Scenes from a hacker house

The San Francisco AI gold rush. Plus: Kari Howard Fund for Narrative Journalism, Justin Heckert's one that got away.

October 3, 2025

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Dear Storyboard community,

My mission for this newsletter is to focus squarely on journalists who are doing the work, and what we can learn from them.

If I admitted to a second, unspoken goal, it might be: “Let's not talk about AI.” I want Nieman Storyboard to celebrate the work that humans are uniquely capable of doing: Observing the world, and making sense of what is happening through storytelling.

But when a reporter is able to bring me into San Francisco's AI subculture? Count me in. Here's Kerry Howley at New York magazine, observing the young founders of today:

Someone tells me I absolutely have to meet a “supercool” guy named Patrick Santiago, and when we talk for the first time Pat is down to hang pretty much immediately, so I walk over to Market Street, a few blocks from the Tenderloin, a part of town in which another woman advises me to walk “with purpose” if I walk at all. Pat is transforming a few dozen rooms in a one-star hotel with frightening reviews (“Very unclean. Health and safety concerns”) into “kind of a summer-camp experience” for aspiring founders, mostly 20-somethings with no interest in drawing a paycheck from big tech. He calls his hacker house Accelr8, and he started it, broke, as a way of “raising in the AI boom.” The first residents, who rent rooms Pat has leased from the hotel, rode up the creaky elevator just this past June. Pat’s wearing sweatpants, Adidas slides without socks, a Patagonia fleece he occasionally tugs over his mouth as he vapes, and a square piece of plastic on a string called a Buddi, an AI device that records and summarizes all of his conversations.

In each vivid scene, Howley makes us feel like we're there, hanging out with the cool kids and stumbling into a room with a 50-year-old guru who goes by the name Professor Dumpster. This is another boom in a city that has seen many come and go, in a country that is otherwise shut down and turning on itself. As Howley writes, “Every gold-rush story is a tale of a ticking clock.”

How can other writers capture current moments and bring them to readers? Contributor Emilia Wisniewski dug into the Nieman Storyboard archives to share insights from some of the most iconic narrative nonfiction.

From index cards to interviews: Eight journalists on reporting and writing scenes

“The trick — and of course, it is not a trick — is to choose and use just what is needed to paint a picture and pull readers into the moment. Too little and the picture is fuzzy or incomplete or, worse, confusing. Too much and the reader is overwhelmed, not knowing where to look, what to pay attention to or, worse, bored.”

[ Read the story ]

Links of note

Kari Howard at the Nieman Foundation's Lippmann House on the Harvard campus in 2016.

The International Women’s Media Foundation has announced that journalists Camille Bromley and Elizabeth Flock are the recipients of the 2025 Kari Howard Fund for Narrative Journalism grants: “Both journalists’ stories will cover aspects of the global migration crisis, with Bromley focusing on immigration in New York City, while Flock will report from an ancient forest along the Polish-Belarus border.” The fund honors Howard, the beloved former editor of Nieman Storyboard, the Los Angeles Times, and Reuters, among other publications, who died in 2022. The foundation's selection committee includes family, friends, and former colleagues. Howard “inspired writers to observe acutely, listen to the melody of language, and take chances with their writing,” the foundation noted in its announcement.
When journalists turn on the front-facing camera: “I try to take a very multi-pronged approach to getting my stuff out there, always trying to remind myself that I have to be the biggest advocate for my work.” At Embedded, The Verge's Mia Sato discusses embracing TikTok and other platforms to share her reporting.
From Storyboard contributor Carly Stern: "There were so many sentences I wanted to underline in this beautiful craft piece about ideas unfolding in motion, as the writer Karen Palmer takes a road trip and finds her creativity unblocked again." For Palmer, driving can serve as “a form of meditation, or self-hypnosis, a way to bypass the censor that lives inside every writer,” she writes. “Ideas flow when the body is occupied but the mind is unbound.”
The Society for Features Journalism has announced its full program for the return of its conference, Nov. 6-8 in Phoenix. The event will also include the induction of recent Storyboard podcast guest Lane DeGregory and editor Maria Carrillo into SFJ’s Hall of Fame.
Do you have a pitch graveyard? For Brendan O'Meara's Pitch Club newsletter, journalist Justin Heckert shares the one that got away: a magazine story pitch that didn't come to fruition, about the hero of the 2011 World Series, David Freese of the St. Louis Cardinals, and what happened in his life after his moment in the spotlight passed. “This one hurt,” says Heckert. (Editor's note: I would *absolutely* still read this.)