Welcome, new readers! Our audience has grown considerably lately, so we thought this might be a good time to recap Storyboard’s goods and services, and to invite you to follow us on Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook.
We're a Nieman Foundation for Journalism publication, with two sister sites:
Nieman Journalism Lab, edited by Joshua Benton, covers the future of news with daily online posts and a dynamic Twitter stream. Sample story: emerging links between civic engagement and the revival of local journalism.
Nieman Reports, edited by James Geary, the foundation's deputy curator, is the foundation's quarterly magazine — also available online — and has covered the journalism industry since 1947. Sample package: "The signal and the noise," about coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing.
Here at Storyboard, we cover the craft of narrative journalism and the future of storytelling. On our site, you can find more than a decade’s worth of material related almost exclusively to story craft. Our contributors represent every medium and have included Pulitzer and National Magazine Award winners, industry icons, and game-changing up-and-comers. You might recognize some of the best names in storytelling, including Chris Jones and Tom Junod of Esquire, GQ's Amy Wallace, Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger, Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden, best-selling science-narrative writer Deborah Blum and food journalist Michael Pollan, and Pulitzer winners Amy Ellis Nutt, Isabel Wilkerson and Jacqui Banaszynski, plus storytellers as diverse as Evan Ratliff, Gay Talese, Adam Hochschild, Starlee Kine, Alexis Madrigal, Wesley Morris, Maud Newton, Adam Penenberg and Jenna Wortham.
Our burgeoning Pinterest site is updated almost daily with writing inspiration, interviews, gear, reporting resources and more.
Three of our most popular series:
— “Why’s this so good?” features writers deconstructing their favorite pieces of storytelling. Example: the Nieman Lab’s Justin Ellis on David Grann, on a real-life Sherlock Holmes mystery:
— Annotation Tuesday! goes line by line through stories with their authors. This newer feature got a shout-out from the New York Times magazine recently when the 6th Floor blog referenced a Pamela Colloff series that she annotated for us in March, about a wrongful imprisonment in Texas. Colloff's story won the National Magazine Award for feature/profile writing in May. (Check back Friday for a City & Regional Magazine Association talk — recorded exclusively for Storyboard by the Atlanta magazine crew — between Colloff and Junod.)
— Narrative Speakers Series Q-and-A’s feature a growing lineup of notable writers — Michael Paterniti, Junot Díaz and more — who visited the Nieman Foundation and Harvard through the other wing of our operation, the Nieman Narrative Writing seminar.
You’ll also find archived essays on craft, featuring speakers and tip sheets from our former Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference (which ended in 2009); an occasional series on story mining, called, “How’d you find that story?”, in which successful narrative journalists demystify the hunt for great stories; and “Work the problem,” in which Amy Ellis Nutt recently wrote, for instance, about how to look at your own stories more objectively.
To browse the archives, see the “Medium and Message” index. And feel free to write to us with story ideas and pitches anytime at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.
Thanks for reading!
We're a Nieman Foundation for Journalism publication, with two sister sites:
Nieman Journalism Lab, edited by Joshua Benton, covers the future of news with daily online posts and a dynamic Twitter stream. Sample story: emerging links between civic engagement and the revival of local journalism.Nieman Reports, edited by James Geary, the foundation's deputy curator, is the foundation's quarterly magazine — also available online — and has covered the journalism industry since 1947. Sample package: "The signal and the noise," about coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing.
Here at Storyboard, we cover the craft of narrative journalism and the future of storytelling. On our site, you can find more than a decade’s worth of material related almost exclusively to story craft. Our contributors represent every medium and have included Pulitzer and National Magazine Award winners, industry icons, and game-changing up-and-comers. You might recognize some of the best names in storytelling, including Chris Jones and Tom Junod of Esquire, GQ's Amy Wallace, Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger, Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden, best-selling science-narrative writer Deborah Blum and food journalist Michael Pollan, and Pulitzer winners Amy Ellis Nutt, Isabel Wilkerson and Jacqui Banaszynski, plus storytellers as diverse as Evan Ratliff, Gay Talese, Adam Hochschild, Starlee Kine, Alexis Madrigal, Wesley Morris, Maud Newton, Adam Penenberg and Jenna Wortham.
Our burgeoning Pinterest site is updated almost daily with writing inspiration, interviews, gear, reporting resources and more.Three of our most popular series:
— “Why’s this so good?” features writers deconstructing their favorite pieces of storytelling. Example: the Nieman Lab’s Justin Ellis on David Grann, on a real-life Sherlock Holmes mystery:
A chateau! A curse! Deception and a Russian princess! And Grann’s just getting started. He’s clearly in the process of spooling up the thread to lay out the stakes of the story. Once the prized documents take a turn for Christie’s auction house the Sherlockian scholar grows more desperate and paranoid. The paragraphs race forward, the pace quickens, each sentence becomes so compressed and descriptive you feel like you can’t breathe. (In a good way, of course.) You’re worried about Green and what will happen to Conan Doyle’s archive. And then, just after you’ve gotten 1,000 words deep into the mystery, the body shows up. Boom.
— Annotation Tuesday! goes line by line through stories with their authors. This newer feature got a shout-out from the New York Times magazine recently when the 6th Floor blog referenced a Pamela Colloff series that she annotated for us in March, about a wrongful imprisonment in Texas. Colloff's story won the National Magazine Award for feature/profile writing in May. (Check back Friday for a City & Regional Magazine Association talk — recorded exclusively for Storyboard by the Atlanta magazine crew — between Colloff and Junod.)
— Narrative Speakers Series Q-and-A’s feature a growing lineup of notable writers — Michael Paterniti, Junot Díaz and more — who visited the Nieman Foundation and Harvard through the other wing of our operation, the Nieman Narrative Writing seminar.
You’ll also find archived essays on craft, featuring speakers and tip sheets from our former Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference (which ended in 2009); an occasional series on story mining, called, “How’d you find that story?”, in which successful narrative journalists demystify the hunt for great stories; and “Work the problem,” in which Amy Ellis Nutt recently wrote, for instance, about how to look at your own stories more objectively.
To browse the archives, see the “Medium and Message” index. And feel free to write to us with story ideas and pitches anytime at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.
Thanks for reading!
