Good Writing for Journalists

Angela Phillips

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781446228951
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

?The ultimate book on the creative skills of journalism?
- Writing Magazine

?Useful and timely... it is refreshing to discover a book so overtly designed to inspire students to think about what can make writing good - or even great.?
- Media International Australia

This is a book about the art of writing for newspapers and magazine, but doesn?t look at punctuation, spelling and the stylistic conventions of ?everyday? journalism. Instead, Good Writing For Journalists presents extended examples of writing which are powerful, memorable, colourful or funny. Each piece will be contextualised and analysed encouraging readers to learn from the best practitioners.

This book will inspire those who want to make their writing individual and memorable. Along the way the major elements of non-fiction writing will be introduced, in chapters organised by genre - profile writing, reportage, news analysis, investigation, sports writing, personal and opinion columns and ?lifestyle? among them.

Phillip?s book sees itself as a natural successor to Wolfe & Johnson?s seminal The New Journalism (1975). By adopting a larger sweeping and tailoring itself for the contemporary journalistic arena, this book will be an essential purchase for the discerning journalist and journalism student.

PART I

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THINKING ABOUT WRITING

1

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LET’S HEAR IT FOR STORY-TELLERS

From narratives to stories

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There is much debate about the exact definitions of narrative and story. Indeed, they are often used interchangeably. For the purposes of this book, then, story is a sequence of events in which some form of action takes place. In journalism, as opposed to fiction, that sequence of events has actually taken place or is likely to take place. A narrative, in the literary sense, would be the telling of that story in printed form. I use narrative in a broader way to describe a set of ideas (or discourses) constructed from the myths and legends that have shaped our cultures and communities, which then help us to construct the way we think about our world. I suggest that these ‘meta-narratives’ shape and also direct the way in which a story is presented. The narrative arc, or the narrative spine, refers to the foundation idea that runs through the story when it is presented.

Private stories

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From infancy the job of any human being is to find out who they are through interaction with the people closest to them. They are told stories about who gave birth to them, who their families are, who to trust and who to fear. The information will be passed on via legends, folk tales and parables of heroes and bogey-men, martyrs and witches, fire and water.

Learning how to … construct stories, understand stories, classify stories, check out stories, see through stories, and use stories to find out how things work or what they come to, is what the school, and beyond the school the whole ‘culture of education’ is … all about. (Geertz, 2000: 193–4)

When we notice changes to the expected patterns of our lives we re-count these as stories, drawing humour, drama and suspense from the unexpected disruptions. These stories allow people to connect emotionally and feel closer but they also pass on information about changes or warn of danger. As we grow up, and our knowledge accumulates, we learn to sum up people and situations quite quickly by keying into a range of signs and symbols that we then interpret according to our own preconceived ideas and the stories we have been told. These signs and symbols start to form an overarching narrative that helps us to interpret change, threat or danger.

We are all the unofficial biographers of ourselves for it is only by constructing a story, however loosely strung together, that we are able to form a sense of who we are and of what our futures might be. (Thompson, 1995: 210)

Collective narratives

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Public stories have a similar function. They pass on important information, warn of danger and they also create a sense of connection. Through them we learn, for example, that crime will be punished and achievement will be celebrated. We mourn together when good people die and we celebrate when bad people are avenged. Journalists, novelists, dramatists all use the same basic material: they are describing what they have seen and heard and experienced. They all tell stories that arise from the culture in which they live, and in their turn contribute to a collective ‘grand narrative’ – a shared idea of cultural life.

To say that two people belong to the same culture is to say that they interpret the world in roughly the same ways and can express themselves, their thoughts and feelings about the world, in ways that will be understood by each other. Thus culture depends on its participants interpreting meaningfully what is happening around them, and ‘making sense’ of the world in broadly similar ways. (Hall, 1996: 2)

This shared idea is an expression of a particular ideology. In a liberal democracy, one of our shared ideas is that powerful people are fallible and subject to jointly agreed laws and standards. We tend to tell stories that fit in with this belief: stories of powerful people who have been found wanting and been reduced to our level. We also have a shared belief in the possibility of opportunity, so stories of people who have risen far above the place they were born into are also popular. These stories acquire the status of myth (Barthes, 1972: 119), contributing to our sense that power is not arbitrary and that individual success will be celebrated, as long as we don’t abuse what privilege our society provides.

