A question about interviewing for narrative

Narrative's in a bit of a funny place right now, because it is somewhat "fashionable," and what's fashionable attracts all sorts of ambitious types who may or may not be as thoroughly rigorous in their reporting as they should be. A Jayson Blair undermines the entire profession, and that is dangerous.

But at the same time, newspapers are desperate. We must find some way to connect with readers, and frankly, narrative stories (however you define them, and that's a whole 'nother conversation) often do that better than the traditional, "just the facts" inverted-pyramid approach. So there's some hope for salvation there.

We have to find the right balance between "information" and "story," have to properly blend reported facts with emotional truth. I'm a narrative guy and in my opinion, JFS is going way too far. But you can't just toss out the whole form as "more harm than good." Done right, it's an important part of the solution.

 

Great topic.

I'll just add in this - On one big story I did last year, I went around and everyone I talked to, I'd simply just ask what they remember from this particular night. They ended up pointing out little details you wouldn't think about, but throw it all together, and each thing touched one of your senses, so you could get a pretty good visual of this moment. And it led off my story.

 

No hope at all. I mean it's nothing new and history says nope. It was tried long before I started reading newspapers, and we had a course in it when I was in college in the late 1970s. Didn't save anything before, won't save anything now and won't 20 years from now, either. I'm not saying abandon the form entirely. But when we have a narrative quota, we wind up with the JFS solution. It's the rare story and rare sources that lend themselves to doing this well and honestly. Forcing many news features into this form will indeed erode credibility.

 

It always amazes me how many people think narrative writing means you have to make stuff up or "interpret" a scene. I just don't think the reporters who criticize narrative writers and assume they are making up their details are thinking on the same level, or understand how hard those of us who write that way work for every pertinent detail.

People talk all the time about wanting to write like Gary Smith. But they don't realize that you first have to report like Gary Smith. I once read that Gary does not feel his work is complete until he has interviewed 50 people. How many of us do that much reporting for a story? But you know what? If you interview 50 people, you're going to have a hell of a lot of detail to work with. I know when I am working on a narrative, my goal is to have at least a dozen sources (and I've found that is not an unreasonable goal for a newspaper reporter). And with each subsequent interview, I know my subject better, so my questions become more detailed, and the picture I'm building becomes more and more vivid. Once I'm close to my goal of a dozen sources, I find that I have so much detail, and understand my subject well enough to be an expert, that I can write without being bound to quotes, and know the story so well in my head that I can write without being bound to my notes.

And believe me, many details are easier to find than many reporters realize.

For starters, public records can have incredibly valuable detail that can help build a scene. I did a profile on an NBA All-Star last winter, and I wanted to portray the fact that his home was very average -- he lived in a upper middle-class subdivision that was an ungated community where neighborhood kids would often knock on his door. That detail was important in portraying who he is. So after doing the interview in his home, I looked up his property tax records online and was able to find out the exact square footage of the home, how much it sold for, and its age. Any of those details could be useful in portraying the type of home he lived in. I did the same thing in another player profile and was able to learn how many fireplaces he had in the home, the exact size of the lot (which was pertinent), exactly when he bought it and how much he paid -- most of which is common information in property tax records, which are usually easily available online. Detail can also be garnered from police crime and incident reports and crime statistics. Or go into a local municipality and talk to the firemen (they're always the best, it seems) or police officers if you want to learn about the area in which your subject lives. You likely won't quote them, but they'll give you great background information that can help you build a scene. There are lots of public records that can be great resources of information, but reporters often forget to seek them out.

And the question about weather keeps coming up. There's a simple answer for that: Go to this Web site: http://www.wunderground.com. From that site I can tell you that on the day I was born in Rockford, Ill., the high temperature was 43 degrees, the low was 31, the humidity maxed out at 89 percent and the wind blew at an average of 7 mph. And it'll give you an hour-by-hour breakdown. You'll find plenty of information to bore the shit out of your reader, and enough pertinent information to build a good scene. And it's a hell of a lot more accurate than portraying what you think a hot day feels like.

