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Dear Storyboard community:
In this newsletter, we often grapple with how and when a journalist brings their own voice and experience into their stories.
The truth is, the narrator is always there, guiding us along. But in what ways do they reveal themselves to the reader?
This week's Nieman Storyboard podcast guest, author Claudia Rowe, set out to write a work of narrative nonfiction about the failures of the American foster care system. She knew she wanted to tell it through the eyes of former foster youth, but she also needed to understand how her own voice could weave all the threads together into a compelling narrative.
I moved pieces around for a long time. The difficult parts of the book for me were structure and voice. What exactly was my narrator voice? If I want the kids to be telling their story, where is that narrator persona? This is difficult. But I think essentially what happened is I ended up structuring the book the way I discovered the answers for the questions I was trying to find … like following a thread or little breadcrumbs, or unraveling a mystery. I had questions, and I'm assuming the reader will have the same questions, and here is me trying to figure them out. And that was where I kind of got the narrator persona.
I'm just going to be, “Okay, I'm not the genius reporter who knows everything. I'm trying to figure this out just like anybody is.” And that [means] maybe I don't look smart on every page. Maybe a reader goes, “Didn't you know that? Why wouldn't you know that? You're a reporter.” Um, well, no, I didn't know it. We're not magic and we only know what we know by figuring it out. And so the figuring out is going to be part of this story.
The end result is “Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care,” which was published in May and has been named a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for nonfiction. On the Storyboard podcast, Rowe shares lessons for journalists about trauma-informed reporting and working with young people to tell their stories, and how to cover a system that makes it difficult to obtain public information in the first place.
"Listen when the subject's story seems to be veering in a direction you didn't think it would go, and you maybe don't want it to go. You think that you know what your story is, and you want them to speak to this, but they go over here to some other place entirely. Let it happen. It's a difficult thing to do. It requires relinquishing control, and you need to let it happen because you might find a kernel of magic there. Surprise is magic in journalism, right? Surprise is the glittering stone at your feet that you didn't expect to see.”
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Links of note
- In the newsletter Continuous Wave, Julia Barton (Nieman Fellow '24) talks to Julie Shapiro and John DeLore about the three-minute stories that make up their long-running series Audio Flux, which just launched as a podcast. “You can do quite a lot in three minutes, but it doesn't feel overwhelming for people who don't have time, or haven't done it before, or just want to try something new … you can push people a little bit further because you're not pushing for as long.”
- On publishing a book and keeping your day job: At Sara Fredman's newsletter Write Like a Mother, author Erin Somers discusses her journey to publishing books, balancing creativity with steady work, and turning a short story into her new novel, “The Ten Year Affair.”
- Put down your phone and grab a pen and paper: Are you ready to have an “Analog Fall”?
- How important is it to cultivate deep connections? “Like our beat coverage, journalism is about building relationships and if you go silent or only reach out when you need something it might be difficult to get ahead or stay in the industry long term.” Useful advice for emerging journalists from Tat Bellamy-Walker at My First Byline.
- “Nory Doesn’t Go to School Here Anymore.” Corina Knoll of The New York Times demonstrates the power of zooming in on individual stories from the Trump administration's continued deportations — in this case, 17-year-old Nory Sontay Ramos and her mother who were living in Los Angeles — and how to bring humanity to a story through text messages:
After that, Nory stopped communicating altogether.
Over the next few days, her friends grew uneasy, then frantic. Nory wasn’t even responding through her social media accounts.
“omg noryyy are u okayyy im worried for you!!”
“please tell me you are ok”
“Are u okay norita”
Finally, on July 4, Nory responded:
“Idk if u can see this”
“We didn’t have any chance to fight our case”
“We are in Guatemala”
“They deported us back”
Through it all, keep sharing your stories,
Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
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