Journalism and Storytelling

A rant. A common story told in journalism school is that what they teach is “storytelling” (for example, see Storytelling in journalism.) A couple of years ago I noticed that everytime I visited a communications programme or journalism programme I was told they were into the business of “storytelling” as if this was some deep discovery or a secret hidden from the rest of us. The implication was that initiates (journalism students) were taught to give up naive views of what they would learn inorder to learn creative writing. Journalism as a discipline told itself a story that excused it from such mundane challenges as understanding, accuracy and timeliness in order to become a creative art closely allied with public relations (otherwise known as propaganda.) They believed their own story and now we pay for it by having to read papers that are little more than collections of columns (where the columnist is the story), fictions (that entertain the reader), and editor’s reflections about the media (navel gazing.) Google News is the refreshing antidote – news (not stories) that is aggregated by algorithm (not storytelling). Read on for more ranting…

This rant is, of course, an old story – the story of philosophy and rhetoric. Gorgias argued that he was a better doctor than his brother because he could tell a story that convinced the patient while the expert could not. Journalists like MBAs like to believe that the capacity to write in a certain voice (or manage) means they can write about anything (or manage anything.) Conversely the experts complain that no journalist ever gets it right – the philosophers, if you will, dismiss the views of the specialist in communication.

The truth is that we need experts who care to communicate outside their discipline and we need good communicators interested in expertise. My two cent prediction is that what we don’t need in the face of online news aggregators is “storytelling”. Disney does storytelling better as do the truly creative writers. Journalists shouldn’t compete with fiction they should engage the intersection between expertise and an interested public. Try to accurately convey what is happening in the world in a timely fashion.

Which leads to the word “journalism” – a perfectly good word and a word that suggests that the daily (“jour” = “day”) or timely nature of reporting is important. An expert communicates when they have something to communicate – when they have completed a study. Journalism is about regular and timely communication – reporting over time in a way that informs. Is that not challenge enough? Are the challenges of writing up the news (of which there is more than enough) every day as accurately as possible not sufficient to keep journalism schools busy? Do journalists need to learn to make stories out of news? Are the rest of us so ill entertained that we can’t imagine the story behind the facts?

Unfortunately the economics of journalism push it into entertainment. Opinions (called columns) are cheaper than news as on columnist can crank out an opinion (based on the news of others) every day without leaving the office. Editorials ditto. Big colour pictures are cheap. Add a few token journalists that crawl around writing “in depth” stories about whatever place they are in when the story is due and you can call it a paper. The need to get linear inches from each live journalist employed, even if they didn’t uncover anything of interest that day, encourages storytelling – the making of a story out of nothing at all – which is what we get.