on teling the truth ...

... in interviews. For those times when you're heading off to what might be a difficult interview for a tough story, listen to what NYT columnist David Carr tells NPR's Terry Gross.

One of the first things he often says to sources is that the story is "likely to be big. What do you think the story is that I should tell?"

Here's more:

Historically, I had been a reporter who was very fond of making speeches and very fond of telling people what their stories were about," he says. "[As journalists], we're people who just show up and declare ourselves instant experts on all manner of stories. And we often are only taking a very blunt-force guess about what's going on, and I think it always behooves us to ask the people, especially if you're aspiring to do something good, 'What do you think is going on? What do you think this is about?' "

Carr tells his sources that they shouldn't expect a fluff piece; he doesn't want anyone to be genuinely surprised by what they find in his stories.

"I don't want to sit up in the middle of the night and wonder whether I was unfair to the person — that I didn't communicate to them what is coming," he says. "I don't want anybody to open up one of my stories and have their nose broken by what they read — although I do have to say, at the beginning of the week, I wrote a really mean column, and I didn't tell anybody involved, so I guess that's not always true."

incivility in the internet age

An obituary for journalist Deborah Howell, who was killed in an accident in new Zealand, generated a slew of ugly comments from readers who didn't even know her. In this NPR interview, journalist Melinda Henneberger questions the incivility that results from the anonymity of the internet.

When do we say basta? Or should we? Should these kinds of comments be censored? Is doing so a violation of free speech? The internet has long been heralded as an instrument of democratization. But how do we -- or should we -- corral it?

You can read Henneberger's column on the subject on Politics Daily here. Here's a taste:

But there was also a shocking number of comments to the effect that since Howell was in the news business, she must have been a lefty, so how fabulous she'd been killed. There was joshing speculation about whether she'd been driving a hybrid, a joke about how liberals walking in lockstep really ought to be more careful, and a couple of cracks about how Republicans were sure to be blamed. "One less of those anti-US types to deal with," said one of several celebratory rejoinders from readers who by their own account had five minutes earlier never even heard of Deborah Howell.
We can't pretend this sort of thing is limited to one or other corner, either; Matt Lewis wrote here about how news of Rush Limbaugh's chest pains had similarly gladdened some tiny liberal hearts, and our obit of Irving Kristol provoked disquieting comments, too.

So, what to make of this? Assuming we are not becoming a nation of psychopaths, are we trading our humanity for a little negative attention? Do people just not think before they type? Or, even if they don't really mean such meanness, do they not worry that someone who reads it might?

the death of narrative?

Is the internet killing storytelling? Ben Macintyre, writing on the London Times Online, thinks so:

Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.

The piece came to my attention on NPR this morning, via Daily Beast Editor Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, who again bemoans the death of narrative journalism as internet driven delivery systems -- and attention spans -- grow ever quicker, ever shorter. The irony, of course, is that The Daily Beast is online. And recently Brown announced a plan to speed up the publishing process by putting out quick, digital books. But back to Macintyre:

Addicted to the BlackBerry, hectored and heckled by the next blog alert, web link or text message, we are in state of Continual Partial Attention, too bombarded by snippets and gobbets of information to focus on anything for very long. Microsoft researchers have found that someone distracted by an e-mail message alert takes an average of 24 minutes to return to the same level of concentration.

The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing.

But this new method of reading is still at odds with why we read -- especially when it comes to journalism. When it comes to news, Macintyre writes, the stories that are compelling are "not the blunt shards of information, but those with narrative."

He goes on to suggest that the solution may be technology itself -- some sort of machine that "can combine the ease and speed of digital technology with the immersive pleasures of narrative." As an example, he offers Japan's keitai shosetsu, or thumb novels: books that can be uploaded to mobile screens a page at a time.

