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Dear Storyboard community,
There’s a moment I keep coming back to from my podcast conversation last week with journalist Drew Harwell. He talks about this era of heightened distrust in the media, and he wonders whether we are missing opportunities to help people understand what journalists actually do and why it matters:
We as an institution have been attacked and criticized from a partisan perspective for many years, right? We've had this persona placed onto us, and we haven't really done a good job of necessarily just saying that we're all just a bunch of random normies, basically.
We have notepads. We go out and ask people questions. We are trying to be a reflection of what we see. We're just people like you. We're just observers.
The words that come to mind when I encounter great work from journalists are “curiosity,” “humility,” and “humanity.” A passion for showing up, listening, and bearing witness. We have a brilliant example this week from journalist Kent Babb, who told the story of Jaedan Brown, whose father, former football star Corwin Brown, is suffering from mental illness potentially caused by CTE. So much of good storytelling rests on access to intimate or difficult moments from someone's life. Babb told Storyboard's Trevor Pyle that writing this story required trust and transparency with the family — and at one point Babb found himself nearly talking them out of participating.
In journalism, you can meet people where they are and engage in storytelling however works. You might be full-time on staff at a news organization or side-hustling with an iPhone camera and a TikTok account. There are many ways for “random normies,” for observers with notepads, to show up.
Plenty of journalists will be doing that this weekend at protests around the U.S. Be safe, be careful, and thank you for braving dangerous conditions to keep us informed.
"It may seem self-defeating to talk a willing participant out of speaking with me for a story, but with pieces like this, I try hard to be a human being first and a reporter second. It's extremely personal, mega-sensitive, and the immersive nature of this kind of story isn't for everyone."
Links of note
- This year's winners of the European Press Prize have been announced, celebrating excellence in journalism from the 46 countries that make up the Council of Europe. The full list of winners is here, including investigations and essays "ranging in focus from the pervasive influence of the Kremlin in European elections to the everlasting scars of the black market adoption industry." (Hat tip to Storyboard editor emerita Jacqui Banaszynski.)
- "Secret Billionaires. Age-Gap Marriages. Plenty of Revenge." For better or for worse, there are countless lessons on social media storytelling in Joshua Hunt's feature story for New York magazine, about the 1-2-minute fictional micro-dramas, or "verticals," being produced for apps like ReelShort. "Because every 90-second clip needs to advance the story, heighten the melodrama, and summarize the plot for anyone just tuning in, the characters in these microdramas don’t bother with subtext. They say what they mean, or stroke their chin and look off into the distance while a voice-over tells us what they are thinking."
- "At 98, the Grandmother of Juneteenth Still Has Work to Do." For Texas Monthly, Hanif Abdurraqib pays a visit to Opal Lee. On June 19, 1939, when Lee was 12 years old, a white mob set fire to her childhood home. She later made it her mission to help make Juneteenth a national holiday — and she succeeded. "She’d taken an inciting moment of rage and grief and dedicated her life to healing the wound it had created. And yes, that is a mighty triumph. A worthy ending to a remarkable life, a strong conclusion — if she were to be satisfied with any idea of closure. But Lee, who has lived through, endured, and fought for so much in a long and still-unfurling lifetime, has something unique to offer in an era of renewed crisis."
Keep sharing your stories,
Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
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