Whenever possible, walk the areas where you're building the scenes of your narratives, even if it's after-the-fact. Perhaps you can't be there when everything you're writing about is actually happening (the best situation, obviously), but at least you can get a feel for it. It's hard to write a good narrative if you can't get your five senses involved. You need to experience the story in order to tell it properly. If you're writing about an incident outside an apartment building, you may not be able to get all the proper details of the actual event, but at least you can get the details of the area and get a feel for the moment. At the very least it can make the details of your interview easier to visualize, and as a result more vivid when you write.

And one of the biggest keys is to try to limit quotes to those that are in present tense. As part of your reporting, try to get your subjects to recall what was said. Then you can quote them in present tense during the scene. And if the subject gives a quote for what somebody else said, try to get that person to recount the scene when you interview them, or quote them as, 'Joe Blow remembers Jane Bell telling him.' Present tense quotes keep the flow of the narrative from bouncing in and out of time frames and allow you to write more as a storyteller, and less as an after-the-fact documentor.

There are a number of ways to get detailed information. You just have to dig and think creatively about how the information that is already documented can help you.

 

Frank,

I agree that long-form narratives shouldn't be forced into the newspaper. I agree that they should be done with great care, meticulous research and with only the strongest's editing touch ... but I disagree with your notion that they hurt credibility. I dont think readers read narratives and think, "Now how did they get that information? How do they know he actually cried himself to sleep?" ... Journalists, absolutely think this way. But readers, most of them, I'd say no.

I dont think narratives will save newspapers. But at this point, I dont see how they could hurt. Ditching them because they're "nothing new" is a lame excuse, especially in an industry that hasn't added anything of significance in decades. Doing the same old thing, day-in and day-out is partly why we're in this mess. Heaven forbid, we give people something worth reading every now and then. If done correctly, narratives might be a step in the right direction. But this goes for everything we do.

Problem is -- and it's a big one -- too many people in this business think narrative journalism provides literary license and freedom to make shit up.

 

I said newspapers shouldn't ditch them entirely. But they need to be A LOT more selective about which stories and which writers instead of thinking that telling people a story in cinematic style is automatically going to pull them in (people do walk out of movies). And underestimating the power of other forms of journalism.

I think you grossly underestimate readers and their ability to think critically while spending time with a story. And to me, that's what's done more harm to newspapers than anything else, including cutbacks. I do think they evaluate a story's credibility and are often rather harsh about it. In fact, I believe that in today's society, that is their FIRST reflex rather than their last.

 

I'm quite aware that narrative is nothing new. In fact, it's the opposite of new, it's what we've done since time began. It's just telling stories about people as a way to make sense of the world. Beginning, middle, end, hopefully with some tension and resolution and maybe a stab at some universal deeper meaning. That's it. And, for God's sake, they don't all have to be "long-form" four-part tearjerkers about kids with cancer or whatever. Plenty of the best narrative is daily.

Debates about literary license and "cinematic scene-setting" for its own sake are a distraction. The real debate is over how we should communicate with readers, through "information" or through "story." I'd argue that a good newspaper needs a mix of both, and that most contain too little "story." I don't know that more story will really save us, but at this point it certainly can't hurt.

Why won't it hurt? Because story, usually, is about people. And information, too often, is about institutions. Most readers, most people, don't identify with institutions, and, it seems, most don't really care about institutions. But they do identify with the stories and struggles of people, people who are like, or unlike, them. And the more we can get those stories in the paper, stories that speak to bigger issues through the daily experiences of regular people, the more likely we are to connect with readers. Again, that may not save us, but it seems worth a try.

 

OK, if you all want to see how great narrative journalism can be (an example of THIS IS HOW TO DO IT), check out the Star-Telegram series, "To Catch a Killer."

Link was e-mailed to me a while back. Absolutely jaw-dropping.

http://www.star-telegram.com/killer/

 

That's what reader surveys say. That's not what circulation figures say. Newspapers were doing far better when they reported consistently about what was happening at the police station, at city hall, etc., and are doing far worse now that they focus on trend stories and profiles of your next-door neighbor.

