Consider how storytelling has evolved through the centuries in art and literature: oral storytellers, epic poems, myths, legends, parables, fables, fairy tales, tall tales, campfire stories, ballads, sonnets, tragedies, comedies, mysteries, biographies, novels, short stories, free verse, comic books, operas, soap operas, animated cartoons, situation comedies, TV commercials, and on and on.
Storytelling in journalism has evolved, too: inverted pyramid, news briefs, columns, reviews, charticles, timelines, series, Q&A’s, narrative journalism, and on and on.
In a recent blog post, Jeff Jarvis committed journalistic heresy, questioning the use and future of the article, the most common product of newspaper journalism. “An article can be a luxury,” he wrote.
Jarvis’ post prompted responses from Mathew Ingram, Frédéric Filloux and Jonathan Glick, which prompted two more blog posts and a Facebook response from Jarvis (under the Facebook comments tab at the end of the Ingram piece).
Clearly, Jarvis has struck a nerve. He has been misunderstood, in part because the article is so fundamental to our understanding of journalism processes. In his most recent entry on the subject he wrote:
First, far from denigrating the article, I want to elevate it. When I say the article is a luxury, I argue that using ever-more-precious resources to create an article should be taken seriously and before writing and editing a story we must assure that it will add value.
I appreciate the debate Jarvis has sparked, though I am heading in a different direction from his entries or the responses. I think article and story are too often used interchangeably to describe those strings of text that are the rapidly diminishing lifeblood of newspapers. I view the article as a collection of facts, the answers to those five questions starting with W. As journalism has evolved, this form of prose has most certainly become a luxury, even an anachronism.
The article is seldom the best way to do what it does best. Newspapers publish so many articles because they employ so many reporters and because they have not restaffed, redesigned or retrained to tell the day’s news in other ways. (Same with TV, which does similar formulaic news reports.)
Even before newspapers’ business model began to collapse under the force of digital disruption, we learned that many articles worked as well or better as graphics or tables, organizing those facts with a better structure for their content than the paragraph. As Dan Conover correctly notes, the answers to those W questions actually work better as structured data. And, as I’ve noted, databases have great potential economic value for news organizations.
Amy Gahran suggests that reporters, rather than leaving so much of the information they gather unpublished, should publish “small, discrete story modules” from which users could construct the articles that suit their needs, as if building with Legos.
These are excellent suggestions to help journalists consider better ways of presenting these basic facts that are the fodder of most news articles.
I distinguish articles from stories by the qualities of storytelling. A story is not constructed simply as a string of information. It has a narrative arc. It is built around those story elements we learned in 8th grade: plot, character, setting, theme. It uses literary devices such as dialogue, action and scenes. It has a conflict and a resolution (or at least a quest for resolution, since so many journalism stories are not yet finished). It builds to a climax.
I cherish journalistic storytelling. I have written a 200-inch newspaper story and I have blogged here with advice for narrative journalists. I am pleased that as this discussion about the value and future of articles is unfolding, other editors are discussing storytelling techniques editors at Nieman Storyboard are discussing the craft points of an artfully told story, Stephanie McCrummen’s compelling tale of a pay stub tossed some 70 miles away by an Alabama tornado.
Journalists resisting change like to cite such stories, as well as the big investigative projects, when the campaign for preserving some core of traditional journalism in whatever lies ahead. I love those parts of journalism’s past, and I hope they can adapt well enough to survive into the future.
But if journalism evolves beyond my favorite pieces of its past, we can still tell profound stories. Storytelling is evolving with digital tools, just as it has evolved in writing, video and graphics. While the McCrummen story is gripping, I think Brian Stelter’s tweets and the Des Moines Register map are just as powerful ways to tell the story of a tornado, maybe more powerful.
