, the case is still active, and “if I said something that didn’t match up with what I said, I could jeopardize the case.” But what he would never say out loud, I think, is that he’s a Republican sitting judge in Alabama and he would rather hang on a cross than talk about abortion, than how he helped catch a killer.

Becca Andrews: We have this person that I’m trying to talk to right now who has been very back-and-forth. She’s just genuinely terrified of this moment. She’s a private person and the political climate is not helping her feel safe to tell her story that is critical of white supremacy. And even though her experience is her experience and has nothing to do with politics, she’s just like, “I don’t know that I even want to consider touching that.”

As a journalist it’s frustrating because … I feel it right now in my position as a professor, this chilling effect of, “Can we speak freely…? What’s going to happen?” I think it’s affecting us in journalism too with our sources.

John Hammontree: Jermaine Hughes [the University of Alabama at Birmingham student who witnessed Rudolph leaving the scene of the crime and followed him] is a whole separate category of person. He hasn’t spoken to the media since [the bombing] happened. He’s just the true definition of a Good Samaritan and a hero. There’s something almost noble about it. I mean, it’s frustrating, don’t get me wrong, but he has this principled stance of … never going to try to seek out credit or anything for this story. I wish he had talked to us, I wish we were the exception, but there’s something to be said for the fact that he’s never spoken to the media.

We’ve spoken off the record to some people who knew Eric directly. One of them was an old Army buddy of his, who initially was interested in going on the record, and then called back the next day [after] he’d spoken with his wife and he just didn’t want to get his name dragged into all that, which I understand. I wouldn’t want to be on the record of being an old friend of a serial bomber. But some of those conversations did give us the chance to learn more about Rudolph, which, on deep background, did affect the way we told the story.

We reached out to everybody in his family: his brothers, his sisters, his mother. Some people talked to [Rudolph’s mother, Patricia] back then, but since then, they’ve gone cone of silence. The family’s not talking. Maybe that’ll change when [his mother] passes, maybe not.

And then Eric, we each wrote multiple letters. We don’t know if he got them, we don’t know if he read them, but we never heard from him.

Archibald: For everybody in the story that made the final cut, there were many more who didn’t get that far, who had other reasons for not wanting to talk, and a good many of them were trauma. 

It’s like one of those things with Jermaine Hughes, the witness who followed [Rudolph], the hero. We didn’t get to talk to him, but when we found that transcript of his police interview from two hours after the [Birmingham clinic] bombing, in some ways, it seemed even more perfect because he was telling his story fresh in that moment. And what we found from so many people is when they talk about things they remember — like me — they remember things wrong, and through their own particular filter in that moment.

Hammontree: And there were some mundane things like people not checking their Facebook messages or not checking their emails. We had about three — they responded two weeks after the podcast went live.

How did you care for the people you interviewed? Some folks got quite emotional during their recollections.

Archibald: [Chris Eidson, a paramedic on the scene featured in Episode 1] comes to mind on that. We just let him talk. I think some of that’s in the final tape. He was obviously very shaken by [the Birmingham clinic bombing].

I think I said something about, “I’m sorry to put you through it again,” and he said, “No, no, no, that’s what I think is supportive.”

We had a lot of conversations you didn’t hear with him about how it was going to be portrayed. He said he came to us because he knew we would tell it in a sensitive way. And then we talked about what that sensitivity looked like. And that’s what you end up with.

We basically said, “We just want you to tell your story, and you tell what you’re comfortable telling.” And he just opened up. And John and I, honestly, just sat there in an emotional state of wonder because he was summing up things that I thought were so extremely powerful and that we had never heard before. I think he understood that.

Hammontree: Some of the details he provided affected things like sound design or the music we would play. He talked about the ringing in his ears, and we tried to bring that to life for listeners.

One of the things I love about podcasting is just how intimate it is as a medium. If you’re just reading Chris Eidson’s words, it’s not the same as hearing the catch in his voice. It’s a great way to [practice] journalism because it takes audiences into the room with you. You can hear the timbre in [police officer] Jeff Postell’s voice, and you can hear [The Otherside Lounge bombing victim Memrie Wells Cresswell’s] birds tweeting in the background. You can hear [former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama] Doug Jones banging on the table for emphasis. I think, in some ways, that’s unique to the form.

Talk about Memrie, Becca.

Andrews: I’m still shocked that we got through the phone conversation, because the first phone conversation she was like, “I Googled you and you’re a liberal.” And because I’m human, I sometimes make assumptions about people too. I was taken aback because I was like, “Oh, you’re queer — you wouldn’t be conservative!” So it took us a minute to be like, “Okay, look, I’m not telling the story as someone who typically votes Democrat. I am telling the story as someone who cares about the story, we care about the story, and we care about what happened to you and we care about the societal repercussions that are echoing in our present moment.”

