Eulogy for news voice
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.
- 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. [↩]
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In addition to the Kraft Foods stuff – yum, it's so nice to eat Oscar Mayer after reading The Jungle (OM built their brand in part by submitting to govt inspection) – I wonder, too, about the broader transdisciplinary contexts of all of those news reports.
Think about business memos, scientific and police reports, wire news sent over telegraph, legal and government proceedings — all of these official documents, written in the institutional voice, which is a good chunk of what a reporter might be reading all day. (It's what a good chunk of their white-collar urban readers will be reading, too.)
Now think about what a blogger-reporter might read all day: other blogs and microblogs, reader comments, community sites, newspapers (sure) and TV, press releases, political theater — stuff on all different subjects in all different voices, very few of them institutional. The voice will inevitably shift.
Tim
20 Jul 09 at 7:58 pm
[...] Related: Matt Thompson steps over the corpse of objectivity and writes a eulogy for “the news voice” itself. [...]
Further notes on objectivity, transparency, and links – Invisible Inkling
20 Jul 09 at 5:06 pm
[...] Eulogy for news voice at Newsless.org – 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." [...]
Eulogy for news voice at Newsless.org — Chris Heisel
20 Jul 09 at 8:02 pm
I think your criticism of "news voice" confuses a stenographic repeating of information, from the effort needed to discern facts. The latter is still, IMHO, a part of basic news reporting (as opposed to analysis or interpretation). The former is a degraded form of reporting, driven by some combination of laziness, lack of insight, and fear of criticism.
While "brand" can be misused, in the news business it's beneficially applied to trustworthiness to produce accurate, clear and complete descriptions of what's going on. For a reporter to adhere to and support that definition of "brand" doesn't require any brilliance or deep insight.
Within the public, there are those that truly seek "news" and there are others that seek rationalization for their deeply held views and prejudices. The former aren't necessarily looking for the reporters' personal take on some event – but they do seek a clear description of what went on.
Terry Steichen
21 Jul 09 at 12:44 pm
[...] a J-school friend who works for a newspaper in Maryland. I thought of it today while reading a blog post lamenting the proliferation – and shortcomings – of what that blogger calls the institutional [...]
Kathlyn Clore » Blog Archive » My writing ability: Institutionalized?
21 Jul 09 at 9:36 am
Ooh, that's an interesting broadening of the lens, Tim. You're probably right – the weaknesses of the institutional voice convention are probably starting to pop up everywhere, not just in journalism.
Matt Thompson
21 Jul 09 at 3:34 pm
On your point that there's an irreducible minimum analysis and interpretation needed to discern facts from information, I certainly agree.
But I disagree on the conclusions you draw from your two examples. You ask a bunch of questions that are unanswered by Henry's graf. True, but these are questions that I'm far from comfortable that the reporter (Henry) has good insights into. I'd rather that the reporter gave me the facts, and let me decide why Democrats were formerly cavalier, etc.
On your admiration for Cohn, I for one, don't care about Cohn's conclusions like "Obama was right…." That may or may not be true, but the fact that the reporter has an opinion doesn't do a thing for me. I want to reach those conclusions myself. (Or, alternatively, the reporter could interview some credible figure and report that figure's conclusions. That might have more weight.)
So I guess what I'm saying is that there's a balance here. Not enough analysis/interpretation and you're left with dry, less useful stenography. Too much analysis/interpretation and the reporter may be overstepping the bounds of their personal credibility and moving into commentary (which is fine, as long as I know that's what's happening).
Terry Steichen
21 Jul 09 at 6:18 pm
I'd disagree, Terry. First of all, you can do stenography journalism in any voice you'd like. Plenty of columnists function as glorified stenographers. Part of what I'm saying is that the convention of institutional voice has made it easier for hackish, stenographic journalism to pass muster alongside real blood-and-grits reporting, since both of them now get mushed into the person-less, "The Star Tribune has learned" style.