In societies in which the shared belief in social solidarity overrides the belief in individual freedom, we would expect to see lots of stories in which self-sacrifice is celebrated and selfishness is punished. For example, the central character of the Chinese soap opera Yearning was a poor and poorly educated woman. Her life is a series of trials but she was not redeemed at the last moment by the love of a wealthy man or a miraculous cure (as we would expect of an American soap opera); rather, her self-sacrifice was celebrated as a worthy end in itself (Rofel, 1999). In Chinese newspapers, stories about corrupt officials are popular but, whereas in a western democracy the emphasis is likely to be on the failings of the individual, in China the emphasis will be on the success of the system in rooting out corruption.

These collective narratives help us not only to decode and evaluate stories, but also to decide which stories are important. On the whole, the stories we tell are normative – they point out and punish those who deviate from the norm and celebrate people and events that confirm our sense of how things ought to be. This is not something we do consciously; it is embedded into our thinking to such an extent that it requires an effort of will to conceive matters differently. This tendency to uphold the status quo has often been commented upon by critical scholars because it is used to block out discussion about change and to pillory those who do not conform. Indeed, it may be argued that this tendency to check everything, uncritically, against our pre-existing knowledge (Hall, 1996: 646) means that we have a built-in tendency to be suspicious of people and ideas that are unfamiliar and that this suspicion can be used to create division instead of cohesion.

Narrative and the conventions of journalism

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Journalists are like novelists in that they are story-tellers, but they are unlike them in equally important ways. We are bound by a different set of imperatives. We tell people about events which are actually happening in the world at that time. If every journalist were to disappear tomorrow, society would re-invent us the day after, and in doing so would almost certainly suggest that news needs to be:

• timely – be about something that has just happened, or is happening, or has only just been discovered, or which will have resonance at this particular moment,
• relevant – have meaning for their existing audience,
• important – tell us about things that matter to that particular audience,
• focused on change to the established order – new songs, new trends, new laws, new wars,
• evidence-based – stories cannot be invented but must be based on accounts of things that really happened and can be verified, and finally news needs to
• have impact – big is more newsworthy than small, close is more important than far away, bad news sells better than good news.

Only by operating within these conventions can journalists expect to be trusted by their audiences – and trust is important. Without it, those who own the newspapers, magazines and television stations have no product, that is nothing to sell that is different from advertising. It is the realisation of this bond with the audience that makes it possible for journalists to work within the commercial world and allows for the development of professional ethics – loose rules of conduct that set the boundaries of what is permissible. Where there are no rules governing journalism, or where journalists have lost trust, people start looking elsewhere for the information they need to govern their lives.

This collective agreement about the permissible boundaries doesn’t stop newspapers being selective or biased in the way in which they present information. The imperatives of news conventions provide the driving force for story selection, but at an unconscious level journalists are also looking for stories that fit in with their own (or their employer’s) idea (narrative) of how the world works, or examples of how it doesn’t work but ought to work.

Things are newsworthy because they represent the changefulness, the unpredictability and the conflictful nature of the world. But such events cannot be allowed to remain in the limbo of the ‘random’ – they must be brought within the horizon of the ‘meaningful’. In order to bring events ‘within the realm of meanings’ we refer unusual or unexpected events to the ‘maps of meaning’ which already form the basis of our cultural knowledge. Into which the world is already ‘mapped’. (Hall, 1996: 646)

The job of making a story ‘fit’ is done by a process of selection and juxtaposition so that, as Paul Willis (1971) observed: ‘Once an item of news has been selected for transmission to the public there is already bias, some selective principle, some value, quite apart from the way it is presented.’

Choosing stories

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Some of that ‘value’ undoubtedly derives from the structures of power within which journalists operate. To begin with, most ‘hard’ news stories emanate from what are described as ‘authoritative sources’ – the government, the police, the courts and the business community. More often than not journalists present the views of whichever part of the establishment their newspaper tends to support. Where news decisions are not overtly political in character they will still be made on the basis of certain ‘values’. If the newspaper they work for is socially conservative in its outlook, then stories will be selected to uphold a world view in which ‘good’ people are married before they have children, refrain from sexually promiscuous behaviour, are unlikely to be homosexual and are always prudent in their financial affairs. A more liberal newspaper might select stories that demonstrate the validity of relationships that are not sanctified by state or religion and highlight the needs of people who are socially excluded.

