Journalism in Perspective

The Storytelling Movement in American Print Journalism

Thomas R. Schmidt

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780826274311
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

Between the 1970s and the 1990s American journalists began telling the news by telling stories. They borrowed narrative techniques, transforming sources into characters, events into plots, and their own work from stenography to anthropology. This was more than a change in style. It was a change in substance, a paradigmatic shift in terms of what constituted news and how it was being told. It was a turn toward narrative journalism and a new culture of news, propelled by the storytelling movement.Thomas Schmidt analyzes the expansion of narrative journalism and the corresponding institutional changes in the American newspaper industry in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In doing so, he offers the first institutionally situated history of narrative journalism's evolution from the New Journalism of the 1960s to long-form literary journalism in the 1990s. Based on the analysis of primary sources, industry publications, and oral history interviews, this study traces how narrative techniques developed and spread through newsrooms, advanced by institutional initiatives and a growing network of practitioners, proponents, and writing coaches who mainstreamed the use of storytelling. Challenging the popular belief that it was only a few talented New York reporters (Tome Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and others) who revolutionized journalism by deciding to employ storytelling techniques in their writing, Schmidt shows that the evolution of narrative in late twentieth century American Journalism was more nuanced, more purposeful, and more institutionally based than the New Journalism myth suggests.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

BETWEEN THE 1970S and the 1990s, American journalists began telling the news by telling stories. They actively reinterpreted, rearticulated, and redefined what journalism in newspapers could look like. They turned away from the “inverted pyramid,” a formula that squeezed the most important piece of information into a lead sentence and organized the rest of the material in order of decreasing importance. Instead, reporters borrowed narrative techniques, transforming sources into characters, events into plots, and their own work from stenography to anthropology. This was more than a change in style. It was a change in substance, a paradigmatic shift in terms of what constituted news and how it was being told. It was a turn toward narrative journalism. It was a turn toward a new culture of news. And it was a turn propelled by the storytelling movement.

Narrative journalism emerged from the fringes of newspapers and magazines. It started out as a rebellious act to capture the culture and counterculture of the 1960s. Yet it attracted editors and reporters who wanted to expand the boundaries of newspaper writing, enlarge the appeal for readers, and enhance the mission of the daily press by emphasizing how news affected people. Narrative journalism was built on the belief that journalism had more to offer than detached observation. But it faced formidable obstacles: the professional ideology of U.S. journalism and its “strategic ritual of objectivity.”¹ In response, journalists were gradually constructing a set of norms, values, and practices that would challenge ingrained news conventions and gradually establish new ones. Narrative journalism then spread through newsrooms, carried by institutional initiatives and a growing network of practitioners, proponents, and writing coaches who effectively mainstreamed the use of storytelling. Although economic forces exerted competing pressures to sensationalize news content and target an upscale audience, narrative journalists pushed a different agenda. They saw storytelling as a way to revitalize the profession, reconnect with their audiences, and rekindle the artistic appeal of newswriting. This book is about how this story unfolded.

It is a story of institutional change. Storytelling had been popular in the late nineteenth century but fell out of favor until in the 1960s the so-called “New Journalists” (e.g., Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Jimmy Breslin) challenged journalistic conventions and reintroduced storytelling to news reporting.² When the Washington Post launched its Style section in 1969, it deliberately and systematically incorporated narrative techniques into its daily news production. During the 1970s, other newsrooms (e.g., Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer) were also experimenting with storytelling formats, but it was not until the end of that decade that the newspaper industry as such paid attention. In response to declining circulation numbers, the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) initiated efforts to improve writing and inaugurated writing awards in 1979. In the same year, feature writing was introduced as a category to the Pulitzer Prizes. By the 1980s, news organizations began pouring resources into the production of narrative news stories. They hired writing coaches, gave reporters more time to work on assignments, and expanded weekend editions by adding narrative stories. Simultaneously, reporters and editors were discursively constructing narrative journalism as a legitimate practice in newspapers. The Poynter Institute, then evolving as the country’s leading training center for mid-career journalists, became instrumental in promoting narrative writing at newspapers, and by the 1990s other renowned training institutions, like the American Press Institute and universities (Harvard University, University of Missouri, Boston University), held workshops and conferences about the benefits of storytelling. In the year 2000, a self-declared, yet unofficial “narrative movement”³ had solidified.

This is also a story about cultural change and journalism’s evolving role within U.S. society. Between the 1960s and the 2000s, Americans changed their media diet and amid a growing supply of information options became more discerning about where and how to get the news. Against the backdrop of social and political change, they began questioning institutions and authorities as well as representations of everyday life in the media. In response, the “high modernism of American journalism”⁴ started falling apart, leading to confusion about formerly stable genres and changes in the relationship between news consumers and producers. Examining these dimensions is important because it highlights the significance of journalism as a cultural practice. Changes in journalism reflect changes in the way that public debate is shaped. Journalistic norms and values not only structure the work of reporters, editors, and media managers. They also determine what and how readers and viewers learn about the world they live in. The history of narrative journalism, then, provides a distinct perspective to explore how newspapers adapted to the changing lifeworld of Americans in the late twentieth century.

