Narrative journalism will survive the Manti Te’o hoax. In fact, the sports stories that spouted and perpetuated the lies of the hoax were not narrative journalism. They were shallow journalism.
Sports Illustrated’s Tim Layden imagines that the backlash against sportswriters who failed to check out things they were told about Te’o’s fake girlfriend may “lead to fewer narrative stories, period, and that would not be such a great thing.”
The notion that coverage of the fake girlfriend’s death was narrative journalism is as bogus as her car crash, her leukemia, her Stanford enrollment or her death.
Here are a couple of key passages from Layden’s lament (Layden responded to my post on Twitter; I have embedded our Twitter exchange later in this post):
Those “features,” which arose amid the cultural skepticism of Vietnam, Civil Rights and Woodstock and of which Gay Talese’s “Silent Season of the Hero,” a study of Joe DiMaggio published by Esquire in 1966, a decade and a half after his retirement, are a vital part of the sportswriting realm. Literally, its stories. And within that genre, stories are built upon detail upon detail upon detail. It is the detail that often brings a piece of writing to life. The Red Pontiac Firebird with a black spoiler, instead of just the car. And so on. Details come from observing, reporting, researching, questioning and confirming. They are critical in any great — or even good — narrative.
Prominent amid the animus directed at media in the wake of the Te’o story is that sportswriters are too willing accept the details provided to them in their pursuit of what mid-20th century New York City sports editor Stanley Woodard is credited with calling “Godding up,” athletes and coaches, as was common in his generation (and some would assert still is). The Te’o story of overcoming tragedy to lead Notre Dame’s return to mythic glory, for instance, was just too good to resist (or confirm) for everybody who passed it along, which was just about the entire media industry. …
Yet in all of narrative storytelling — whether it’s sportswriting or other nonfiction (insert “nonfiction” joke here), there exists a realm of the unconfirmed detail. It is that piece of information delivered which was not witnessed or recorded. It is the person who says, “I dropped to my knees and prayed for the strength to carry on.” Or: “I sat alone in my apartment and drank 16 shots of Jack Daniels.” Or: “That one afternoon I was by myself in the weight room and I did double reps on everything.” It is the anecdote that unfolds absent scrutiny and thus absent proof. Every good writer can provide examples of such anecdotes in his work, or he can lie about having never used such details. Are all these details utter B.S.? Not likely. Are some of them? Possibly. And some of them are possibly exaggerations.
Let’s be clear about something: The failures of sportswriters in their stories about Te’o’s grief were not failures of details and not anecdotes unfolding absent proof. The claim that Lennay Kekua’s casket closed at 9 a.m. Pacific time was a detail, one that perhaps could not be verified (though it probably could have). And if you got that fact wrong (let’s say it was 10 minutes off), the heart of the story remains true, even if your source was a few minutes wrong on that detail. Sometimes you have to accept someone’s memory for a detail (but if you trust the memory of someone who claims to have drunk 16 shots of Jack Daniels, you have a problem).
The fact that Kekua died (if, in fact, she had existed and died) was not a detail and was not an anecdote unfolding without proof. It was the premise of the story it was a verifiable fact, a fact that cried out for more detail. A narrative journalist not only would have verified that fact (of which there would have been ample proof if it had actually happened), but would have gone out to California (or would have done some long-distance research) to gather the details and tell the story. If this was a narrative, it was a story of love and loss, a story of a relationship, not just a story of a football game. No journalist covering that “story” inquired beyond a surface level about half of the relationship, so let’s not mourn anything lost for narrative journalism in this story.
I wrote a narrative about dead people once, the story of the four people in the photo below, one of the most famous photographs from World War II, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Earle “Buddy” Bunker and the Omaha World Herald (my newspaper a half-century later, when I was doing the story).
I couldn’t interview any of the four people in the photo because they were all dead (a fact I confirmed by reading obituaries and death certificates). I dug and dug not only for central details in their lives (Bob Moore’s heroism in World War II, his battle with alcohol and a marriage that few people in his hometown knew about) but for the little details, gathered from the memories of family members, fellow soldiers and townspeople and from documents such as bankruptcy records and letters home during the war.
The story was 200 inches long in newspaper columns (it’s embedded below), and I was confident of every detail, though the story spanned nearly a century. If perhaps a detail that relied on a faulty memory was inaccurate (I never learned of any that were), the heart of the story was absolutely true and nailed down from every possible direction. In seeking some details, I agonized about a home movie that I learned had been shot that day by the mother of the little boy in the photo. But I was unable to track it down. (The movie didn’t surface until 11 years later, resulting in the video story below.)
Narrative journalism is not loose with facts. I remember something Tom French, one of the masters of narrative, said when I attended a Nieman Narrative Editing Conference nearly 10 years ago: “We can’t make up a single blade of grass.”
Do we sometimes get misled about a blade of grass (or something much bigger), either by a prankster, a liar, an innocent mistake or a faulty memory? Sure, but the narrative journalist still always strives to get the facts right.
