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Dear Storyboard community,
My career in media and journalism has not been a straight line. I started out in newspapers, and later founded Longreads and co-founded the podcast company Ursa, but I've also worked for ad agencies, and I've worked in marketing and communications for different companies. This is a fact of working in journalism in 2025 — sometimes we also have day jobs to fund the work that is important to us.
If there's one thing I learned from marketing, it's that it's never enough to tell a story once. This is even more critical now, when we are being inundated with misleading information and outright lies on every platform. The truth could use a bigger marketing team.
Recently I pointed to New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie's TikTok account as an example of how journalists are using short-form video. As an opinion writer, he's one of the best, so it's worth noting how he adapts his storytelling to suit the medium, whether print, social media, or video. Here he is writing about his thesis that Donald Trump's second-term strategy is primarily about retribution:
To get his revenge, Trump would turn the I.R.S., the F.B.I. and other powerful parts of the federal government against his political enemies. He would hound and harass them in retaliation for their opposition to his law stretching and lawbreaking.
For once in his public career, Trump wasn’t lying. As president, he has made it a priority to go after his political enemies.
Two days prior, he posted a video on TikTok outlining this same argument. The narrative style of TikTok is casual, intimate, off-the-cuff — so Bouie spoke while walking down the street in a stylish scarf and blazer, as if he were telling a friend what he’s been thinking about on a FaceTime call. The lede on his written piece is replaced by a "hook," albeit one that's similar to how he starts his New York Times piece — reminding us what Trump promised during his presidential campaign.
Similarly, here are two approaches from Stacey Vanek Smith for a Marketplace story explaining what's going on with the bond market. In the radio version, she takes a trip to an "Ice Cream Roulette" shop to explain how bonds work. But on TikTok, she saves the ice cream analogy for the end of the video, starting instead with the headline "Why everybody is so worried about bonds." Again, TikTok means casual, so Smith ditches the big professional microphones and studios in favor of a living room and a tiny iPhone mic. Her Marketplace segment is six minutes, while her TikTok video clocks in at just over four.
Crafting stories for social media, even just to promote written or broadcast work, is a necessity of our fragmented media ecosystem. Audiences are spread out in subcultures — one eye-opening fact about Bouie's audience on TikTok is that many of them don't even realize he writes for The New York Times.
This could be a moment to bemoan declining traditional news readership, but there is a demand and a need for real journalists on these apps. There's also a media literacy gap to be bridged, as TikTokers remind each other that just because someone reads out a news headline on a video doesn't mean they're a journalist.
So it goes with short-form video, like every trend before it. The same principles of reporting and storytelling apply, and I'm rooting for those who will offer a positive way forward.
This week, author and Storyboard contributor Kim Cross shares her guide for journalists on how to work with fact-checkers. It's a fantastic resource for reporters doing it for the first time, as well as experienced journalists looking for tips on how to keep their work organized — from compiling detailed source lists to highlighting and linking interview transcripts and preparing your sources for the process. As Cross writes, "They are great unsung heroes, now more than ever." Read the full guide here.
(And for more guidance on fact-checking, National Geographic fact-checker Brad Scriber is hosting a seminar on fact-checking a nonfiction book.)
Links of note
- "Boxed Up: A Portrait of an Immigrant Community Living Under Threat of Deportation" (hat-tip Barry Yeoman.) To tell the stories of Nicaraguans working on Wisconsin's dairy farms who are facing the threat of deportation under Trump, ProPublica's Melissa Sanchez and photographer Benjamin Rasmussen documented the boxes of cherished possessions that they are shipping back to Nicaragua, in fear that they will be arrested and deported at any moment. It's a powerful visual of the panic and uncertainty immigrants are feeling in the U.S.:
For now, many are staying in their homes, behind drawn curtains, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible as they travel to and from work or pick up their kids from school. Few have given up on their lives in America, but they’re realistic about what may be coming. Methodically, they have begun packing their most cherished belongings into boxes and barrels and shipping them to relatives back in Nicaragua, ahead of their own anticipated deportations.
- "A Thousand Snipers in the Sky: The New War in Ukraine" (via the Sunday Long Read). A superb example of collaborative storytelling through reporting and visuals. New York Times reporters, photographers, illustrators, and editors team up to show how the war in Ukraine has changed dramatically because of advances in drone warfare. The lede starts on the ground, with an account of a Russian drone strike:
When a mortar round exploded on top of their American-made Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, the Ukrainian soldiers inside were shaken but not terribly worried, having been hardened by artillery shelling over three years of war.
But then the small drones started to swarm.
They targeted the weakest points of the armored Bradley with a deadly precision that mortar fire doesn’t possess. One of the explosive drones struck the hatch right above where the commander was sitting.
“It tore my arm off,” recounted Jr. Sgt. Taras, the 31-year-old commander who, like others, used his first name in accordance with Ukrainian military protocols.
- Ryan Teague Beckwith's newsletter Your First Byline is doing a terrific series of quick tips (aka "one weird trick") for reporting. This one is for researching local history.
- Applications are due April 14 for the McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism, which offers journalists grants up to $15,000 and editorial support "to produce deeply reported enterprise and investigative stories with a strong economic, financial or business angle." (You don't need to be a business reporter to apply.)
Keep sharing your stories,
Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
On Bluesky: @niemanstoryboard.org
Send me your story, book, podcast, and documentary recommendations: editor@niemanstoryboard.org
