Above photo: A protest against the killing of journalists in Gaza, in Sant Jaume Square on Aug. 27, 2025, in Barcelona. Nearly 200 news workers have been killed in Gaza, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. For more coverage, see Nieman Reports. (Photo by Europa Press via AP)
***
Sign up for the Nieman Storyboard newsletter, delivered every Friday in your inbox.
***
Dear Storyboard community,
As we wind down the last days of August, let's take a moment to revisit the stories, interviews, and lessons from journalists featured on Storyboard this summer.
We'll be back in September with new editions of the Nieman Storyboard newsletter and podcast. Thanks for reading and listening — and thanks to all of you who continue to share your own stories and recommendations. Please keep them coming. Email me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org.
Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
Follow the Nieman Storyboard Podcast
On Bluesky: @niemanstoryboard.org
"On a high level, I think this is a type of story where timing is really key. We wanted to show how there are people very far from Washington, D.C., who are making decisions that have a dramatic impact on how the White House's immigration policy is carried out on the ground. And I think a lot of these more local decisions get ignored because they seem routine or boring or small compared to what happens on a federal level. And yet these are the decisions that are in part responsible for the hundreds of men being flown across the country to rural detention centers."
Bloomberg's Rachel Adams-Heard takes us through the reporting and writing of her story, with Polly Mosendz and Fola Akinnibi, about a private detention center in New Mexico.
[ Read the story ]
"I saw part of the deck rip away. I heard windows break from every corner. Cracks split the walls. We crashed into something, probably a tree. I don’t know how long it took—ten seconds, maybe fifteen—for the house to come apart."
Aaron Parsley, a senior editor at Texas Monthly, published a harrowing firsthand account of his family's struggle to survive during the early morning hours of July 4, during flash flooding along the Guadalupe River. (At least 135 people died.) Parsley's family has since partnered with the Austin Community Foundation to establish a fund in memory of Clay Parisher, Parsley's nephew who died in the flooding.
[ Read the story ]
"There were some writers, like when [Toni Morrison] talked about Toni Cade Bambara, she said, ‘My only job with Bambara was to make sure that the story held together and that she wasn't leaving the reader behind.’ She would joke about Bambara moving so fast that if the reader didn't keep up, then the reader just got lost. So sometimes it would be slowing her down, adding a sentence or two to give the reader some time to process.
"Interestingly enough, I didn't know it at the time, but I think that was a function of Morrison's work in the theater. The time that she spent at Howard that she talked about most positively was as an actor herself. And one of the techniques for playwrights is if there's a line that punches, you have to give the audience an opportunity to pause, to catch up, before you move to the next line."
[ Read the story ]
"We’re really greedy with people’s time. I try to be really upfront with people when we go interview them and I’m like, ‘I’m going to talk to you, [and] I need at least three hours, and then maybe I’ll come back.’ Often I just do it in chunks. I’ll do a three-hour interview, and then I’ll do another three-hour interview to end up with a 15-minute radio piece." Reiman, a reporter and editor for “This American Life,” reflects on the show’s unique voice, as well as her own experience with immigration.
[ Read the story ]
“I think it’s very important to think of reporting and interviewing as two separate tools if possible. When I report, I just tag along with my notebook. I don’t ask questions unless it’s strictly necessary. Then, later, I do interviews and ask all the things I’m curious about.”
[ Read the story ]
“I think when people start, a lot of journalists don't think about their stories as stories. They think about it as providing information. So even the idea of, ‘Let me tell you a story’ is not forefront in a lot of especially young news reporters' minds. It wasn't for me. It's a habit and a mindset to sort of go, ‘What kind of story can I tell with this information?’ A news story, you're reporting on an event; a narrative story, you want people to kind of follow you along and see what happens.”
[ Read the story ]
“I was trying to be very mindful of being an outsider but also trying to assess my own kind of place and situate myself. That's what the book’s about in general. How can I situate myself within these current moments but also within the timeline of history? To engage in general conversations and being very mindful of the things that I don't know and being OK with asking questions and being OK with my own ignorance.”
[ Read the story ]
“I'm Catholic. Every time I interview a new person, I say a prayer. I try to get across to them that I'm scared out of my mind before I interview strangers. It takes all the courage in the world for me to go up to a stranger's door and knock on the door, right?
“It's always easier to email. So I try to have them do those kind of one-on-one, actual face-to-face interactions. Once I tell them, ‘I'm kind of scared out of my mind,’ that breaks down so many barriers with my students. They're like, ‘Oh, Robert's scared. So it's OK if I'm scared.’”
Robert Sanchez of 5280 magazine reports on experiments around psilocybin therapy, while also using first person to tell his own story.
[ Read the story ]
“In my late teens and throughout my 20s, I actually had been struggling quite a lot with the effects of a relapse, and yet I was too afraid to admit that narrative, and I didn't really think that I could share that publicly, partly because so many of the narratives and books that we hear and see and read on eating disorders are written from the perspective of people who are fully recovered, such that it can make people who aren't feel as though their narratives are either not worthy of being shared or not really safe to share, because it can feel very stigmatizing if you're in this middle place.”
[ Read the story ]
“[Joe Tone] is the best, most thorough, most sensitive editor I will ever have. He understands what a story can be, almost always from the beginning, and he saw this piece more clearly than I often did. My first draft came in at 9,000 words, because I was trying to tell all three kids' stories almost equally. That's overwhelming and disorienting to the reader, and it was Joe's idea — and insistence — that we remain focused on Jaedan. This wasn't a story about Corwin Brown. It wasn't even the story of a family. It was about one daughter's determination to learn everything she can about her dad's plight, and maybe get him some help.”
[ Read the story ]
Subscribe to Storyboard
Get insights into the craft of journalism and storytelling in your inbox, delivered on Fridays.
Follow the Nieman Storyboard Podcast
[ Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. ]
