Storyboard Best of 2025 (Part 2!)

More of your favorite stories, books, podcasts, and docs. Plus: The craft of filmmaking, and how to bring characters to life

by Mark Armstrong

Image for Storyboard Best of 2025 (Part 2!) — People gather on Washington Street in front of Manhattan Bridge during a snowfall Dec. 14 in Brooklyn. (AP Photo/Adam Gray)

December 19, 2025

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Dear Storyboard community:

This week, we’re back with Part 2 of our inaugural Storyboard Best of 2025 series. Thanks again to everyone who contributed a pick this year. Some of you asked if you could bend the rules or create new categories (like music!), to which I proclaimed: Absolutely. If you loved it, tell us about it.

One of my favorite parts of this series was the rare dual endorsement from multiple contributors. Part 1 featured a pair of rave reviews for Brian Goldstone’s book “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America” and another for Nicholas Hune-Brown's “Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era.” And Part 2 features multiple recommendations for Kurt Streeter's New York Times story, “How to Fix a Typewriter and Your Life.”

Let's keep these community recommendations flowing in 2026. As you come across them, please send me your favorite stories, books, podcasts, social media accounts, and documentaries for future editions of this newsletter. Email me anytime at editor@niemanstoryboard.org.

We’ll be away next week and back with our next newsletter on January 2, 2026. Happy holidays!

Nieman Storyboard Best of 2025: Your favorite stories of the year (Part 2)

“I love stories that make me feel like I'm peeking behind the curtains of a magic show.”

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Links of note

“Mining the Future: Filming Cobalt Miners in Congo (DRC).” I’m excited for this new newsletter from filmmaker (and 2025 Nieman Fellow) Mike Shum, who takes us into the craft of documentary filmmaking, starting with a behind-the-scenes look at a short doc he worked on for Al Jazeera Witness on mining for cobalt, which is critical to the manufacturing of electric vehicles and renewable energy.
More “Best Of” lists are here: Don’t miss year-end collections from my old colleagues at Longreads, Vulture, the Sunday Long Read newsletter, and Siobhan McHugh (author of “The Power of Podcasting”), who has a fantastic list of notable podcasts from 2025.
When Hollywood and journalism collide: Editor-journalist Christine McLaren has launched the 2025 edition of “The IP List,” a collection of 25 longform stories that are well-suited for film and television adaptation. McLaren launched the list in partnership with an organization called PopShift / Pathos Labs. Storyboard contributor Erika Hayasaki, whose Verge story “The Lurker” is featured on the list, writes about her experiences optioning her work for the screen and talked with McLaren about how The IP List was born.
“How to bring a character to life.” At the Curious Reading Club newsletter, Bobbie Johnson breaks down how author-journalist David Baron introduces us to a character named Percival Lowell in his new book, “The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.” In this case, Lowell is a central character, but not the only character. “Baron is very careful in how he chooses to introduce Lowell to the story. He doesn’t make his first appearance with either of the chronological bookends that you might expect—as a baby at the outset of life, or as an older gentleman looking backward and foreshadowing his achievements. He doesn’t even appear at the moment when his Mars obsession takes hold, which would certainly have some narrative logic. Instead, he first appears in a scene that immediately situates him as an aristocrat, a snoot, a product of New England history and breeding: as a student giving a commencement speech at Harvard.” The writer sets the scene for the story to come, and we’re along for the ride.