Newsless.org

You and I and most of our colleagues have grown up accustomed to the convention that most substantial journalism is delivered in a spare, impersonal, just-the-facts style. Although a robust tradition of narrative journalism has flourished over the past few decades, to the point where even the most impersonal story gets critiqued for its narrative appeal, our industry has a strong cultural attachment to the institutional voice. But for many reasons, I think the convention has outlived its usefulness, and needs to be euthanized.

First, let me eulogize it a little.

As best as I can tell, institutional voice ascended in popularity with the same trajectory and for similar reasons as the concept of “the brand” did. During the advancement of the industrial age, local suppliers of goods lost significant ground to much larger regional and national suppliers. “Brand reputation” became a substitute for personal reputation. (“I love that cheese made by Farmer McGinty down the road!” became “I love Kraft cheese!”)

In the same way, as news was industrialized, the news voice was an easy way to subsume individual reporters’ identities into the brand of the larger organization. Wire stories could be written and slotted into papers across the country without being tonally dissonant; news voice lent every story a sort of factory-made coherence.

Even better, the convention saved us space and time. It kept reporters from laying on self-indulgent personal asides and stylistic flourishes. At its best, it produced stories that were lucid, concrete and economical.

Over time, the institutional voice came to be closely associated with the increasingly popular (albeit increasingly oversimplified and misunderstood) principle of “objectivity” news organizations were espousing. The convention was a handy signal to readers that all personal perspectives and biases had been removed from a story before publication. It communicated authority and ideological neutrality.

But the news industry was laying itself a very dangerous trap.

After a while, news voice was so tightly coupled with the public understanding of journalism that folks began to mistake mere adherence to this [easily mimicked] stylistic convention for journalism itself. (Check the 2000 American Heritage entry for journalism, and you’ll find an alarming definition lurking among the other only-slightly-less-alarming ones: “The style of writing characteristic of material in newspapers and magazines, consisting of direct presentation of facts or occurrences with little attempt at analysis or interpretation.”)¹

Even worse, readers began to evaluate the journalism on the strength of its adherence to the institutional convention, rather than on the strength of the reporting behind it. If a reporter betrayed a hint of personal perspective in a news story — dropping a mildly loaded word, including a minimally subjective characterization — she could be pilloried for violating superficial conventions, no matter how well the story was reported.

Worst of all, news voice had the unfortunate side effect of hiding the reporting that lends all good journalism its credibility. By meticulously pruning out references to reporters’ methods and circumstances from every story, the industry deprived the public of the best tool to evaluate or understand the work reporters did. Shoddy work could sit alongside skillful work, all under the same institutional imprimatur, and readers were given few tools to tell the difference. To the untrained observer, it’s not easy to differentiate a two-source press release story from a piece built on weeks of FOIAs and footwork.

Meanwhile, we got outflanked by partisan hucksters who’ve exploited our dependence on news voice as a key weakness, promoting the value of personal authenticity over the institutional identity we staked our reputations on. Which do you suspect is more instinctively powerful — the cold, dehumanized voice of the Washington Post saying merely, “These are the facts,” or a demagogue like Bill O’Reilly telling you he’s on your side?

I think the best way to gain ground is not to engage in a battle over which institution is more trustworthy — the WaPo or BillO. That fight is too easy for us to lose. Instead, we’re going to have to start the slow, difficult work of shifting the terrain — forging more meaningful, less institutional relationships with our visitors; teaching people through our work how we acquire and evaluate information.

I think scrapping institutional voice is a great starting point, and organizations like ChiTown Daily News provide the best opportunity for doing it. The New York Times can’t really shift, at this point, away from news voice; it’s sort of built into the brand. But you’re creating something new, Geoff — informed by the best of the journalistic tradition, but unshackled from the worst journalistic conventions.

We’ve known for a while that great journalism doesn’t have a template. For my money, the best work of journalism done in the run-up to the Iraq War was James Fallows’ “The Fifty-First State” in the Atlantic, which presaged everything we should have known going into that war. Among the article’s most notable characteristics is Fallows’ willingness to show his work — the story begins with a remarkable catalogue of Fallows process and assumptions. Almost everybody quoted is on the record (side note: just think of the thousands of inches of anonymously sourced stories that totally got it wrong right around this time), and we see Fallows’ perspective shift as the piece progresses. By putting all that in there, Fallows makes the story accessible, engaging, and deeply informative, not overly reflective or self-indulgent.

Of course, Fallows was writing a magazine cover story. You’re making a website. So I’d point you to examples from the blogosphere, where some great journalists (e.g. Matthew Cooper, Greg Sargent, Ezra Klein) are pioneering non-institutional, highly engaging formats for news. And I’d encourage you to take a careful look at how these folks are doing it, because I think this last point is key:

Doing this well is harder than writing stories in institutional voice.

It is both easy and intuitive to pop out a story in news voice. In fact, at its worst, the format encouraged a sort of laziness we still see all the time. But leaving that convention behind means you’ll have to learn some new rules, be mindful of a new set of pitfalls (e.g. self-indulgence, oversharing, I-think-you-know-the-biggies), and bring your audience along.

In the long run, I think this will reap you all sorts of benefits, and it’ll get much easier with practice. And there’s nothing that says you have to start every story with a first-person narrative lede. Just consider yourself unshackled. And start playing around.

1. Just in case they update the entry, here it is as of 11/09: (1) The collecting, writing, editing, and presenting of news or news articles in newspapers and magazines and in radio and television broadcasts. (2) Material written for publication in a newspaper or magazine or for broadcast. (3) The style of writing characteristic of material in newspapers and magazines, consisting of direct presentation of facts or occurrences with little attempt at analysis or interpretation. (4) Newspapers and magazines. (5) An academic course training students in journalism. (6) Written material of current interest or wide popular appeal. [↩]