The life of an author, on camera

Jason Pargin's second career pivoting to video. Plus: tools for organizing your reporting, and a database for freelance rates

by Mark Armstrong

Image for The life of an author, on camera — Photo by Tuur Tisseghem, Pexels

September 5, 2025

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Dear Storyboard community,

Understanding the craft of storytelling involves confronting the reality of what it takes to get a story seen and read. And sometimes that means filming a selfie video from the front seat of the family minivan.

If you've perused the Nieman Foundation Instagram, you may have seen me on camera, discussing some of the same topics you've read about in this newsletter or heard on the Storyboard podcast.

Part of this experiment was a challenge to myself — to learn about short-form video and practice our most modern form of public speaking — and part of it was accepting the reality of the digital world. Not everyone reads or consumes traditional news, so rather than shake my fist at evaporating attention spans, I wanted to examine how we can tell stories that reach different audiences.

That said, we're now several years into the TikTok era, and we’re still confronting the same problems that always plagued social media. Algorithms reward sensationalism over substance, while nuance and facts often disappear into the digital vortex. We may show our faces onscreen more often, but there's still no guarantee we can see each other's humanity.

Our latest Storyboard interview gets into these issues — as well as what happens when authors are expected to use TikTok to promote their books. Contributor Tricia Romano sits down with Jason Pargin, the bestselling author who built an entirely new career — and a second full-time job on top of writing — telling stories to hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok and Facebook:

I have no staff at all helping me with any of the 11 various platforms I have to maintain to keep my life going as an author; it's all me. Now, the only reason I don't write out a script for my videos is because I'm not good at reading a script for my videos. You'd be able to tell I was reading. So I have notes that are like the points I'm going to hit, or the facts that I've got to put in there. If I'm going to cite statistics or whatever, I've got to have those written down to make sure I'm not saying it wrong.

You can film and edit in the app. It takes me about two hours start to finish to get a video done. And you can spend two hours filming, after having spent multiple hours researching it, and then within 15 minutes, you'll see if TikTok has decided to kill it because they don't like the subject matter or something, and instantly that effort will all be wasted.

Pargin is candid about the pros and cons of content creation from the time investment required, to the built-in biases of the algorithms — and the hoops women authors are expected to jump through compared with men. His story is also a great case study in following your curiosity, wherever it takes you.

The craft (and business) of TikTok storytelling, according to author Jason Pargin

How the writer and former Cracked editor found his voice with short-form video.

[ Read the story ]

Links of note

Speaking of TikTok: Sometimes a video arrives on your For You Page (FYP), and it represents everything you love about the format and its possibilities for storytelling. We don't get all the specifics — e.g., who is the narrator? Who is her aunt? — but this is a simple, beautiful reflection from a bygone era of New York City's Greenwich Village.
When the bookmarking app Pocket announced it was shutting down, science reporter and audio producer Christian Elliott went looking for a new tool to organize his reporting and writing for big projects. Here's what he discovered. Elliott also shares what it's like to spend ten days with an interview subject. (Hat-tip Erika Hayasaki.)
Also via Erika: The Institute for Independent Journalists is offering a free webinar on Sept. 19 on “Reporting from the Intersection: When Identity and Beat Collide,” in partnership with the Trans Journalists Association.
There is a lot to unpack in Elizabeth Gilbert's new memoir. Start with Jia Tolentino's review of the book, and then read Rusty Foster at Today in Tabs, as they both ask what the tropes of nonfiction and memoir require from their subjects. Foster writes: “‘All lives only have one beginning and one ending and they’re both exactly the same for everyone, so where you choose to begin and end a story about part of a life says more about storytelling than it does about living.”
Tim Herrera's Freelancing with Tim newsletter has been a must-follow for years — and he's recently published a comprehensive database of freelance rates for nearly 450 publications (via Kara Cutruzzula).