EDITOR’S NOTE: Narrative editor Jan Winburn created a class focused on trauma reporting last semester at the University of Montana, where she was the T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor. For the next four Thursdays, we’ll post interviews her students did … Read more
Atlantic editor and writer Jacob Stern can sum up in a single word, as flickering as a blurred jab, what he knew about boxing: “Nothing.” But when Stern embarked on a story about a boxer returning … Read more
Joan Didion died on December 23, 2021, and by Christmas internet searches were returning page after page of obituaries that described her as a “peerless prose stylist.” She has long been celebrated as a journalist, essayist, novelist and memoirist, … Read more
In 1990, Joan Didion received an assignment from Bob Silvers, editor at the New York Review of Books, to write about a highly publicized, emotionally fraught crime almost nobody wanted to read about after it was, in theory, solved. Read more
“I’d told a few friends but asked them to keep it under their hats,” Kari emailed me in the spring of 2016. She had just been appointed editor of Nieman Storyboard, and we weren’t quite ready … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: Temperatures in the Pacific Northwest were sitting in the single digits, with rare snow in the cities along the I-5 corridor, as this piece came in for editing. Long-time weather-watcher Stuart Tomlinson reflected back on the “heat dome” … Read more
If this seems dated (it’s inspired by a Christmas movie, after all), consider this: The best of stories are, or should be, universal and timeless. And thus a breath-catching moment early in the recent season’s Netflix movie, … Read more
Untold stories remain one of journalism’s and society’s starkest gaps. The plight of the mentally ill and homeless, the Sisyphean struggles of the working poor, ingrained prejudice against minorities in the workplace, child poverty and hunger — those … Read more
At the end of each semester, after all the discussions of craft, I remind my reporting students at the Missouri School of Journalism the why of it all: the larger purpose their journalism serves. By then they have become … Read more
It would have been easy but discouraging to spend an entire year of Storyboard featuring stories about homelessness, climate woes and, of course, COVID-19. It would be tempting to identify the stand-outs among those, which are many, in my … Read more