Coincidence? Perhaps. But there's no way you can offer a convincing argument that not covering institutions with the previous depth has done anything but hurt the product.

Reporters and editors like the idea that storytelling is the answer. It's more interesting to them than writing and editing stories about zoning ordinances. And it's far better for their portfolios. But there's no evidence that it's done anything to help newspapers. I argue that it's made newspapers less relevant, not more.

I want to know what's happening where I live -- which isn't much -- and I want to know it as quickly as possible so I can spend my time reading a real newspaper that, when it attempts the narrative form, spends the time and effort doing it well rather than writing nonsense in a longer form (and formula) that does nothing but waste my time. The local daily is strictly a utilitarian, informational tool for me, and I seldom read anything in it that doesn't serve that purpose.

 

Come on, Frank. There are a whole lot of reasons for falling circulation that have nothing to do with the content of the newspaper. I don't think I need to recount them here.
Your argument of local-newspaper-as-strictly-utilitarian-tool makes sense at a very local level, for small town papers, community weeklies and maybe isolated small cities with minimal suburbs (and I'll grant that those are the kind of papers where narrative is most likely to be done poorly).

But in any area with more than maybe a couple hundred thousand people, it just falls apart. Outside of maybe county government, and sports teams, any given institution is irrelevant to most of your readers. That's suburbanization for you (and I'd argue that urban sprawl, with all its socio-economic side effects, has done more to harm newspapers than any thing except maybe the Internet). And you can't cover every meeting of every zoning board and school board and planning board, it's just not feasible.
So, to have any chance at relevance in a sprawling, balkanized, 21st century metropolitan area, newspapers have to take a stab at the universal. That means telling stories of how people confront the issues we all face, be it paying the bills or raising the kids or growing old. To me, that's narrative. It's not all we should do - we absolutely have to keep an eye on our major institutions, because no one else will - but it should be part of the mix.

 

Newsday pioneered the regionalization of suburban news. There's a good amount devoted to it in a history of that paper that came out in the early 1990s. Except Newsday didn't really have any daily competition and for much of that time its area was growing rapidly, so what happened there isn't necessarily a lesson for anyone else. I think you could look at, say, The Orange County Register, and surmise that its initial prosperity in a competitive suburban market came from covering each town in great detail. But it costs a lot of money to do that.

I don't think you can find an example besides possibly Newsday where regionalizing the news rather than covering the town-specific news has helped a newspaper grow. It's hurt it. Publishers like it because it's cheaper to cover a circulation area that way, and reporters like it because they feel less hemmed in when they write about broad issues rather than covering all the goings-on in one or two small towns. But on what basis do we believe readers like it better? The broad issues are generic -- we see newspapers copying project and enterprise ideas from each other -- and what we see in those stories are likely to be pretty much the same in the suburbs of Boston and in the suburbs of Kansas City. And a narrative about a kid with cancer in Pittsburgh is probably going to be essentially the same as a narrative about a kid with cancer in Phoenix. What isn't generic is the crime, the pissing matches on the school board and the nepotism in city hiring on that specific day in that specific town. The further newspapers get from covering the day-to-day news of the towns they purport to cover, the worse they do with circulation. I think history tells us that. The supposed cure has been far more damaging than the original ailment.

 

Two points, Frank, and then I'll leave this conversation to those who actually want to discuss how to report for narrative, because I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.

1: Is there any evidence that papers focused on by-the-books, information-based coverage of local institutions are faring better than those that take a broader view of "the news?" It seems to me there are so many variables at work that it's hard to prove a causal relationship one way or the other. And, really, the whole fleet is taking on water pretty fast.

2: And, again, I'm not saying we shouldn't cover the day-to-day. We should. But we should look for opportunities to use it as a window into something bigger, so that that pissing match on a school board that only serves 5 percent of our readership has some relevance, or at least interest, to the other 95 percent. Use small stories to tell big stories.