It was clear that she was still dealing with some of this trauma. Basically everyone who has been through a bombing is dealing with that trauma for the rest of their lives. I took that really seriously and tried to prep for the interview with that in mind: What’s going to make you comfortable? Do you want your partner there? How do we do this in way that makes you feel safe?

I just remember that interview and feeling so lucky to be able to sit there and listen to her talk about her experience and share. It’s a thing we feel as journalists, right? When you’re in an interview and someone’s sharing with you and there’s this intimacy and you feel so fortunate to do this work in the first place, but also to just be trusted with that kind of experience. The whole interview was like that. I just felt like I was holding my breath and awed by it, by her.

The other dynamic with [Memrie] specifically was she had also been traumatized by the media. She had been outed by the media. That was another thing that was very present in the dynamic, that I think that we all felt was important to be sensitive to and thoughtful about. And we were all horrified that that happened to her.

Hammontree: When we were structuring the podcast, we wanted to make sure that we built episodes around her perspective, around Diane [Derzis, owner of the New Woman All Women Health Care Center in Birmingham, Ala.] and Emily [Lyons, the nurse injured in the bombing there] so that it wasn’t just the story of Eric Rudolph. He’s a vehicle, and this is the story of dozens of people who were affected by him, and it’s also the story of the people trying to make a whole army of Eric Rudolphs. So we wanted to try to set aside specific episodes to broaden the scope of the story.

How were you all able to take care of yourselves? You all spent three years researching and recording the podcast.

Archibald: I’ve been doing this a long time and covered a lot of these things … but we’re in a fortunate situation in that anytime we come across this stuff, we get to write it down. And when you write this stuff down, you process it in a different way than when you let it sit and fester. I honestly believe, whether it’s executions or bombings or disasters, the fact that I’ve always had to do obits for people … you get to process it, and you give them some kind of honor with the way you do it, and you get to figure out how you think about it.

And having two other people in this situation to share it all with, and bounce it all back and forth, and hear them — even when they’re wrong — tell you what they think about it, and to just check yourself … has been really valuable.

Andrews: The group dynamic really helped. None of us can take ourselves seriously because the other two are there to check that. That’s a gift.

Hammontree: Doing this deep dive back into the history, about the rise of some of these violent movements, in some way made the current moments scarier — the assassination in Minnesota [of state Rep. Melissa Hortman], the [Charlie Kirk] assassination, January 6^th, the bombing of an IVF clinic, the bomb threats in North Carolina — you could just see the continuum of them. But I think it also helped us, or at least helped me, to understand that this is not brand new. This is something that’s been building, and that there have also been people kind of pushing back, and getting in the way. When you hear Memrie or you hear Emily or Diane, you hear that they’re still fighting 20, 25 years later, and it gives you resolve.

***

Minda Honey is the author of the dating memoir "The Heartbreak Years" and writes a weekly newsletter, Writing for Fakers, at mindahoney.substack.com.

The post How the team behind the ‘American Shrapnel’ podcast helped their sources feel safe appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On making her grandmother’s house a key character:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On ending the book with a collage:

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

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

Reading, Listening, and Visual Art List:

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

Show credits

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

[ 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 

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

Show Credits

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

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

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

***

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

Kate Sosin found their way to The 19th by a happy accident. After being laid off in 2020 from Logo TV, an offshoot of MTV focused on queer audiences, they were applying to any job postings they could find.

The 19th was then just an early seedling in the media ecosystem. The nonprofit news startup, which covers how politics and policy impact women and LGBTQ+ people, launched in January 2020 — moments before the world plunged into pandemic life. Sosin saw an open role for an LGBTQ+ beat reporter.

“I thought, ‘There's no way I'll get that, because every queer journalist I know is out of work,’” said Sosin, who’s based in Los Angeles. They also had no expectations for what the publication would become. “If I’m honest, I didn't think it was going to be a big deal. I was excited to get a job, but I just didn't know exactly what I was getting myself into.”

The 19th has since established itself as a respected nonprofit publication that’s partnered with outlets like The Texas Tribune, KFF Health News, The Guardian, and Teen Vogue. The newsroom earned two national Edward R. Murrow Awards in 2024 and 2025: one for breaking news coverage on Biden stepping down and Harris stepping up, and another for a series about being pregnant in a post-Roe v. Wade America. It also won an Online Journalism Award in 2024.