But the more important part of my argument is the contention that often, when effort is needed to discern what is factual, some analysis or interpretation is required to make that discernment, and it's best to acknowledge that in a transparent, human fashion. I think Atul Gawande's account of sitting down with a group of doctors in McAllen, TX, and probing them about the reasons for the high cost of care in their city was better — as journalism and as narrative — than attempting to convey that information in news voice:
You could say, "Doctors in McAllen, TX, said patients today are likely to receive a full battery of tests for symptoms that would have gone untested in the past." And you'd have conveyed much less, less effectively.
I guess a simpler way of expressing this is that "accurate, clear and complete descriptions of what's going on" often require a sense of the reporter's process and perspective that news voice can only obscure.
Take this graf from a less-than-helpful recent NYTimes story:
Plenty of analysis and interpretation underpins this graf, and packing it all behind this "New York Times has learned" veneer only raises more questions than it answers. Why does reporter Derrick Henry think Democrats in Congress have grown increasingly nervous about the costs of reform? Does he think they were formerly cavalier about the cost of reform? Are there really people in Congress who thought we could overturn the health care system on the cheap?
Grafs like that no longer tell me anything. I'm unwilling to trust Mr. Henry's conclusions merely because they've been given the Times' imprimatur. Unleash him to tell me what lies behind his perceptions, and you'd probably be left with a clearer, more accurate, more complete report. Contrast this with Jon Cohn's perspective:
I have at least a sense of why Jonathan Cohn came to his conclusions. I know at least what he observed (Obama's speech, the push-back by members of Congress, the e-mail responses from his buddies on Capitol Hill) and how he perceives it. As far as I can tell, he did at least as much "reporting" as Derrick Henry (whose principal facts are quotes from the Sunday talk shows).
Cohn's post equips me with the tools I need to evaluate it. Henry's, stunted by the adherence to news voice, does not.
Matt Thompson
21 Jul 09 at 5:33 pm
Part of what I'm saying is that in Henry's case, he's not giving you the facts and helping you decide. He's giving you just as much analysis and interpretation as Cohn is and hiding it behind the veneer of news voice. Only, unlike Cohn, you have less material with which to assess that analysis. You have no idea how Henry came to his conclusions. You have at least some idea how Cohn came to his.
But I guess the Cohn/Henry case is askance of my main argument. In brief, I think this sentence…
… is journalistically and narratively inferior to this one …
Matt Thompson
22 Jul 09 at 8:08 pm
Matt,
I see I'm not making my point clearly enough. I expect the writer of a news story to convey to me facts. The reporter's only job is to let me know what happened. However, I think we agree that this needs to rise above stenography; some degree of interpretation is necessary to translate 'he-said/she-said' into more factual and useful description.
If, rather than a news report, the writer has produced an analysis piece, that's different. However, in this case, in most situations, I'm not as interested in the reporter's interpretation of the situation as I would be of the interpretation of others (interviewed by the reporter) who may have a lot more credibility (than the reporter, per se).
If the reporter is writing commentary, I'm interested if I value the insights of the commentary writer. If the writer has a reputation and history of providing what I consider valuable insights, I will appreciate and read it. Otherwise, I could care less what the writer is saying.
Put bluntly, I don't we should assume that a good reporter necessarily has good insights into the dynamics behind the news events, let alone deep and useful opinions about the forces at work behind the events. It's nice when they do, but in that case, we have to be careful not to confuse facts and speculation/opinion.
In the examples you cite in your latest response, you state that the reporters involved are (and I gather, should be, in your view) providing "analysis." As to your example sentence, I would agree that the second version is superior simply because it is more specific and factual – but neither of the two versions involve any analysis per se.
Terry Steichen
22 Jul 09 at 8:28 pm
Let's say we differ on whether we prefer our journalists to provide "just-the-facts" or analysis, but that's not what I'm disagreeing with you on here, Terry. I'm completely agnostic on whether facts or analysis are wanted, or what constitutes what. My argument in this post is purely about presentation. Whether what we're presenting is primarily factual or analytical, I think presenting it in the stentorian, voice-of-God style that we've grown accustomed to is harmful.
