Literary Journalism in U.S. newspapers

Jim Bettinger

On June 16, 2000, a story on page one of The New York Times headlined, "At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die," began this way:

"It must have been 1 o'clock. That's when the white man usually comes out of his glass office and stands on the scaffolding above the factory floor. He stood with his palms on the rails, his elbows out. He looked like a tower guard up there or a border patrol agent. He stood with his head cocked.

"One o'clock means it is getting near the end of the workday. Quota has to be met and the workload doubles. The conveyer belt always overflows with meat around 1 o'clock. So the workers double their pace, hacking pork from shoulder bones with a driven single-mindedness. They stare blankly, like mules in wooden blinders, as butchered slabs pass by.

"It is called the picnic line: 18 workers lined up on both sides of a belt, carving meat from bone. Up to 16 million shoulders a year come down that line here at the Smithfield Packing Co., the largest pork production plant in the world. That works out to about 32,000 a shift, 63 a minute, one every 17 seconds for each worker for eight and a half hours a day. The first time you stare down at that belt you know your body is going to give in way before the machine ever will."

The article, written by staff writer Charlie LeDuff, continued on for several thousand more words, revealing how slaughterhouse privileges, work and status followed racial and ethnic patterns. It was part of a series that won the Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious journalism prize in the United States, and it is hard to imagine it having appeared in The New York Times at all, let alone on its front page, a generation earlier. It is a good example of how the craft of literary journalism is making its way into mainstream daily newspaper journalism in the U.S.

Some people welcome this development, believing that it holds the potential to expand the reach of newspapers by finding new stories to tell and new ways to tell them. Others are cautious or outright hostile, believing that the principles and techniques of the craft minimize significant social stories, and are subject to abuse. The debate has been going on for several years and seems unlikely to be resolved soon.

It is even difficult for observers to settle on a common definition of the term. Some rely on a generalized description: using some of the techniques of fiction to tell the true stories of journalism. Others use more complicated definitions that include such elements as multiple layers of meaning, a reliance on extended close access, and others. The result is that not all discussions about literary journalism are using a common definition. Indeed, some critics have latched onto journalism scandals such as the case of Jayson Blair and the New York Times to buttress their case. (Blair was a young New York Times reporter who was revealed to have been inventing details in order to heighten the verisimilitude of his stories. The discovery of this led to the downfall of the Times' top two editors. )

The use of literary journalistic techniques is the most recent manifestation of attention to the quality of writing in U.S. newspapers that began more than 20 years ago. It corresponds to a decline in U.S. newspaper readership, which has worried publishers and editors alike. Beginning in the 1970s, many newspapers, joined by journalism educators and institutes, mounted significant campaigns to reverse the decline in readership by improving newspaper writing. A number of newspapers created a new kind of job, "writing coach," to help writers improve their writing. Sometimes these were writers or editors who were already on the newspaper's staff, but not always. One of the earliest was Roy Peter Clark, an English literature professor who was hired in 1977 to create a program to improve writing at the St. Petersburg Times, in Florida. Clark eventually left academia, and now is vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a foundation dedicated to midcareer journalism training.

The role of writing coaches varied, but generally all worked with individual writers to critique their stories and help them find ways to improve their writing. They differed from the writers' editors in two ways: First, they were not the writer's boss. And second, they generally did not work on stories on deadline. Instead, they discussed stories that were in progress, or discussed them after they had been published.
Newspapers also brought in speakers, such as accomplished writers who were not journalists. They began regular newsletters about writing, and they helped writers set up discussion groups.

The goal in this was not to improve the literary quality of newspaper writer per se, but to help all forms of writing. In many cases, helping journalists make their writing clearer was a primary goal. But some of the techniques of literary journalism began to make their way into newspapers, especially in Sunday magazines and in feature sections.

In main news sections, newer forms of writing ran counter to the most standard from of news writing, known in the U.S. as the "inverted pyramid." The inverted pyramid was long ingrained in U.S. newspapers, in part because it had the benefit of being useful to reporters, editors and readers alike. Its basic premise is that the most significant element in a news story - or in some cases the newest element - went at the top, followed by the second most significant (or newest) and so on, in descending order of importance. The emphasis was on the weight of the facts, rather than the style of the writing. The first paragraph was called the "lead," (pronounced "leed") and every beginning reporter was taught to ask himself or herself, "What's the lead?"

