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Dear Storyboard community,
It can feel disorienting to make sense of this week — a presidential inauguration, a flurry of executive orders, the pardoning of rioters from January 6 (and one who declined), and a bishop’s plea for mercy — which is why I’m thankful for all the journalists out there playing the long game. The full story will take days, months, and years to become clear.
In the meantime, I’m trying to keep an eye on journalists who are in close contact with those who are being impacted directly by changes in leadership and policy.
Over on Bluesky (where you can now follow Nieman Storyboard), Casey Parks was in contact with a teenager who had a simple, but urgent, concern:

Parks is a staff reporter for The Washington Post focused on LGBTQ+ issues, and has written some outstanding profiles of trans teenagers and their families as they navigate a political environment that has targeted them. It’s storytelling that requires an eagle eye and a compassionate heart.
As Parks told me this week:
For the potential federal sports ban, I wanted to find a kid who is in a blue state. More than half of U.S. states have already banned trans girls from playing girls sports, so I wanted to find a place where a kid is still able to compete. Washington was actually the first state to ever allow trans students to compete (way back in 2008), so I went looking for someone there. I found this girl on Instagram, and we started with an informal conversation.
Parks told me about the process of working with a subject, including helping to prepare them for what can happen:
One thing I worry about in my job is exposing young people to hatred. Usually when I write about trans children, their parents have asked us to obscure their faces or not use their full names, because they worry something may happen to their children. The sports issue is particularly delicate because most Americans do agree with the bans, and a lot of people are very, very angry at trans athletes, and I don't want to expose a child to that kind of painful rhetoric. In this case, she has already been exposed to it because she won a state track meet last year, and the crowd booed her. She knows what she is risking by being public. Still, I wanted to give her some time to think about it before I put her on the front page of the Washington Post, so I told her to talk to her mom and sleep on it, and in the meantime, I shared a little bit of her story anonymously on Bluesky. To use a fully anonymous source at the Post, I would have to make a compelling case to my bosses, and they would take some time to think about whether that's something we want to do.
Parks also offered some recommendations for journalists covering trans issues:
I would definitely reach out to the Trans Journalists Association for guidance if you haven't covered these issues before. I would also counsel reporters to not be offended if someone doesn't want to be on the record. I actually just got an email from someone I talked to yesterday who told me I can't use her name. I'm not going to push her because she has the right to do everything she can to be safe. Officials in Texas and elsewhere have shown they will go after trans adults or parents with trans children, and there are going to be a lot of people who do not want their names in the paper. Their experiences can still be worthwhile to hear.
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What’s a Scene That Sticks in Your Mind?
Longtime Storyboard readers know this site has published many great story annotations (and the pitches that got them assigned). I’d like to continue that tradition with another running series called “Behind the Scenes” — we’ll talk to writers and journalists about specific moments from their stories, books, podcasts, and documentaries, and find out exactly how they reported and crafted them.
Pitch your “Behind the Scenes” moments to me at heymarkarms@gmail.com. And be sure to check out our pitch guide for more information.
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Links of note
- “He starts a villain on day one, and by day eight, he’s a hero.” This might just be the perfect story. Filmmakers Rashida Jones and Will McCormack introduce us to Bill Marsh, who has taught thousands of small children how to swim:
It’s like the rawest, purest form of a human going through a struggle and being triumphant at the end of it. They can look at something that seems insurmountable and become successful at it very quickly. I mean, Wow! I can’t think of anything else that’s life-threatening, that you can conquer at age 2.
- There's nothing like a $200 million lawsuit to expose the inner workings of a corporate partnership gone terribly wrong. At Bloomberg, Austin Carr tells the story of Walgreens' failed experiment replacing thousands of their refrigerator doors with "smart screens." Product glitches and unmet revenue expectations led to a fight with the vendor, Cooler Screens Inc. Court filings and reporting allow Carr to reconstruct scenes like this one, in which Walgreens accused Cooler Screens co-founders Arsen Avakian and Greg Wasson of disrupting service to the screens:
Then Avakian launched the so-called December attack. A security camera caught Wasson entering one of the affected stores shortly after the planogram feed was cut. The footage, which Walgreens submitted in court as evidence the attack was premeditated, showed him walking straight to the blank coolers and “seemingly admiring the handiwork” before leaving. Wasson denies he visited the store to check out the broken displays. “I was there to get a prescription,” he says, insisting the timing was “just a coincidence.”
- More narratives are surfacing from the Southern California wildfires. LAist's podcast Imperfect Paradise presented "The First Five Days," a glimpse at how the wildfires first took hold and how the community responded, as told through the live broadcasts of Larry Mantle's call-in talk show AirTalk.
- I'm always fascinated by how storytelling is structured differently across digital platforms. At our sister site Nieman Lab this week, Neel Dhanesha interviews science journalists Adam Cole and Joss Fong about the strategy behind their new YouTube channel, Howtown, which already has nearly half a million subscribers.
Thank you for reading,
Mark Armstrong
Guest Editor
Nieman Storyboard