Digital journalists tell stories through a variety of tools and techniques today: Interactive graphics, curation, liveblogs, lists, time-lapse photography, annotation and a host of others. Perhaps the news article and the text narrative will survive in some form in journalism. But if they fade into journalism’s history, storytelling and journalism can still survive and thrive. (Update: I added annotation to the listing of forms above on July 8.)
If the epic poem has vanished (or nearly so), does that diminish Homer‘s epics? We can appreciate a storytelling form that has passed while still enjoying what evolved and survived.
I think you’re underestimating the importance of any article or story for coherence and accessibility. But you’re dead on about people writing articles out of simple habit and in stressing that online journalists are hammering out a new grammar for storytelling.
http://bit.ly/mv1OFT
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Thanks, George. I greatly respect the journalists who use articles and stories effectively to make events and issues coherent and accessible. That’s why I say that I hope they survive as storytelling forms. But I’ve seen a lot of bad use of those forms, and I also respect the new forms that journalists are developing.
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[…] Steve Buttry: the article versus the story […]
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[…] Buttry posted some interesting thoughts today on newspaper articles, which some like digital/social media commentator Jeff Jarvis has deemed […]
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[…] Steve Buttry: the article versus the story […]
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[…] Jeff Jarvis hat seinen programmatischen Beitrag präzisiert, in welchem er ausführt, dass der lineare Beitrag künftig nicht mehr die Standardform journalistischer Veröffentlichungen sein werde. Der Artikel werde zum Luxus, er fasse den Kenntnisstand zusammen, werde magaziniger, analytischer und letztlich dadurch auch wertvoller. Doch diesen Luxus benötige man nicht unbedingt jedesmal, um einen Sachverhalt zu vermitteln. Mit sehr interessanter Debatte in den Kommentaren. Hier ein weiterer lesenswerter Beitrag zu diesem Thema von Steve Buttry: Why should storytelling stop evolving now? […]
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[…] Steve Buttry added to the discussion with a distinction between “story” and “article.” An article is a set of […]
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Hi Steve,
Homer’s epic poems or any other form of storytelling have not vanished. They are just a much quieter art that mines its way through time and among people who wish to meet and share. All the other forms of story composing, delivery and digital sharing you have mentioned above are not the evolution of storytelling, just something else.
Regards,
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It’s not the form or technique but how it’s used that matters. Sometimes (too often), the writer is no good. Other times (way, way too often), there is some direct or indirect form of censorship that distorts the information. This includes issues with space, money, and assumptions about readers as well as politics and the more common problems.
There is no form, technique, or data that will make up for bad writing, storytelling, or other presentation. Also, while graphs and such may fall under the general heading of “a picture is worth a 1000 words”, it remains the job of the writer to make sure which 1000 words come to the mind of the reader/viewer.
Forrest D. Poston
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[…] [13] Buttry, Steve (14.06.2011) Why should storytelling stop evolving now? In: The Buttry Diary. https://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/why-should-storytelling-stop-evolving-now/ […]
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[…] Consider how storytelling has evolved through the centuries in art and literature: oral storytellers, epic poems, myths, legends, parables, fables, fairy tales, tall tales, campfire stories, ballads, sonnets, tragedies, comedies, mysteries, biographies, novels, short stories, free verse, comic books, operas, soap operas, animated cartoons, situation comedies, TV commercials, and on and on. Storytelling in journalism has evolved, too: inverted pyr … Read More […]
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[…] thought of this story when I wrote recently about storytelling, prompted by the discussion that ensued when Jeff Jarvis suggested that the article had outlived […]
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[…] Writing. Two developments prompted me to publish several posts of writing tips. Journal Register editors created an informal network to provide coaching on writing skills to staff members, so I updated several of my old writing handouts from my years as a writing coach. I also was invited to Canada for a series of writing workshop for the music staff of CBC.ca. Between the two prods, I blogged this year about writing leads, tightening copy, writing for the web, blogging and grammar. I also blogged about the writing of one of my best stories from my reporting days and about a story that was never published, as well as my view that storytelling needs to keep evolving. […]
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