A Conversation With 2025 National Magazine Awards Finalist Gloria Liu

Plus awards updates & an upcoming conference for freelancers

It is awards season, the time of year when it dawns on me that I simply have not had time to keep up with all the incredible journalism being produced by writers and publications in the face of layoffs, budget cuts, freelance struggles, and threats to the media. I’ve spent some time recently trying to catch up, adding more pieces to my reading list, immersing myself in remarkable works of journalism.

I am happy to report that three writers who shared their behind-the-scenes reporting with The Reported Essay (since this newsletter launched in September) are finalists for the 2025 National Magazine Awards.

Lauren Smiley, who recently delved into her approach to several memorable feature stories, including her Wired piece “Priscila, Queen of the Rideshare Mafia,” was named a finalist in profile writing for that very feature last week. In our talk, Smiley mentioned discovering the Best American Magazine Writing books as a young journalist. “They blew my mind,” she told me. “Suddenly I was like: ‘Whoa, there's this whole other art form out there.’” Now, 18 years after she took her first journalism job, Smiley’s work is being recognized within the ranks of the same writers that first inspired her career.

In October, freelance journalist Joe Sexton, who spent 25 years as a reporter and editor at The New York Times, and later worked as an editor at ProPublica, talked to The Reported Essay about his story, “The Hardest Case for Mercy,” from The Marshall Project. The investigation follows the defense team for the Parkland school shooter as they fought to spare their client from the death penalty. Sexton’s piece is a 2025 National Magazine Award finalist in feature writing.

In today’s post, I am bringing you my Q&A with Gloria Liu, a freelance journalist based in northern California who broke down her reporting process for this gripping 12,000-word narrative, “Death on Shishapangma” that ran in Outside last year. She and I spoke for this Q&A a little while ago, but it turns out that last week Liu was also named a National Magazine Award finalist (in the service journalism category) for another great story—a feature for Bicycling magazine: “Why We Need to Talk About Cycling’s Silent Epidemic.” In today’s post, Liu discusses how she taught herself narrative writing, and how she has worked so hard—focusing intensely on features—as a relatively new freelancer.

I also want to applaud Rachel Epstein, my wonderful editor at Men’s Health magazine, whose feature package “Beyond Obesity,” is also an American Society of Feature Editors finalist in the service journalism category. Epstein was also a finalist in 2024, for her feature package: “The Human Cost of the Sports Betting Boom.” And big congrats to all the other incredible nominees.

In Other News

I am honored to serve as chair of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Awards this year alongside judges Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family, and Matt Weiland, vice president and senior editor at W. W. Norton & Company. The Lukas Work-in-Progress Awards are given annually to aid in the completion of significant works of nonfiction on American topics of political or social concern.

Today, we announced the five shortlist nominees:

—Susie Cagle’s “The End of the West.”

—Dan Xin Huang’s “Rutter: The Story of an American Underclass.”

—Akemi Johnson’s “Better Americans: In Search of My Family’s Past in America’s Concentration Camps.”

—J. Weston Phippen’s “We Want Them Alive: The True Story of a Massacre on the Border, and the Mothers Who Exposed a U.S. Deal that Trained the Killers.”

—Joe Sexton’s “Life or Death: Justice and Mercy in the Age of the School Shooter.” (which began as the story for which he received the recent ASME nomination).

These five finalists for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award exemplify rigorous and fearless journalism, foregrounding the stories of real people facing extraordinary circumstances in unprecedented times. Each book project aims to bring depth and nuance to crucial social issues in this period of attacks on history, education, science, and DEI initiatives, books being banned, and journalists facing increasing threats to their credibility and safety. In a moment of deep polarization and active efforts to silence certain voices, these works represent the most courageous, careful, and compassionate approaches to nonfiction storytelling.

The Lukas Prize Project was established in 1998 and honors the best in American nonfiction writing. Please see the Columbia Journalism School’s website for all 2025 nominees for the Lukas Prize Project Awards.

A Unique Conference for Freelancers

It is not too late to sign up for this year’s Institute for Independent Journalists virtual conference for freelancers, happening next week. This year’s theme is “Beyond Surviving,” a call to take big swings and build resilience during tough times. Here is a recent “ask me anything” webinar with myself and other organizers, Katherine Reynolds Lewis and Sa'iyda Shabazz, talking about what to expect at the conference.

This year, I will be moderating a 2/28 editor panel featuring Nicole Pasulka, Senior Features Editor at Cosmopolitan; Deborah Jian Lee, Senior Editor at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project; Tami Abdollah, Senior Editor at Noema magazine; and Amy McKeever, Senior Digital Editorial Manager at National Geographic.