It was useful to reporters, because it provided a reliable and easily learned framework for organizing a story in a short amount of time. It was useful to editors, because a story could be shortened for space reasons by cutting out the appropriate number of paragraphs at the end of the story, confident that they were less significant than those at the start. And it was useful to readers, who could stop reading at any point in a story and be sure that something more significant would not be hidden later in the story.

The inverted pyramid was not only the news story structure of choice for daily newspapers, it was also used by the Associated Press and other press associations. Although critics have highlighted its shortcomings for years, it remains in wide use today, particularly on relatively short or uncomplicated stories.

The inverted pyramid made the most sense when newspapers were the primary source of news and information. It began to lose some of its utility when new forms of media took over some of that function from newspapers: radio, then television, and now the Internet. When radio could broadcast at 6 p.m. the news that would not be published in newspapers until the next morning, a format that focused solely on the newness of facts made less sense. When the same thing happened with television (which had the added impact of moving images) and the Internet (which could be accessed at any time, rather than on a schedule), the format lost more of its impact. But as noted, it remains in wide use today, particularly on stories involving governmental actions.

Moreover, its simplicity appeals to many newspaper veterans, who are suspicious of what they deem fancy writing. The phrase, "Just the facts, m'am," was linked to the fictional Dragnet television detective, Joe Friday, but it could have been the motto of several generations of newspaper reporters as well. These journalists saw their job as finding out what had happened - the facts - and putting it in the newspaper for people to read. Stylish writing, many believed, hid a lack of facts, and furthermore alienated a newspaper from its readers.

It is against this background that the practice of literary journalism in newspapers should be seen. And at this point, let me return to descriptions of what literary journalism is - and is not. Most everyone agrees that it uses the techniques of literature to tell true stories. But there is some disagreement about what those are.

They certainly include an attention to the narration of a story. The inverted pyramid, recall, did not have a narrative structure; it had a structure determined by the relative significance, or the relative newness, of its elements. But literary journalism stories are told in some chronological sequence.

In some cases the sequence was relatively straightforward: begin at the beginning and end at the end. But writers who were experimenting with narration looked to cinema, to the theater and to fiction for guidance in telling stories. Thus a particular story might be told as a series of flashbacks. Or a story might begin in the middle of the action - "in media res," as the Latin poet Horace recommended. A story might have chapter-like segments, in the manner of a novel. And so on.

Indeed, for some writers and commentators, the attention to narration is the defining characteristic of this kind of writing, and some insist on calling it "narrative journalism," and saying that what such journalists are writing should properly be called, "narrative."

Ann Fadiman, a writer and the editor of The American Scholar, wrote, "I think of narrative as storytelling: that is, as a way of ordering thoughts in a coherent sequence that makes them interesting to listen to. It therefore has a strong oral heritage. The sequence doesn't have to be strictly chronological, though it can be; it can include digressions and flashbacks and foreshadowings, just as a story recounted around a campfire can. But because narrative is powered by events, its goal is not essentially analytical or critical - though, like many stories (especially in traditional genres - folktales, fairy tales, fables), it can contain substantial moral lessons."

Journalists who were striving to write in this manner use a variety of techniques to move the story forward. For instance, they rely on detailed description - of people's appearance, of their clothes, of a geographical landscape, of buildings and rooms and structures, of sounds, smells and other sensations. One goal of this type of story is to transport the reader to the place where the writer was, by distilling the writer's experience. This is especially true of what the writer Tom Wolfe called "status details" - the sorts of ornamentation that individuals adopt to signify their place in society. It might be a certain style of necktie, or the pronunciation of a word, or choice of restaurant for dinner: The premise is that such details tell something significant about a person.