But these power structures cannot on their own account for the kinds of story that continually recur in the pages of newspapers and magazines. Very often an item is chosen for what I would call its ‘narrative quality’ and that quality may well take precedence over the importance of the information contained in it, the source from which it derives or even the political slant of the newspaper. Bird and Dardenne (1988) suggest that we could productively look at news in terms of myth or archetype. It is through myth, they suggest, that members of a culture learn values and definitions of right and wrong. By understanding news as a means of conveying the values of society rather than merely a means of conveying information, we can understand more easily what journalists actually mean when they say ‘now that’s a great story’.

Often those stories have a very simple story line that depends on a reversal of our expectations. Today I heard about a woman who had won the lottery but hadn’t told her family. Her behaviour is unexpected but only because of our preconceptions: the story in our heads. Those preconceptions and our realisation that she is outside the norm arouse our curiosity. We want to know why she did that but we are already judging her within the narrative of our own morality. We may see it as a gesture of independence or as shamefully selfish. The way in which the story is written need not tell us explicitly what the journalist (or newspaper) thinks. Judgement will usually be subtly implied by the way in which the story is told (the narrative approach). For example, one newspaper will chose to interview a family therapist about the likely impact of such behaviour on future family relationships. Another might choose to get a comment from an organisation championing women’s financial independence. Each narrative approach invites the readers to view the story in a different light (the preferred code [Hall, 1996: 58]) but the readers will finally shape the narrative for themselves, and make their own judgements in the light of the narratives in their own heads.

Narrative framing

Using internet archives, look at articles printed on the same day in three different newspapers on the subject of: teenage pregnancy, gay marriage, education reform. Print them out and, using a marker pen, highlight all the quotes and pieces of information that are the same. Now look at sources of additional information and comment. List them for each piece. Look at the ordering of the information. Which sources are given pride of place? Who gets the last word? How does the choice of additional comment affect the ‘narrative framing’? From this, can you deduce the kind of audience that the writer had in mind?

The stories in our heads

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In a conventional narrative, a protagonist endures a series of disruptions that test his strength and character, followed in the end by resolution. Aristotle (1998) believed that a story must be resolved in order for it to work. Tzvetan Todorov (1977) argued that stories end when an ‘equilibrium’ has been established. Robert McKee (1999) writes that ‘archetypal’ stories always end in closure (though he describes different forms of story that end with only partial closure), and all the story types described by Christopher Booker (2004) have clear resolutions.

News stories are also about disruption and change and they often focus on people who have endured testing experiences, but they don’t always have resolutions and, even for feature stories, the resolutions are provisional. They are being told while events are unfolding. Where they work towards resolution they may be overturned by a new set of events tomorrow. Nevertheless, I would suggest, it is possible to read news and feature stories within these conventions as episodes in an ongoing drama. In the real world we never know how events will unfold but we are continually trying to guess. In a sense, the whole purpose of news is to provide us with readings of the present that will allow us to make predictions of the future. In making our predictions we are using a ready-made set of possibilities (narrative structures). It is in this impulse towards controlling our world and making it seem predictable that we use stories. Journalists, who share the same human desire to make sense of things, are using the same stories when they try to explain what has happened, and what might happen as a result.

These narratives in our heads provide the impetus behind story structures and often the reason for choosing them. Sometimes events unfold neatly, mapped on to our expectations of story shape. Sometimes readers are lulled into the anticipation that a story will turn out a certain way, and then they are jerked awake when the writer (or life) pulls the archetypal rug out from under them, disturbing their expectations. Even if there is no obvious ending or resolution to a story, the expected, or desired, resolution is often implied in the way in which it is written.

Story archetypes

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Journalists draw on the same set of basic characters, archetypes or myths, that are used by film-makers and novelists. They are the basic moral tales that guide human behaviour in all societies. They are told and retold in ways that conform to the needs and the norms of the particular society...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Thinking about Writing
• 1 Let’s Hear It for Story-tellers
• 2 Constructing Stories
• Part II Examples of Great Writing
• 3 Reportage
• 4 General News Features
• 5 Topical Features
• 6 Investigative Features
• 7 Profiles and Celebrity Interviews
• 8 Arts, Sports and Music
• 9 Personal and Comment Columns
• References
• Index