Keynote speaker and author Celeste Headlee will talk with NPR’s Deepa Fernandes about her experiences working in mainstream media (NPR, PBS, WNYC), as well as independently. Semafor executive editor Gina Chua will give advice and perspective from leading news organizations around the globe. Other editors will talk about what they want in a pitch, including from Bicycling, Bloomberg, Bon Appetit, the New York Times, Popular Mechanics, Runner's World, Slate, Washington Post, and more. Fellowship directors will also explain how to get funding for an important journalism project, and shoot your shot. Use this link for more info and to register for the conference.

“Snowfall” and Gloria Liu

In today’s Q&A with Liu, we get into a brief conversation about the epic 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning story “Snowfall,” by John Branch. “Snowfall” was especially celebrated at the time for its feature writing merged with multimedia components.

For anyone teaching multimedia storytelling, I wanted share one class exercise that I have used in the past: I break my students into two groups. One reads the immersive narrative with all the multimedia bells and whistles. The other reads only the text alone, no videos, audio, or other multimedia aspects. Then, both groups come together and discuss their “Snowfall” experiences and engagement. It always leads to interesting craft and multimedia debates.

Liu has worked as a features editor for Outside Magazine, and her byline also appears in The Atlantic, National Geographic, Men’s Health, Travel + Leisure, Cosmopolitan, Bicycling, Runner’s World, and other publications. Her stories have won awards and been recommended by Longform, Longreads, and The Sunday Long Read. They’ve also been recognized as notable mentions in the Best American Essays and Best American Sports Writing anthologies. Another feature she wrote won Gold in the News/Investigative Reporting category for the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism awards.

Freelance journalist Gloria Liu.

Here is our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity (and updated since the 2025 ASME announcements).

Congratulations on your National Magazine Award nomination for: “Why We Need to Talk About Cycling’s Silent Epidemic,” about how many women stop riding their bikes because of labial swelling and pain. Can you talk about how that project came together?

My editor at Bicycling, Leah Flickinger, had this idea for years—about covering this women’s cycling injury that no one was talking about, which she knew afflicted amateurs and pros alike. Leah is an incredible editor. I worked with her my first four years in journalism and she taught me so much of what I know. I knew that if she had a story idea for me it would be a good one. (She’s edited features that have won ASMEs and a Pulitzer in the past and has fantastic story sense.) Lo and behold, reporting the story took us down a surprising road, about the history of women’s reproductive health concerns and how their pain has generally been dismissed in the past. I was also really moved by the women who were willing to speak to me openly about this sensitive issue. I’m so honored it was selected as a finalist.

How did you go about finding women who were willing to talk about this personal issue?

We conducted a survey of readers to see how many of them had experienced this issue. It was meant to serve two purposes: one, gather data, but two, also find sources. There was a question that asked if they’d be willing to speak to a reporter and if so, they could provide their contact information. There was also a free-form response section which helped identify sources who might have good stories, or quotes.

Last year you also published “Death on Shishapangma” for Outside, about two American women and two Sherpa guides who perished while racing for a record. How did telling this story start for you?

My editor, Matt Skenazy (who is now at National Geographic) came to me and had the news story. He said: “This just happened. Four people died. They were apparently racing. Do you want to look into it and see if there’s a feature here?” That was just two days after it happened. I didn't know if I was competing against any other reporters. I just had a sense of urgency about it. I thought, I need to talk to people as soon as possible, while their memories are fresh and intact. So I started reaching out to people right away.

There were no accident reports in Nepal or the Himalayas. When an avalanche happens in America, you can read the avalanche report. You can talk to the search-and-rescue people. In this case, there was none of that. I was thinking: How am I going to do this? I wasn't there. There's no official documentation. This is going to be 100% based on eyewitness reports. My challenge is how am I going to make you feel like you were there?

I read “Snowfall” by John Branch. Reading that, he was able to interview all these rescue workers, and they had GoPro footage. I was taking notes on what sources of information he had. Can I get this? Do I have this? Then, I also read “Into Thin Air,” the original magazine piece. I was also taking notes, because John Krakauer was there when it happened, and John Branch wasn't. I wanted to understand what Krakauer noted when he was there. How can I get that kind of information from people so I can make you feel like you were there too?

I remember one detail that Krakauer had was it was so windy, the “tent flaps were rattling like machine gun fire.” It just stood out to me. I thought: Okay, ask people what they remember about, for example, the weather. What else stood out? The five senses. What did you see, what did you hear, what did you smell. That kind of stuff.