The reason that, as you say, the second version I provided above is more "specific and factual" is because it does away with the view-from-nowhere presentational convention that the first attempts to mimic.
Matt Thompson
22 Jul 09 at 9:07 pm
I don't know that we differ – if it's a news story, I (and, I suspect, you) look for facts. If it's an analysis, I expect a bit more perspective (necessitating some interpretation). And if it's commentary, I expect something entirely different.
I agree that what you call the "voice-of-God" presentation is useless and misleading. The way I see it, when a reporter adopts that mannerism, they're concealing the details and over-generalizing. It's as if, when my source(s) say it, it's "obviously" quite true and you (the reader) don't need to know the details.
So, at this point, are we seeing the issue in a similar way?
Terry Steichen
23 Jul 09 at 12:59 pm
My two cents. The Twitter format of a 140 characters or live blogging at an event is, in my view, the best way to get the facts as they happen. I read the live blogging from one of the President's press conferences at WSJ. Because time was so limited, there was no analysis. Just an amazingly skilled reporter being able to communicate what they saw happening at the moment.
There is just no getting around the truth that after the event, the selection of facts is fraught with implicit judgments and the selections are filtered through personal and socially supported lens. It's why jury trials have such a hard time figuring out the "facts of the case" and why eye witnesses are sometimes the most unreliable. It's also why lawyers spend so much of their time finding and presenting the "facts of the case." And historians do the same. Presenting the facts in a particular order is the "analysis" in the sense of the patterns that create meaning for the reader or viewer or jury.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that events are not amenable to becoming facts. Merely that it is a complex process. I agree with Terry's point about "just the facts, ma'am." I'm just saying that translating facts into useful data points might be exactly the irreducible value of journalism. Everyone is entitled to do "analysis" or "commentary". Some patterns emerging from the data points work for me. Some don't. But that's not the core of the journalist's job.
Michael Josefowicz
27 Jul 09 at 12:47 pm
Good stuff, Matt. Two possible countervailing forces:
- As you say, analysis is harder than no-analysis. Therefore some outlets will still find a competitive advantage in churning out fact-rich, analysis-poor information as quickly as possible.
- More perilously: I think news junkies like you and I (and most of your readers) should be wary of projecting our preferences onto the general public's. To most casual news readers — not the ones who send emails or post comments, but the ones who glance at front pages on their way to the comics — an article that's been carefully pruned into evenhandedness can often be more useful and easier to digest than one that takes a point of view. Deciphering and evaluating points of view — learning to distinguish Ezra Klein from Mickey Kaus from Glenn Reynolds — is a task best suited to people willing to spend a lot of time gathering news.
Michael Andersen
2 Aug 09 at 11:20 pm
I should add that I say this in full understanding that every article has a point of view, etc. But as I think your post acknowledges, some have stronger points of view than others.
Michael Andersen
2 Aug 09 at 11:22 pm
[...] Let the blog be the DVD commentary to your reporting. Refer to it wherever your stories appear. Make it clear that the blog is the place to go for those who want the inside scoop on how your process works. Then deliver. Make sure it’s written in your voice, not news voice. [...]
Five concrete steps to improving the news at Newsless.org
1 Sep 09 at 12:37 pm
[...] by Neil Browne. (Return to post) 3. Thompson argued a similar point in an earlier post of his, Eulogy for news voice. (Return to post) 4. One of my favorite books I read in the last year, Our Unfree Press: 100 Years [...]
A category error - Dave Herrera (.org)
6 Sep 09 at 11:14 pm
[...] Offer helpful context, analysis, and background as we know it. This is done in large part by avoiding news voice. [...]
The Digitel « InOtherNews.us
3 Nov 09 at 3:04 pm