Brendan R. Watson

Mindy McAdams posted a call for good storytelling earlier this week on her blog. I asked, “How relevant are stories to contemporary journalism.” I believe that focusing on stories, particularly individual’s stories, rather than stories of collective experiences, is problematic in contemporary journalism.

There is no lack of stories on the Internet. Millions of people are pouring their hearts out online about their struggles with poverty, battling cancer and of personal triumphs. If anything, we’re overloaded with stories and we have started to tune them out. The journalist’s role shouldn’t be to tell more stories. Rather, they should start to see existing stories as data points, which the journalist can help the audience visualize in relationship to one another. The journalist can create connective tissue that weaves these individuals’ stories together to show common experiences, trends, etc. and to give shape to a community to spark and sustain discussion.

Just look at how Google is using individuals’ experiences of the flu to track activity of the disease. Undoubtedly untold numbers of stories will be written on this exact subject throughout the winter, but Google’s view of Flu activity is far more comprehensive.

Chuck Peters, CEO of The Gazette Company, has more thoughts on the issue on his blog:

For some time, I have been saying that the problem with the media industry is that we are stuck on stories, or packages, whether they be articles with photos in print or online, or video packages. I have limited time, and limited brainpower, and I want to see current, relevant information, in context, anywhere and anytime. I don’t think we can get there until we create our content, in the first instance, as a “post” or “tweet”, and organize from there.

What he calls for is more conceptual clarity to aid in this type of reporting. This is where I would like to see more academics pick up the exploration of new forms of presenting information rather than assuming traditional forms in their research and teaching.

In some ways Paul Farhi’s essay isn’t even worth responding to. He says, “Newspapers are in trouble for reasons that have almost nothing to do with newspaper journalism, and everything to do with the newspaper business.” I find that position completely incomprehensible and indefensible.

True, the newspaper business model is in a state of crisis, but study after study shows that journalism is, as well. Surely, your local newspaper — and even the Washington Post — is not filled with the high-minded analysis and investigative work with with Farhi likes to associate himself with.

Rather, journalists — not business executives — are pursuing an extremely self-destructive editorial strategy. Thomas E. Patterson explains in his 2000 research paper that the journalism decisions newspapers are making are “shrinking the news audience and weakening democracy.” This is not a business-side problem, but reflects poor editorial judgement, which is only being accelerated by a misguided short-term strategy to pursue online page views at any cost, driven as much by editorial as business executives.

There’s lots of research out there — Patterson’s is a good start — that can help one understand the role of (bad) editorial decision-making in this crisis. This is if you want to do something about the crisis rather than just wash your hands of it.

Jeff Jarvis also tackles this subject in his own overstated, pundit-like manner.