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Dear Storyboard community,
This week I want to share three stories about how we preserve history.
First, I'm excited to share my latest Nieman Storyboard podcast conversation, with Wired senior writer Makena Kelly.
Over the past two-plus months, Wired has broken dozens of stories about Elon Musk and DOGE, and on March 13 they published a longform feature story to zoom out and make sense of what was happening.
I interviewed Kelly on March 24, and she talked about how journalists communicate securely with their sources. For many reporters, this includes using the encrypted messaging app Signal. But as she warned:
You need to be looking at your Signal messages that you're sending to people and be like, somebody could take a screenshot of this and post it online. You need to be messaging people defensively.
Right as she was telling me this, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg was publishing screenshots from a Signal group chat that he'd been inadvertently added to, of top Trump administration officials discussing an impending U.S. military attack in Yemen.
Amid disappearing group chats and disappearing historical documents, journalists are doing important work in preserving everything we can.
[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]
Meanwhile, Storyboard contributor Frank Bures has written a love letter to archivists, librarians, and local newspapers everywhere — discussing how he used digitized newspaper archives to reconstruct the stories of a legendary canoe race for his new book, "Pushing the River." When we lose local news and funding for libraries and archives, we lose critical windows into history.
[ Read the story ]
And as part of New York magazine's “Yesteryear” package on Broadway, journalist Mark Harris weaves his own personal memories into a deeply moving story about efforts to document how AIDS ravaged the artist and theater community in New York City in the '80s and '90s. In this case, newspaper archives didn't tell the real story:
Early in the following year, [actor David Carroll] collapsed and died at a recording session for the "Grand Hotel" cast album. He was 41. The New York Times obituary cited a pulmonary embolism as the cause of his death; it did not mention that he was suffering from complications related to AIDS. This was not atypical; for many years, “cancer,” “pneumonia,” and “a long illness” were used in obituaries, sometimes at the request of families who wanted to avoid any implication of AIDS and, sometimes, of homosexuality. Carroll’s death was reported by his “companion,” Robert Homma, but Homma was not listed among his survivors at the end of the story. That word was mainly reserved for family members, not for lovers, boyfriends, or (in everything but the letter of the law) husbands. For years in the paper of record, no gay man who died of AIDS-related illnesses was survived by another gay man.
Harris writes about people who kept their own handwritten lists of friends they lost to AIDS, and recent efforts to share those stories through a documentary (still in the works and seeking funding) and a permanent exhibit at the Museum of Broadway.
[ Read the story ]
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Finally, congrats to all of this year's winners of the 2025 National Magazine Awards, announced Thursday. Get the complete winners list (and reading list) here.
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.
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