Descriptions are often used to set a scene, much in the way that a theater set design sets a scene for the action of a play that is about to take place. A story detailing a feud in a small town in the American West would likely include near the beginning a vivid (but not overly long) portrait of the town, perhaps focusing on its history if that seemed relevant, or its economy, or it politics or its culture - or some combination of all of these.
Many of these stories also use quotations differently from traditional news stories. Traditional stories rely on quotations - "quotes," in journalistic lexicon - as evidence for the significant facts in a story, or to buttress what has already been said. Thus a story about President Bush branding Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an axis of evil is likely to contain the exact words spoken by him, as evidence. (This can lead, as readers know, to a kind of choppy writing where it seems like every significant assertion is being repeated.)

Narrative, by contrast, uses people speaking to demonstrate emotion, or vividness, as well as to provide a sense of dialogue. This might be an exchange between a public official and a private citizen at a governmental meeting, or a conversation between a waitress and a customer at a restaurant, or something similar. Such dialogues provide the same dramatic movement as they do in fiction, in cinema or in theater.
And literary journalism stories are more likely to be written from different points of view. This does not refer to the writer's opinion or conclusion (although that can enter into it). It has more to do with the person the writer chooses to be the primary character in the story, and that person's perspective. On the day of John F. Kennedy's funeral in 1963, newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin famously chose to write about the cemetery worker who was called in the day before to dig the slain president's grave. A writer today might choose to write a story from a similarly unorthodox point of view, or perhaps several points of view.

Most journalists who write these kinds of stories would likely agree that they are striving for more than one level of meaning. The New York Times story quoted at the beginning of this essay sought first of all to tell how African Americans, Latinos, American Indians and whites interacted in one slaughterhouse in North Carolina. But it also was a story about the American South, as well as a story about race relations in the U.S. These stories also tend to focus more on ordinary people, rather than the most powerful or influential figures. This is not an absolute characteristic - literary journalists do seek to write about the powerful, the influential and the significant - but it is more common to find people without power figuring prominently. For this and other reasons, these stories often seem closer to the ground than traditional stories.

Finally, these stories are written with a different "voice" than traditional news stories. One goal of traditional U.S. news writing is to eliminate the writer's personality from the story, in favor of the "facts." A tradition of objectivity, defined as providing a view of the news that is not influenced by the writer's personal opinions or convictions, is strong in U.S. newsrooms, and, for that matter, among the reading public. U.S. newspaper journalists declare that their goal is objectivity and critical readers hold them to that; almost any critique of any news story leads off with the assertion that it isn't objective journalism.

The "voice" of news stories, therefore, tends to be distant, formal, emotionless, impersonal and unwilling to assert anything independently while retaining an air of authoritativeness. As I write this, for instance, a story on the front page of the day's edition of the New York Times begins:
"The attorneys general of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut say they are ready to open a new round of litigation to force power plants to make billions of dollars of pollution-control improvements after a decision by the Bush administration to abandon more than 50 investigations into violations of the Clean Air Act.

"The state officials said they would move quickly to fill some of the void left by the Environmental Protection Agency, which decided this week to drop they investigations at the old coal-fired plants, a major source of the air pollution that drifts over the Northeast.
"But they said that the states have far fewer resources than the federal government does to battle one of the nation's most powerful industries and that they would have to focus their actions against fewer utilities."

The voice of literary journalism, by contrast, is less formal and more personal. These stories read as if a human being wrote them. Compare the passage above with this beginning of an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, published the same day:

"Nearly everywhere he goes, Tim Burton carries a pocket-size sketchbook and a small watercolor kit. Even when he's directing movies like 'Beetlejuice,' 'Batman' and 'Big Fish,' his latest film, which opens in New York on Dec. 10, he is always drawing. He'll walk to a pub in Camden Town, near his home in London, and sit at the bar and sketch a woman as she flirts or conjure a tiny child. His artwork, like his movies, is a combination of the beautiful and the strange. In Burton's rendering, the flirting woman will end up looking rather like an alien and the tiny child will have long needles in his eyes. And yet there is a pervasive sweetness in Burton's work that tempers the ghoulishness. He favors his misfits, especially if, as he has imagined, they have clamshells for heads or their bodies resemble pincushions."
Sunday magazines are one prime venue for literary journalism in U.S. newspapers, but their numbers are declining for economic reasons. Feature sections, particularly in newspapers like the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun, have made a point of highlighting stories of this type. So have some sports sections (although sometimes to the complaints of readers who say that they have to wade through multiple paragraphs of scene-setting, description and narrative innovation to find out who won). Main news sections have been less hospitable to such stories, in part because of the emphasis on governmental, "significant" news. However, while I have not done any extended study, I believe that such stories are becoming more common in main news sections.