I just started reaching out to people one by one. A lot of it was through social media, because that's the best way to contact a lot of the Sherpas, to DM them through Instagram. I did a bunch of interviews, and then I started chopping them up and putting them into chronological order. I also kept a doc each on Anna Gutu and Gina Rzucidlo. Each doc went into each woman’s life, her bio, and her climbing career leading up to this expedition. Then I merged the chronologies when they reached the point where they intersected. After that, it was all one stream of events.

Did you already have that mapped out in your mind? Was that just instinctual?

I've never done anything like that before. Normally for a story, I do interviews, every source has a doc, and then at the end, I'll outline it. But as I was doing the interviews, I started becoming really confused. I couldn’t keep track of what was happening. I realized I can't do it this way. It doesn't make sense to organize ideas by source. It makes sense to organize by chronology, because I'm recreating an event, and I have to piece together all the details from 30 different people. I started doing this, and I found myself wondering how John Branch did it with “Snowfall.” So I listened to a podcast interview he did, and he said he had a similar process. It was reassuring to know I was on the right track.

We learn narrative writing from each other, and from writers before us. Not necessarily by going to school for it, even though I teach this. Learning to construct reported features—whether you do this in a classroom or on your own—also comes from dissecting the writers that you're looking toward as models.

Yeah, I literally googled “John Branch” and “how he reported Snowfall.”

And that really helped you start to organize?

Totally. I was headed in this direction but it gave me confidence. This is the way forward. When it came time to write, my outline was there. I had this huge chronology, and then it was just a matter of what do you want to include? And how do you want to break this up with background and exposition?

Had your editor already given the green light, and did you know it was going to be longform? You said he gave you a news clip, but did he know you were basically giving him “Snowfall?”

I don't think so. When he assigned it, he did say the story reminded them of a modern “Into Thin Air.” But my story was originally assigned at 6,000 words. It ended up being 12,000. If that says anything, I think it exceeded their expectations in terms of the level of detail in reporting. Getting access to both the women’s families was huge. I do wish I could have gotten access to the families of the Sherpas, Tenjen Sherpa and Mingmar Sherpa. I tried.

How did you approach the families, and how did you approach those interviews?

I've reported a few stories where I was dealing with people whose loved ones passed away. But nothing this fresh. I reached out to both women’s families pretty quickly, and I got Gina’s sister on the phone within a couple weeks. It was an emotional conversation. I had a couple phone calls with her, and then I asked: “Can I come out and see you in person?” I wanted her to know I realized we're talking about a life-changing moment for them. I wanted to show them that I was sincere and would treat the story seriously. And I wanted them to meet me in person, because that's always just better for relationship-building. I flew out to see them two months after the accident happened.

I reached out to Anna’s family as well, and it turned out her sister didn't speak English, she only spoke Italian and Russian. So, I used Google Translate, and sent a message to her. She replied: “I'm not ready to talk about this, but maybe later.” I let time pass and checked in from time to time. Finally, a few months later, she said: “Okay, I'm ready to talk to you.” One of the editors at Outside, Tasha Zemke, speaks Italian, so she and I got on the phone and interviewed Anna’s sister by Zoom. We ended up doing three calls by Zoom.

What was the reaction after it came out?

The reaction was for the most part positive. The sources I spoke to said it was balanced, fair and accurate. A couple of them did say they wished certain things had been presented differently. It is the kind of story I would like to do more of. It’s about this trend in mountaineering, how the recent rush to climb the world’s highest peaks is driving climbers onto dangerous mountains like never before. That makes it important and substantive beyond a tragic story.

I often think with longform, what separates great work is when you have that social dimension—inherently there is something that we want to follow in the storytelling, but it's also illustrating some larger issue.

Yeah, it says something about the world. Parts of it can be taken away to help us understand why this happened and how it is preventable.

What has drawn you to the magazine world and these longform pieces?

I was always drawn to features as a reader. As an editor, I always found them the most interesting. They are just so much more involved. You can get into the craft of storytelling, and the structure, and what's at stake. There's so many interesting questions. It's such an art.

But when I started writing, I did some short stories, because people would ask me to write short essays. The Atlantic-style, like 1,500-word analysis. I reported a podcast too. It was interesting, because in that year-and-a-half of experimenting, I realized that the features were the pieces that got the most attention. That's where I was doing my best work. And when I did try to write those shorter stories I was always going over word count. Features are also where I get the most excited, where I get the most engrossed. So I told myself for a year: I'm only going to do features, and I'm not really going to do any short stories anymore.