This book supplements prior research about the narrative turn in U.S. journalism and challenges some assumptions about how and why it happened. Some scholars have pegged the emergence of narrative and interpretive forms of journalism to specific events in American postwar history.⁵ Others put forward empirical research mixed with philosophical arguments, arguing that news changed from a realist to a modernist paradigm.⁶ Still others view narrative journalism as a universal genre that comes and goes in cycles.⁷ I subscribe both to the universal importance of storytelling and the validity of general cultural explanations. However, a major objective of this book is to demonstrate the specific impact of journalists and how they mediated and channeled institutional and cultural dynamics. My analysis is based on the view that journalists are, in the words of Christopher Wilson, “cultural mediators” whose “social practice is intimately tied to historical needs, options, and opportunities.”⁸

The findings of this book also provide a new interpretation to the emergence of narrative news reporting in relation to the New Journalism. The latter is commonly understood as a body of exceptional works of nonfiction written in the 1960s and 1970s by journalists who became book authors. In this context Michael Schudson argued that “the highly personalistic, openly subjective elements of ‘new journalism’ had relatively little direct impact on the style of the daily newspapers.”⁹ My analysis will show that by adopting narrative strategies newspapers created space for personal, subjective, and interpretive writing that incorporated some of the techniques and practices of the New Journalists without giving in to some of their excesses. However, my analysis also challenges the popular belief that it was only a few talented New York reporters (Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and others) who revolutionized journalism by deciding to employ storytelling techniques in their writing.¹⁰ Ultimately, the findings of this book indicate that the evolution of storytelling in late twentieth-century American journalism was more nuanced, more purposeful, and more institutionally based than the New Journalism myth suggests.

To suggest that narrative journalism expanded between the 1960s and the early 2000s is not to say that it originated then. However, narrative journalism during that time had its own unique characteristics, which this book will parse out. Over the course of a few decades and through the digital transition, narrative techniques and practices have expanded throughout all news sections and all media platforms (print, audio, video). Consequently, narrative techniques have crossed over into the digital realm and, rebranded as storytelling, have come to define many aspects of the media industry.¹¹ Thus, what started out as a fringe movement has become a mainstream phenomenon.

My analysis does not privilege narrative journalism as the only or the best way to do journalism, but it challenges assumptions of journalism as a uniform and immutable social practice. As Zelizer notes, “[S]cholars have tended to favor uniform, unidimensional and unidirectional notions of how journalism works, which over time have moved further out of touch from the forms that the news has taken on the ground.”¹² All too often, the form of news and its inherent properties are assumed in an a priori way. Alternative forms of news that do not align with common notions of a particular and historically contingent form of hard news are sweepingly disqualified as soft news, infotainment, or human interest stories. For example—and it is a symptomatic one—Benson defines his use of narrative journalism thusly: “I aim to call attention to journalistic construction of articles as ‘human interest stories’ told about nonelite individuals, generally beginning with the lead paragraphs, whose form tends to work against substantial structural analysis or juxtaposition of opposing viewpoints.”¹³ In Benson’s view, these kinds of people-centered stories are inherently incapable of adding social, political, or philosophical analysis to the depictions of personal experiences. It is not my intention to dispute that an abundance of so-called human interest stories lack additional layers of analysis. Yet, an across-the-board assessment like Benson’s does not pay enough attention to the nuances in style and form. In this context, my study shows how and to what extent narrative journalism responded to, mediated, and channeled social change. “In the past,” wrote Kevin Barnhurst, “each new kind of news may not have made more (or less) sense of the world, but it made different sense.”¹⁴

It is not that media scholars have neglected the transformations in the newspaper industry or overlooked the significance of narrative journalism. My own work builds on extensive scholarship in journalism history, literary journalism studies, and the sociology of news production. To date, however, there is no “institutionally situated history of literary journalism.”¹⁵ Moreover, most research on narrative journalism focuses on the magazine and book publishing industry and rarely extends beyond the high time of the New Journalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s.¹⁶ As Forde writes in this context, “[N]o historical study exists from the decline of New Journalism to the present.”¹⁷ It is my hope that this book will be a first step to fill some of these research gaps.

Theoretical Approach

As I explore narrative journalism, I think about it in terms of the cultural production of news. By that I mean that journalism encapsulates both aesthetic conventions of representation and social practices of news gathering. My perspective is informed by James Carey, who encouraged journalism historians to examine why, how, and when people accepted the news report as “a desirable form of rendering reality.”¹⁸ And he conceptualized the report both as a social form and a social practice, linking aesthetic representation with social interaction. Journalism, in this context, is as “a particular social form, a highly particular type of consciousness, a particular organization of social experience.”¹⁹ Too often, these interlinked components of the news production process are treated separately. Therefore, I would like to suggest that the news story is as much an institutionalized expression of journalism as the institutionalized practice of journalism is defined by the constraints of symbolic forms.