One factor in the prevalence of such stories in U.S. newspapers is the techniques needed to write them well. The sorts of description, scene-setting and dialogue discussed earlier requires extensive observation and access over an extended period of time - the kind of time that daily newspaper writers often do not have (with certain favored exceptions). They require writers to look for different kinds of details than they perhaps had been trained to look for earlier in their careers. Not all can make the transition, and of course, not all wish to.
The most admired literary journalists tend to write longer and more complex stories than most U.S. newspapers will publish. Thus literary journalism in newspapers tends to be something of a hybrid form, compared to the work being done in magazines like The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, or Harper's. And as mentioned earlier, the genre has its critics.

Part of the conflict is between an emphasis on facts and an emphasis on story, between analysis and narrative. Proponents of narrative argue that it mimics the oral tradition that has proven to be an effective means of communication among humans for thousands of years. Proponents of analysis contend that the oral tradition may be at odds with facts observed and evaluated dispassionately and objectively. I would contend that both assertions are correct, and that the answer is not to choose one form or the other, but to focus on choosing the form that is most appropriate to a given story.

A more serious criticism is that the form can put the reader too completely in the hands of an individual writer whose goal may be to tell a compelling story, rather than to offer an "objective" account, laden with caveats and qualifications. A story structure based on the significance of facts can be tested - Is this really the most significant development? How do you know this is true? And so on. A story structure based on compelling story telling cannot be tested the same way, which is one reason it makes some editors uneasy. Moreover, some writers have abused journalistic tenets in the name of dramatic effectiveness. One of these abuses - although it is not very common at all and is rejected by most serious writers - is combining elements of two or more people, events or situations into a single person or event.

Reconstructions of events can make editors uneasy as well. Here there are two main issues. One is the accuracy of the reconstruction itself. A good one has the precision and flavor of an event observed directly by the writer - but it is based on the recollections of others, not all of whom may have seen the event clearly. It may even include what participants were thinking at the time, which is surely a difficult thing to ascertain definitively. The second issue is that it is difficult to convey to readers the source of each element of the reconstruction without bogging down the narrative. And one important value of journalism has been to convey to readers this sort of attribution - how the newspaper knows what it says is true.
Serious literary journalists continue to grapple with these challenges, with some success. The very best reconstructions depend on a level of reporting detail that is unknown in most newspaper journalism, and a degree of editor review that is also not common. And newspapers such as the Portland Oregonian and the Wall Street Journal have developed techniques, usually involving a separate story or information box, to tell readers the exact source of each bit of information.

Writers are working to evolve ethical codes that relate specifically to this kind of journalism, too. Roy Peter Clark, for instance, has offered these two dictums:
"Do not add. This means that writers of nonfiction should not add to a report things that did not happen. To make news clear and comprehensible, it is often necessary to subtract or condense. Done without care or responsibility, even such subtraction can distort. We cross a more definite line into fiction, however, when we invent or add facts or sounds that were not there.
"Do not deceive. This means that journalists should never mislead the public in reproducing events. The implied contract of all nonfiction is binding: The way it is represented here is, to the best of our knowledge, the way it happened. Anything that intentionally or unintentionally fools the audience violates that contract and the core purpose of journalism - to get at the truth. Thus, any exception to the implied contract - even a work of humor or satire - should be transparent or disclosed."

Whether it is called literary journalism or narrative journalism or something else, this kind of writing is a powerful tool for daily newspaper journalists. Done well, it connects to readers in a way that other forms cannot. But whether it will continue to be an effective form in this medium depends on the resources and intellectual commitment of the publishers and editors to it.

Jim Bettinger is professor (teaching) of communication at Stanford University, and director of the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists there.

Jim Bettinger

Profesor de comunicación de la Universidad de Stanford y director del John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists en esa misma universidad. 

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