Thank you, Henry Chu, Ann Marie Lipinski, and the entire Nieman Foundation team for welcoming me. I’m thrilled to be guest-editing Nieman Storyboard for the coming weeks.
Some of you might already know me as the founder (emeritus) of Longreads, which I started back in 2009, initially as a Twitter account and hashtag. I have a special place in my heart for Nieman Storyboard, whose editor at the time, Andrea Pitzer, was the first to write about the project.
Longreads is now about to celebrate its 16th birthday, and Twitter has changed beyond all recognition. When it comes to spotlighting great reporting and storytelling, we need community more than ever.
I’d like to open up this space to you — fellow journalists and the people who appreciate them — to share stories about how you do the work.
Nieman Storyboard highlights the craft of storytelling, in service of journalism’s larger mission: to help us understand the world around us, and each other.
Exploring Storytelling Across Every Medium
Despite having started a site called Longreads, I don’t adhere to any dogma about where great storytelling can happen, or how long it needs to be. I’m now the co-founder of a podcasting company, Ursa Story Company, with authors Dawnie Walton and Deesha Philyaw, creating shows (Ursa Short Fiction and Reckon True Stories) that tell stories through audio.
Longform, shortform, books, podcasts, newsletters, YouTube, even TikTok — there are lessons, opportunities, and pitfalls for journalists in every medium.
Even with all these platforms, the struggles of the news business — and a political and social environment that feels uninterested in, or hostile to, rigorous reporting — make it increasingly difficult for journalists to receive the time, space, resources, attention, and support to do their best work.
Yet, journalists are still out there, doing it. They’re practicing the craft for large publications, or small ones, or entirely on their own. For some it’s a full-time job, for others it’s a side project.
Seeking Guest Contributors for Storyboard
In the upcoming weeks, we'll use this space to bring you stories from journalists who are telling stories in new or notable ways — and better understand how they do it, from idea to pitch to finished piece.
I’ll be commissioning some freelance articles (check out our submissions page), and also interviewing journalists about their approach to storytelling, and how we can apply it to our own work. If there’s a story you’re proud of, or a piece you read (or watched or listened to) and loved, please drop me a note. You can reach me at: heymarkarms@gmail.com.
Thank you for reading.
-Mark
Links of Note
Journalist Lane DeGregory talks about narrative as a daily habit — I love that concept, because it reminds us that we can find ways to tell stories no matter the medium or the scope of an assignment.
Here are a few moments that stuck out to me recently. (If you have a moment or scene you’d like to share with the community, send them to me: heymarkarms@gmail.com).
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- LA Times reporters covering the horrific fires in Southern California:
Ellen Delosh-Bacher abandoned her car on Sunset Boulevard after the fire exploded behind a Starbucks along the road.
“Cops began running down the road telling anyone stuck in traffic, ‘Run for your lives,’” said Delosh-Bacher.
She left the keys in the ignition and bolted half a mile down to the beach, standing amid the orange-lit smoke as she called her mother.
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- New Yorker staff writer (and former Storyboard editor) Paige Williams reporting from New Orleans:
Perez noticed a bulge on Hix’s torso and asked, “Is that a bulletproof vest?”
“You got it,” Hix said, pounding the bulge.
He’d started wearing the vest that day. On his waist, he wore a mace gun and a stun gun. On his hands, he wore brass-knuckle gloves.
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- Rachel Aviv’s devastating investigative story on Alice Munro, whose daughter Andrea was sexually abused by Munro’s partner, and how the writer’s silence tore apart the family:
Andrea sometimes worried that the shiniest parts of her personality were actually coping mechanisms. She felt that she had spent years moving through the world “as if I was giving a hundred dollars to each person I connected with, in the hopes that on the day I needed to borrow ten dollars, I could.” After getting an e-mail from her, I did sometimes feel that I had been given the emotional equivalent of cash: she was tender, warm, funny, frank, often exuberant. We exchanged long e-mails before meeting in person, and there was something almost scientific about the rigor with which she approached her memories, taking care never to overstate a feeling. Andrea said that Jenny used to call her “the little detective.” “It was funny,” Andrea told me. “But it also wasn’t funny, because the ability to recall horrible things with clarity and levelheadedness was another way to not have to feel how utterly painful it was.”
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- From November, Susan Dominus's intimate profile of two families traumatized by an IVF mixup, documenting their struggle to make sense of what happened:
Trying to ease Alexander’s mind, Daphna ordered a DNA testing kit. But Alexander, threatened by its ominous presence on the night stand in their bedroom, was reluctant to go anywhere near it. Daphna grew concerned enough about Alexander’s low mood that she called his best friend for advice. That friend was the first person brave enough to tell Daphna directly what he really thought: At least one of them was not May’s genetic parent. His certainty startled Daphna. Suddenly, when she looked at May, she could see what he was seeing — she could understand Alexander’s alarm. Finally, in November 2019, they sent DNA samples off to a testing company. Then they waited.
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- Wesley Morris's introduction to “The Wonder of Stevie,” a podcast about Stevie Wonder's groundbreaking string of albums in the 1970s. The show was named to several "Best of 2024" lists:
Listen to that bass line. That's an engine pumping. We're about to drive somewhere.
No, no, no, no, no, no, we're about to fly.
This is the beginning of “Love Having You Around,” the first song on “Music of My Mind,” the first album in a run of albums by Stevie Wonder, a run almost universally understood to be the most miraculous, most inspired streak in the history of American popular music. They call it Stevie's classic period.
This song is the sound of someone turning into someone else. You don't often get to hear what that sounds like, but that's what's happening right here in this song. Musical adolescence becoming musical adulthood.