Until then, he writes:

Narrative is not dead, merely obscured by a blizzard of byte-sized information. A story, God knows, is still the most powerful way to understand. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word, in the great narrative that is the Bible, was not written as twitter.

going ordinary: what we lose

Some time back, I read a piece in The Nation by Scott Sherman about how the Wall Street Journal had changed with its new ownership under Rupert Murdoch. Not surprisingly, the editorial perspectives of the two publications could be described as polar opposites.

And yet, Sherman has a keen appreciation for ways in which the Journal excelled:

At its best, in an epoch that future historians will view as a "golden age" for US newspapers, the Journal's front page excelled at various forms: explanatory reporting on politics, economics, science and social trends; deeply researched profiles of companies and executives; and investigative reporting. The Journal pursued General Motors, Mobil Oil, Occidental Petroleum, Texas Instruments, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., Apple and hundreds of other corporations, which inspired Ralph Nader to proclaim that, aside from its "Pleistocene" editorial page, the Journal was "the most effective muckraking daily paper in the country.... the main reporter in our country of corporate crime." (Nader's words prompted Robert Sherrill to read an entire year of the Journal's corporate crime coverage for a Nation cover story in 1997.)

Finally, there was a remarkable tradition of immersion journalism: Alex Kotlowitz spent twelve weeks with a teenage boy and his family in the Henry Horner housing project in Chicago; Judith Valente lived for two months, around the clock, with a family whose son was wasting away from AIDS; Tony Horwitz took a job at a poultry plant in Mississippi to document the brutal conditions inside. This is not to say that Page 1 was flawless or that the Kotlowitz-type narratives were dominant. But they were never absent from the medley, and staffers clearly recall the words of former managing editor Paul Steiger, who led the paper from 1991 to 2007: "Go find stories with moral force."

What Sherman laments is that the paper, under Murdoch, has become ordinary. As have so many newspapers -- many of them ordinary to begin with -- which have jettisoned all vestiges of distinguished journalism in the interests, perhaps necessarily, of the bottom line. As reporters scramble to do more with less, pages shrink, and online readers refuse to click past a screen-and-a-half, what we lose is narrative journalism, solid enterprise reporting, and features that allow a writer's voice to peep through.

Even some alt-weeklies, at the expense of losing readers, are jettisoning popular columnists with both a voice and a following in favor of generic junk -- written by ad reps, underpaid assistants or even readers.

I was reminded of all this last week when I listened to Daily Beast Editor Tina Brown discussing Gay Talese with NPR's Steve Inskeep. In discussing a recent interview with Talese in The Paris Review, she mourns the scarcity of narrative journalism in today's media, and mentions what Talese brought to the table: an obsessive curiosity along with an obsession with getting it right -- during a moment in time in journalism when writing was savored.

Talese, she said, never wanted to be a page one writer because then,he said, you have to stick with the news. He wanted to dominate the story, and, like all good narrative journalism, found the truth in the details. bk

three-dot bloggery

Quick hits -- with very little in common:

Want a concrete explanation on how the economy has impacted journalism? Go here for a video on the end of "Day to Day" on NPR...

Go here for an eloquent and charming obituary -- in an era when most newspapers have abandoned that elegant art in favor of revenue-generating funeral announcements in agate type -- on Maitland Zane, an iconic reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle...

Go here for an editorial from the Toronto Star on why the paper does not "unpublish" stories that appear online. It's an interesting issue, related to one we've discussed in class often: words on paper have a limited shelf life -- unless you make a conscious effort to save them. Thanks to Google, words on the web live on forever....

And finally, please join me in bitching about the rumors that Brit has a book deal for $14 million and Sarah Palin may get $11 million. How many books will not get published because these will?! bk

not this business model, either

At least, not in this economy.

Washington Post, and others, report that NPR is facing the same fiscal woes as its for-profit brethren. According to the piece, 64 employees will be laid off this afternoon. In addition, two shows, aimed at younger listeners, will be killed. The layoffs (7 percent of the workforce) are in response to a recent $23 million shortfall.

NPR was doing fine financially until recently. But the economy finally caught up with the network as the recession began to hammer all its funding sources.

Apparently, this business model isn't the fix we need, either. bk