Innovative Storytelling From 2023 – The New York Times

The Times is a newspaper, but it’s not only a newspaper. As a reader of this newsletter, you get the news in your email inbox every morning, not just on your doorstep. You might also listen to our journalism on a podcast app. You might watch it on TikTok.

This year, as the Morning team began to compile standout journalism from 2023, we wanted to make sure we paid attention to different types of storytelling. Below, we have selected some of the year’s best podcast episodes, TikTok videos and graphics. We are also including some essays by our colleagues that take you behind the scenes of our journalism.

Best graphics

See more of the best graphics here, along with the stories behind their creation.

Best of audio

• 2023 was the year of Taylor Swift. “The Daily” explores what that sounded like.

• On an episode of “Modern Love,” one woman married her crush from the subway. “This story is a heartbreaking articulation of grief, and a heart-mending reflection on how we never really lose the people we love,” Anna Martin, the host, said.

• Girl dinners and hot girl walks: A writer explained how young women are reclaiming “girl” as empowering, not infantilizing.

Best videos

Behind the scenes at The Times

• What happens when an editor who runs a breaking news team takes a weeklong vow of silence at a meditation retreat?

• In 1999, a news assistant’s number crunching revealed that The Times had gotten 500 issues ahead of itself.

• A freelance reporter covered a mass shooting at Michigan State, while her younger sister sheltered in a classroom there.

• A Times book critic had one day to read, and review, Prince Harry’s memoir. Here’s how she did it.

• For years, confusion over who could perform a marriage in New York put The Times’s Weddings desk in the uncomfortable position of telling couples their marriages were not legal.

• In 1945, Milton Esterow began a career at The Times that changed art and culture reporting. He’s still writing at 94 — and still on a typewriter.

THE LATEST NEWS

International

• After a deadly shooting, the parents of Covenant School — many of them conservative — set out to toughen Tennessee’s gun laws.

• Nikki Haley is the only non-Trump candidate with any momentum in the Republican primary. She’s hoping to beat him by mostly ignoring him.

• Vivek Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign has stopped spending money on cable TV ads.

Climate

• “Eerie and disconcerting”: It was a rare snowless Christmas in the upper Midwest, with the temperature in the Minneapolis area hitting a record high.

• Earth is finishing up its warmest year ever recorded. The heat has scientists asking: Is climate change accelerating?

• The Biden administration must decide whether to permit a natural gas project in Louisiana that pits economic concerns against the government’s climate strategy.

Other Big Stories

Opinions

Even if Ukraine fails to drive Russia out of its territory, an armistice would still secure its place in the West, Serge Schmemann writes.

In 1909, Frederick A. Cook claimed to be the first man to reach the North Pole. In our age, in which scammers are idolized, he should be an American icon, Allegra Rosenberg writes.

Social media is a scapegoat that dismisses the real concerns young people have for the economy and Gaza, Zeynep Tufekci writes.

MORNING READS

“Hitting stuff hard”: Amateur blacksmithing is growing in popularity, part of a broader rise in hobby crafting.

Ghosts of New York: Angelina Jolie opened her first fashion boutique in Lower Manhattan this month. The building, 57 Great Jones Street, has a storied artistic past: Andy Warhol bought it in the 1970s, and Jean-Michel Basquiat lived and painted in the upstairs loft. But its history stretches well before that, The Times’s Alex Vadukul found. It has housed a host of New York City characters since the 1800s — including mobsters and bare-knuckle boxers.