Share your favorite stories (and podcasts, books, and docs) of 2025

Nieman Storyboard's Best of 2025. Plus: The team behind ‘American Shrapnel’ on helping sources feel safe

November 21, 2025

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Dear Storyboard community:

It can often feel impossible to keep up with the news cycle and all the outstanding journalism that's produced and published each year.

That's why I'm grateful for the many “best of” lists that begin to roll in around now. The holiday season gives us time to pause, reflect, and look back at what we may have missed.

In that spirit, I'd like to hear from the Nieman Storyboard community. Now is your chance to share your favorite moments in journalism and storytelling from 2025 — the stories, #longreads, podcasts, books, documentaries, photos (and…TikToks?) that stuck with you and made an impression.

Please send me your submissions for your favorite stories of the year. You make your own criteria — perhaps you admire the reporting or storytelling, the writing and production, or you simply feel the work deserves more recognition.

Some other parameters:

You can share up to two recommendations. Provide a link, and up to 100 words on why you love it or what it taught you about the craft of journalism and storytelling.
Please choose stories, books, podcasts, or documentaries that neither you, nor your employer, were involved in.
Let's focus on journalism, narrative nonfiction, and first-person/memoir.
If you discovered something in 2025, but it was published earlier than this year, we'll allow it!

Fill out the Google form below and we look forward to sharing your picks throughout December. Thank you for being a part of this community.

[ Submit your Best of 2025 picks ]

Speaking of great work from the past year, Storyboard contributor Minda Honey is back this week in conversation with the reporting team behind “American Shrapnel,” the serialized podcast about domestic terrorist Eric Rudolph and the series of bombings across the U.S. South from 1996 to 1998, including the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.

Even decades later, some sources didn't feel comfortable talking, especially at a moment when domestic terrorism and extremist political ideology remain at the center of the national conversation. The reporting team of John Hammontree, Becca Andrews, and John Archibald talked to Honey about discussing traumatic events with their sources.

How the team behind the ‘American Shrapnel’ podcast helped their sources feel safe

“We basically said, ‘We just want you to tell your story, and you tell what you’re comfortable telling.’ And he just opened up. And John and I, honestly, just sat there in an emotional state of wonder because he was summing up things that I thought were so extremely powerful and that we had never heard before. I think he understood that.”

[ Read the story ]

Links of note

Congrats to this year's National Book Award winners, including nonfiction winner “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” by Omar El Akkad and fiction winner “The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother),” by Rabih Alameddine. See the full list here.
“You're Writing a Book. So Stop Writing a Movie.” Author Rebecca Makkai shares invaluable advice on writing for the page versus writing for TV and film. Fiction or narrative nonfiction writers can manipulate time, space, and interiority in creative ways — they can tell us what a character is thinking, using language that would be clunky on film. “‘Show, don’t tell’ is largely applicable to emotion. If a student writes ‘He displayed rage’ or ‘She acted embarrassed,’ I’m likely to write ‘Show this plz’? in the margins. What it does not mean is that you’re not allowed to give us exposition or interiority. Neglect those tools at your peril.”
Good news for documentary lovers: PBS's award-winning series ”Frontline” has announced “Frontline Features,” a new effort “dedicated to producing cinematic feature-length and short documentaries for global, multiplatform distribution,” led by “Frontline” editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath. They've also announced four new productions: “2000 Meters to Andriivka,” “Antidote,” “Status: Venezuelan,” and “One in a Million.”
“50 notable works of nonfiction from 2025.” A year-end list of the best memoirs, biographies, history and more, from The Washington Post. (Hat-tip Mariah Blake, whose book “They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals,” is included.)
Author Roda Ahmed talks to Cheryl Strayed about finding time for herself and her writing in the early morning: “As time passed, the kids slept in later, and I got up earlier. Slowly but surely, I found the time to create my own sort of magic. I made the time. This little routine change, as simple as it sounds, changed my life for the better. I now have this golden hour before the world demands of me all my other identities, when I get to be alone with the blank page. It is in that hour that I turn ideas into realties, pages into books, and back to myself.”