Throughout this book I am using the terms “narrative” and “storytelling” interchangeably, but it is worth including a more nuanced definition to delineate what I am talking about and how my perspective differs from other analyses that discuss alternatives to traditional news reporting as “interpretive,” “explanatory,” or “contextual” journalism. Narrative, in its most common sense, is defined as an “account of a series of events, facts, etc., given in order and with the establishing of connections between them; a narration, a story, an account.”²⁰ In the context of journalism, “the term ‘narrative news story’ refers most broadly to any sort of nonfiction storytelling, but more specifically to a news story that begins with an anecdote rather than a summary lead and then is organized in temporal sequence rather than either by inverted pyramid style or analytically.”²¹ Depending on how and to what degree news stories employ narrative devices, we can differentiate, as Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt suggested, between “different degrees of narrativity” and think about “different journalistic modes—such as soft versus hard news or tabloids versus broadsheets—as different positions on a ‘storytelling continuum.’”²² My particular concern in this book, however, is to avoid applying predetermined definitions of narrative journalism and instead demonstrate how reporters and editors themselves discursively constructed these definitions and made sense of them in their daily work. As a result, my own definition of storytelling has organically evolved from studying the historical emergence of narrative practices and their discursive legitimation. Storytelling uses narrative modes that can actually appear in different journalistic genres (reportage, report, first-person narrative, etc.) and in different kinds of media (print, audio, video, digital). Nevertheless, the unifying theme is that we can think of any specific form of storytelling as using a specific narrative mode, in other words, “a smaller set of conventions—really a constellation of stylistic effects—that combine together to elicit a familiar set of [emotional] responses in readers.”²³

The inclusion of emotion is crucial here. The study of emotional storytelling has been hampered by a false dichotomy between news and human interest stories that permeated some scholarship, reflecting the view that journalism could only do either one or the other. In particular, scholars routinely dismissed the role of emotions as either not relevant or deplorable. As Peters observes, “The concept of ‘emotion’ is often treated dismissively; a marker of unprincipled and flawed journalism.” Yet, this discourse is misguided, he argues. “It rests on an undertheorized conceptualization of emotion that is employed with commonsensical discernment, conflated with tabloid practices, sensationalism, bias, commercialization, and the like.”²⁴ Against this backdrop, it is important to highlight that narrative journalism has added a specific form of emotional appeal, a validation of feelings and how they structure human experiences to American news writing. The narrative approach to news writing affected all aspects of journalists’ work: story selection, reporting, interviewing, and writing. As such it constituted a different kind of journalistic epistemology²⁵ and ultimately led to an emerging framework of norms, values, and beliefs.

In this context it is also important to emphasize that I view the evolution of narrative journalism in newspapers as a process that established new storytelling conventions. By conventions I mean a “practice [. . .] commonly adopted in literary works by customary and implicit agreement or precedent rather than by natural necessity.”²⁶ News writing in general is characterized by conventions, and thus the term news narrative can also refer to the narrative characteristics of traditional news writing, that is, the constructed character of seemingly natural and transparent news formats such as the inverted pyramid.²⁷ Narrative devices, as Bird and Dardenne argue, “are used in all news writing, maintaining the illusion that the structural devices used in hard news are merely neutral techniques that act as a conduit for events to become information, rather than ways in which a particular kind of narrative text is created.”²⁸ What the evolution of storytelling and narrative journalism gradually demarcated, however, was the difference between a “news report” and a “news story.”²⁹ The predominant mode of a report is exposition, that is, “[t]he setting forth of a systematic explanation.”³⁰ The predominant mode of a story, on the other hand, is narrative, which is to say, the foregrounding of character, plot, and descriptive detail.

This “customary and implicit agreement” for developing conventions of journalistic storytelling arose from a movement that had originated from diffuse and scattered beginnings but eventually coalesced around common norms, practices, and beliefs. In this study of narrative journalism, I am interested in exploring how a particular group of actors channeled cultural aspects into institutional settings and frameworks. To analyze and explain the evolution of narrative journalism in American newspapers, I am drawing from two theoretical traditions within media studies and journalism research: institutionalism and cultural analysis. In this book I propose a synthesized model that combines elements from both strands of theory.

The two approaches are not necessarily an easy fit. Cultur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One. Introduction
• Chapter Two. A Rough Draft of Culture: The Washington Post and the Invention of the Style Section
• Chapter Three. Storytelling Goes Mainstream: Narrative News and the Newspaper Establishment
• Chapter Four. The Movement Coalesces: The Marketplace, the Academy, and the Community of Practice
• Chapter Five. The Narrative Turn and Its Implications
• Appendix. Methodology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index