Is that right? You made that decision?

Yeah. But now I don’t think I have to be so hard and fast about it. I do think it was good to focus on that for a while. I also found it hard, timing the short stories and mixing them in with the longer ones.

So now you're going back to a mix?

I'm still pretty much focused on longform. I'll take a shorter assignment here and there if it seems like fun. But at the time, I needed to focus on features for a while. Just set the path.

Did you study journalism? And how did you begin to learn literary journalism?

I really loved magazines when I was a kid. Getting Seventeen magazine and National Geographic, I would read the mastheads. I always thought: It would be so cool to work at a magazine. But I have Taiwanese immigrant parents, and they said: “That's not practical. You should go into business or engineering.” I just lacked the confidence when I was younger to think I could do it professionally. So, I studied business, and then I worked in finance out of college. Eventually I told myself: I’m going to change careers. I want to do something that I'm passionate about. But it was a very roundabout way in. By then I was working in content marketing, which got me part of the way there. Then I just quit my job and decided to try to freelance.

This was my first attempt at freelancing. I had no idea what I was doing. I ended up cold-pitching Bicycling magazine. Then they had an opening as a gear editor. So, I ended up getting hired for that. I didn't have journalism experience. But in lieu of that, I had a passion for cycling. The magazine editors were like: Okay, you seem smart, you've run teams before at a finance company, you could probably oversee our gear-testing program. And you seem very enthusiastic about this sport. That was my entry point, as somebody who wasn't formally trained or educated.

It was a fun job that aligned with your interests.

Totally. Starting in gear is not a bad place to get trained as a junior magazine editor. You're writing reviews and you learn the basic skills of magazine making. But also how to boil a technical subject down into something that anybody can understand. I feel like that was a super valuable skill.

When I started, I was writing obituaries. You have to start somewhere, right? You moved into freelancing and wrote this Men’s Health piece “The Club No School Principal Wants to Join,” about principals traumatized by shootings who end up in a support group. I'm sure this was also a difficult story. How did you get that assignment? Was that something where you had to also gain trust with the people?

That one came from an editor who was then at Men's Health, Ben Paynter. He had seen a tweet about this club. A few short stories had been written about it. In terms of reaching out to the principals, when you have a group like this, you pre-report to try to get a sense of who you can start with. Who will be the person who can help open the door to everybody else? For me, I realized it was definitely going to be the former principal of Columbine, Frank DeAngelis, who helped to start the group. He had been profiled before. So I knew he talked to the media. I thought getting him on board would open the door to the other principals.

But I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to get access to some of the other principals, especially ones who hadn't spoken to the media before. I knew meeting these principals in person would make that much more likely. I found out that a few of them were going to be together at this conference in Colorado. I emailed my editor and said: “I really think I should go. It’s one of the only opportunities to see these guys together.” I thought it would do a lot to build trust.

I went to the conference and had breakfast with them and watched them do their presentations. That was where I met Ty Thompson, the former principal of Parkland. We sat down for maybe 30 minutes.It was our first conversation. After that, he said: “Here's my number. We can do a follow-up.”

I think that that's one thing I also learned early on as a newspaper reporter, how important it is to show up. Why do you think it's so important to have that face-to-face?

I feel like as freelancers, if you meet an editor in person for five minutes, they become ten times more likely to answer your email. Then it goes down by degrees of close communication. Like if you get them on the phone, they're probably five times more likely to email back. But you can't replace that in-person connection.

It makes a difference also when they meet you. They could have an idea of you being this hard-ass reporter, and then they meet you and realize: Oh, she's cool.

It's like that with so many interactions. Like, you'll have a tense email or text exchange with someone, and then you say: “Okay, let's talk about this on the phone.” You're gearing up for some tough conversation. And then you get on the phone and realize you’re both reasonable people.

What are your goals for your own writing in 2025?

I love it, because I've literally been sitting here mapping this out. I was typing my 2025 goals and plan. Talking to you was part of the plan.

That's awesome.

When I first started in journalism, I did a round of informational interviews asking: “How did you get into your career?” It was super helpful making those connections. Most of those interviews opened up more opportunities. I realized I haven't done that for several years, and it's time to do another round. I also had a specific problem that I wanted help solving. I'm midway through my career, how do I break into the next level? So I’m doing a round of intentional networking, if you will.

One of my goals for next year is to allocate time to developing these feature pitches that can be good, strong pitches for national publications. I’d like to block time out for that and work through those ideas in a methodical and systematic way.