When I told the story of the rescue of twins who nearly froze to death, I got transcripts of the parents’ 911 call and of the police radio traffic as they searched for the girls. I had a police public information officer read me the supplemental reports from more than a dozen officers in the search, where I found details such as a description of a girls’ pajamas. I had emergency room workers walk me through the efforts to save the girls. I had to rely on memories for the dialogue in the ER, but I had them turn on the heart monitor so I knew what color the line that went flat was. The narrative journalist embraces facts as details and relishes the challenge of learning and verifying them.
Verification in narrative doesn’t have to grow from suspicion, just from a commitment to learning the story and getting the facts right, even those details. I actually debunked a sports story that wasn’t a hoax, just a legend. I wasn’t suspicious of the story I’d been told. I was just trying to get the facts straight (by the way, I am repeating myself here).
As a reporter for the World-Herald in 1996, I was doing a story about the Farragut Admiralettes, a small-town team that had won Iowa’s girls’ basketball championship 25 years before, in the pre-Title IX days when Iowa girls’ basketball was a small-town treasure.
I interviewed all 12 members of the Farragut team, plus the star and coach of the opposing team, the widow of the Farragut coach and some fans and journalists who covered the game. Again and again, in every interview, I asked how Farragut won the game. The answer was always the same: Mediapolis star Barb Wischmeier, now a member of the Iowa Girls Basketball Hall of Fame, was scoring easily early in the game and Farragut couldn’t stop her. Farragut’s coach, Leon Plummer, sent 5-foot-2 Tanya Bopp into the game to guard the 6-foot-1 Wishmeier. Bopp drew a bunch of charging fouls on Wischmeier, I was told repeatedly, and the taller girl got in foul trouble and became less aggressive, and Farragut came back and won the game.
I was never suspicious of that story. People remembered the game, a highlight of their lives, vividly years later and recounted the details with clarity and passion. But I wanted more detail for my narrative. And this time I was able to find the old video. For a class reunion in the 1980s, someone had gotten a video from the TV station that broadcast the 1971 title game.
So I watched a video of the championship game. I was hoping to describe Bopp sprawling on her ass after a charging foul. Or to describe the quaint uniforms of the day. Or maybe to recount the moment of celebration when time expired. I was just looking for detail. But I was puzzled when time expired. I thought I had missed something. So I watched again and counted the fouls. It happened one time. Bopp drew one charging foul on Wischmeier. It did fluster her and she did get in foul trouble (Terri Brannen drew three fouls on her, but even Brannen told me the Tanya Bopp story) and she did get less aggressive. But that one foul had grown to legendary proportions in the years since the game (the exaggeration Layden acknowledged).
See, here’s the point about narrative journalism: Your first job is to learn the full story, wherever it takes you. You do that by finding the best possible sources and documents. That video was a better source than any of the people I interviewed. By seeking to go beyond my interviews, I discovered the legend that became the narrative thread of my story.
Narrative journalists learn and tell stories, and the sportswriters who swallowed the story of the girlfriend’s death didn’t bother to learn the story of the girlfriend they thought existed and as a result failed to learn and tell the story Deadspin told about their gullibility.
Hell, the sportswriters failed even to learn Manti Te’o’s version of the story: that he had never met the supposed girlfriend face to face (and I don’t know or care whether he was a victim of the hoax or not; by lying about their relationship, he certainly became a participant). If a single reporter had dug deep enough into that story to learn that level of truth, wouldn’t it then have been essential to go to California and learn her story?
A one-source story that wallows in cliché, fails to verify facts and fails to tell the story of the central relationship isn’t narrative. Narrative journalism is not shallow journalism.
Narrative journalism is facing challenges. As news staffs shrink and journalists face more demands on their time, as print news holes shrink and as digitally focused newsrooms emphasize breaking news, narrative journalism isn’t as high a priority as it used to be (and it was always a small minority of any newsroom’s work).
But verification isn’t a threat to narrative journalism. It’s the heart of narrative journalism.
@stevebuttry 1) I was not defending Te’o story. Read again. 2) Glad we agree on: Sometimes you have to accept someone’s memory for a detail
— Tim Layden (@SITimLayden) January 21, 2013
@sitimlayden Did I say you were defending Te’o story? You worried that failure to verify essential facts would affect narrative journalism.
— Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) January 21, 2013
@stevebuttry You spent 100s of words explaining Te’o story failures that I never disputed
— Tim Layden (@SITimLayden) January 21, 2013
.@sitimlayden Did you not say the hoax backlash would “lead to fewer narrative stories,” then discuss detail & the need to trust sources?
— Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) January 21, 2013
.@sitimlayden You didn’t write much about the hoax story, but your transition from the hoax to narrative & detail implied a connection.
— Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) January 21, 2013
@stevebuttry Nah, you like many others just can’t let go of the hoax and see bigger picture
— Tim Layden (@SITimLayden) January 21, 2013
@sitimlayden Huh? My post was about the bigger picture. I just called BS on your transition to an unrelated bigger picture.
— Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) January 21, 2013
@stevebuttry Ok cool. I think they are related and will affect me. But your take is fine. Thanks for reading and passing along
— Tim Layden (@SITimLayden) January 21, 2013
Here’s the story of the people in “The Homecoming.”
Here is the follow-up I did 11 years later.
Homecoming revisited from GazetteOnline.com on Vimeo.
Here’s the story of the legend of the Farragut Adettes.
You can read Parts 2, 3 and 4 of Belles of the Ball series on Scribd.
It seems Layden and many others are confusing narrative journalism with lazy journalism. I first began doing narrative journalism before I knew it had a name. I had read Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra’s Got a Cold,’ and it stands today as one of the best stories every found in a media outlet. But I that same year I wanted to be like Gay, Joan and Jon (Talese, Didion and Franklin) I also heard about Janet Cooke. As an African-American reporter there was no way I wanted earn my accolades by falsehood. I may not have been the best writer, but I was surely going to be the most diligent.
In narrative journalism details aren’t details if they aren’t true. They’re called lies. And my editors told me that I still had to collaborate in thrice just as I would on any fast, hard news story which meant if you were going to do narrative journalism at the paper I worked at you had to be obsessive about the truth and facts and not just truth on paper, but truth in triplicate, showing proof of truth. You couldn’t call someone a drug addict because your protagonist did, you had to prove that it was true. You can not take anyone’s word for it. No matter what. If the guy said it was a sunny day, but overcast you looked it up in the Farmer’s almanac and you checked to see if he was right. Which if any of the sportswriters who had written Teo’s story had done we wouldn’t be talking about this right now. I remember reading Walt Harrington’s book about narrative journalism and one of the writers, I think it was Gary Smith, said that a subject told him the water was freezing cold and to corroborate it he put a thermometer in the river to make sure they guy wasn’t off by a degree. I’ll never forget that because that was the litmus test for my narrative stories. Because when you interview people long enough you find out people lie. Not on purpose they just do. Memory, if you study it, isn’t a recollection of what happened, it’s a reconstructing of what we think happened. It’s not fail safe. So you have to check the details against non-memory type evidence to get a closer picture of the truth. And you especially have to do this in narrative journalism. Because narrative journalism asks you to get inside someone’s head, their thoughts, to paint a portrait of the intangible you have to overcompensate with the tangible. I also did a so-called bleeding heart story about a kid who grew up in foster care, was consider homicidal and almost thrown away by our foster care system and was saved by a loving adoptive family. Yes it was a compelling story, and yes it won awards but it would have been all for naught if it hadn’t been true. So when someone said the kid’s mom was a crack-addict, prostitute who couldn’t be found, I found her, tracked her down and got her side of the story. My story would’t have been as powerful without her input, years later after her sons were taken from her. And I wouldn’t have felt nearly as comfortable writing about what happened to her sons in their early years without speaking to her. Because in the end you’re dealing with people’s lives and now more than ever that impression stays with the world and if you’re not right, if you’re the least bit wrong to bolster your own ego then you’re committing the ultimate sin. You’re re-writing history and wiping out the truth.
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Excellent points. Thanks!
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Your key sentence: Narrative journalism is not loose with facts.
writingprincess writes: Memory, if you study it, isn’t a recollection of what happened, it’s a reconstructing of what we think happened. It’s not fail safe. So you have to check the details against non-memory type evidence to get a closer picture of the truth. And you especially have to do this in narrative journalism.
I’m glad writingprincess mentioned Jon Franklin, a master of narrative journalism, taking facts and making them sing.
But determining whether narrative accurately renders facts may be a never-ending process. In 1965, I picked up a New Yorker and began reading its lead story, “ANNALS OF CRIME: In Cold Blood – 1.” The “1” meant it was part 1 this week. Bylines in those days were at the end. I started reading, and became engrossed, annoyed that I had to stop reading when a friend arrived. Never got back to it. When the book was published, I realized it was Truman Capote.
Decades later, questions have arisen about his reporting technique and accuracy.
“Trust but verify” may be a lifetime endeavor.
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Narrative journalism is not the same as creative writing. It requires the most thorough reporting. You’re right that the Manti Te’o story wasn’t really about narratives, though. The reporters who spread the story didn’t really do a narrative. They seemed to feel that because they were getting the story from the main player, most of the reporting was already done for them. If they’d actually been doing a narrative, they would have been hungry for the details that could only come from the girlfriend’s part of the story.
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Katherine Boo’s recent book Behind the Beautiful Forevers is an incredible, heartbreaking, moving example of narrative journalism exhaustively reported; her description of the methods she used at the end over the course of 10 YEARS of reporting was remarkable. It’s a good example of what you are talking about. I also loved reading David Carr’s Night of the Gun that examines how difficult it can be to accurately represent the details of our past lives.
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