Sosin, meanwhile, has tackled a suite of subjects there with empathy and rigor. Whether it’s a story about the threats queer Native youth in South Dakota are facing or a spotlight on the legendary plaintiff Jim Obergefell, Sosin specializes in precisely situating the present moment within the sweep of history to provide rich context for readers.

“As a trans person, I have to write news that makes me want to get up in the morning,” Sosin said. “So I need to find a way to tell stories that are more constructive than just, ‘Here's another thing that has been taken away from you.’”

Storyboard spoke with Sosin about how to sustainably cover queer issues in today’s unrelenting political climate and how they honed their sense of the stories worth pursuing. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You've been covering the LGBTQ+ beat for a long time. What's been the biggest shift in your approach and priorities since the Trump administration took office?

I used to think I had to cover every story — and I kind of did. There were not other people doing this work, or there were fewer. Now I don't. Part of that is just that other people are doing it so I don't have to. Another part of it is that I can’t. It’s too sad. Every single story that’s a daily breaker, I just don't do. Because we're a nonprofit newsroom and everyone can pick up our stuff, if it's going to be done elsewhere, I'm going to not do it. They can read it elsewhere. Let me do something that has a bigger impact for us. This approach has been a lifesaver for me. 

Is this approach different from other places you’ve worked at? There’s a lot of pressure at daily news outlets to churn it out. Can you speak to how that mandate is different at The 19th or how you’ve carved it out to be different?

That’s been my whole struggle in journalism. Everyone's like, “We need a bite at that apple.” But do you really? Everybody wants that traffic. I get it. We want traffic too. We're still a business, even if we are a nonprofit. But we’ve continued to find that even if what we call “beat-building stories” are bringing some people in, it’s not that many people. Those are not the stories that draw in new readers because we're not the biggest mainstream newsroom. We don't have a staff that’s going to break that story first or pull in the whole nation. We're not CNN. So what can we offer that's going to be substantially different on day two that’s not already being offered? What can we offer that's going to enlighten, beyond the minute-to-minute breaking piece? That’s where we’ve learned to shine. 

There’s been an onslaught of news to cover since Trump took office, which we know is by design, and a truly overwhelming need for robust coverage on your beat in particular. But you’re one person. How has this climate shaped your instincts and choices when it comes to which stories to pursue and which to pass on?

My only goal is to not burn out. There have been so many moments in my career where I have burned out and I’ve been at risk of leaving journalism. The risk of burnout is so great when the news is so bleak. I know this is a time when I really need to do this job, and I need to do it well, and I need to do it with purpose. That means that I need to pace myself. 

I've tried really hard to work hard. But more than that, I’ve tried really hard to work sustainably. I don't work past my hours. When I leave work, I leave work. My life feels really big and a very small part of it is this job. When this administration came in, I reaffirmed that commitment. That looks like being nice to myself when I can. That looks like being OK with not covering some stories. That looks like focusing on one thing at a time. I have to be comfortable being slower. We all have to pace ourselves or we will succumb to the overwhelm, which is so easy to do. It’s such a stressful time.

These stories can be really tough and really sad. But folks at The 19th also do a good job highlighting things people are doing to make change and respond to this environment. How do you balance the breakdown between the reporting you want and need to do about problems versus solutions-oriented stories?

I don't have a ton of experience with solutions journalism. I've learned about it and I've done it, but I don't think about them as solutions stories. The only news that’s written for trans people is so devastating that if you just read trans news, you would not want to exist in the world after reading it. As a trans person, I have to write news that makes me want to get up in the morning. So I need to find a way to tell stories that are more constructive than just, “Here's another thing that has been taken away from you.”

But I also just don't feel that way about what's happening in the world. Our present moment is in a backlash because there's been so much progress made. I have a responsibility to communicate that what is happening is the result of incredible progress. We have to be responsible about it and not just information dump. I'm not looking for a silver lining as much as I am looking for an honest balance.

Do you find that your audience responds well to that? Do you have a sense of how they engage with stories that are more hopeful?

Our audience responds well to stories that are more nuanced. People always assume that an audience needs something really simple, as if audiences are somehow dumber than we are. They’re so smart. Every time I do a story, readers are like, “Here are all the things you got wrong. Here are all the ways you didn’t understand this.” And I'm like, “Thank you. You should have reported this, because you’re smarter than I am.” The more complicated you make a story, the more people you draw in. Because they see themselves in it.

How do you think about where the news ecosystem and industry is now in terms of the volume and quality of coverage of queer issues, particularly reporters with lived experience? How would you situate this moment in the landscape?

It's really cool. I look at the Trans Journalists Association, which didn't exist 10 years ago, and it has upward of 600 members. That’s crazy to me. I think back even further to when I started my career, which would have been 20 years ago, and the only other trans reporter I had ever met at that time was Monica Roberts, who’s no longer with us. 

I didn't know trans reporters. I didn't even want to be an LGBTQ+ beat reporter, it was just the only job I could get. Then I realized that being a trans person telling LGBTQ+ stories meant a lot to people, and that was a real job I could do. People didn't think of LGBTQ+ news. Now there are legions and legions of people doing this work. People are like, “You're an elder.” That's awesome. There are people doing so much cooler, better stuff. There’s so many people that I can’t keep up. They're all across newsrooms. Maybe the world feels really hard, but it's changing — and it’s changing really fast.

How do you talk about safety and privacy with your sources? Have those conversations shifted at all since the Trump administration took office and are you noticing sources are more concerned about that?

It's definitely become a greater concern. We’ve increased our safety protocols. I always was pretty cautious with sources about safety concerns. We’ll talk through, “Hey, if you go on the record and you're part of a national article, here are some things that can happen to you and you should be aware of that. Let's talk through the ramifications of how you decide to tell your story and what it means to share it.” But that’s heightened even more so now, especially if we get into things like immigration. 

It’s hard because there are ways in which I want to make greater exceptions that provide people with cover and anonymity. Yet we are less able to do that in this administration because we are ourselves more at risk as journalists if we do that. It has meant more difficult conversations. It probably has limited the stories that we can tell because our sources are less safe, which is a shame.

I’ve enjoyed how you pursue a really nice range of different kinds of reporting — some stories lean more heavily on narrative, while others are actionable and service-oriented. I thought the explainer earlier this year about passports was a good example of that. How do you think about what form a story should take when you start your reporting?

I don't really think about it that way. I think more in terms of, “What are people asking for?” With the passport story, so many people in my life were asking about this. To be honest, I was asking, too. I realized that I had all these questions, so what if I just answered those questions and used experts?

Usually if a piece is narrative-based, it's because someone has a story to tell or a story lends itself to an issue best. I report and report and report until the story just starts coming out of my brain. Sometimes that means I report too much, but this helps a story organize itself in my head. I’m at my best when I report it enough so that the story writes itself.

It doesn't sound like your editors are particularly prescriptive about the form a story needs to take. Is that a fair assessment?

My editors let me pick my stories, report them how I want to and turn them in on a timeline that makes sense for me. They give me a lot of space to do what I want to do. It's very rare that they say, “Do this and do it by this timeline.” Sometimes there is a deadline, obviously, because we're a newsroom. But for the most part, there’s a lot of room.

Your reporting is always grounded in the stories of real people living out the impacts of the policy choices you're writing about. How do you think about narrative in shorter enterprise pieces where the writing has to be economical because the real estate is limited?

That's actually my favorite. Sometimes it's just a few quotes or descriptions, or a few sentences, but you need to capture the essence of someone. It's a lovely little challenge to sew that together and give a snapshot of them. It’s really fun. We did this Voting Rights Act anniversary piece with little vignettes, about 300 words each. The questions are: Who is this person? What’s the elevator pitch version of them? What’s the most significant thing they said? What is the most significant thing that they've done? Why does it matter historically? By the time you start writing them, they’re done. For the most part, that’s all people want to read anyway.

What advice would you give to reporters on this beat right now, in this particular political climate?

Don't follow the news or be responsive to it. Create the news. 

It’s significant to me that everybody's writing stories about how all of our rights are being stripped away or asking, “Is gender-affirming care safe for kids or not?” Those guidelines have largely gone unchanged for years, but no one's reported that. Lawmakers continue to argue this, but the doctors don't. We're in this alternate reality where the news can change the outcome of people's lives. Our narratives can reshape our realities and how we perceive what is safe and what is not. But the truth of the matter is still the same: gender-affirming care has been found safe and effective. It's still prescribed. All the major medical associations back it. 

In terms of trans people participating in sports, there is science that still supports that trans women can compete in sports against cis women and there's no competitive advantage. But we don't report that anymore and engage in the noise instead. This defensive, silly, “Just present both sides of this argument without doing the actual research” is not good journalism. Go for the facts, and put them in the news.

***
Carly Stern is an independent reporter and editor based in Brooklyn who covers health, housing and economic security. Her enterprise work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Vox and The Guardian.

The post Journalist Kate Sosin on covering trans issues in the age of Trump 2.0 appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.