Or, Who Writes What, When
LET’S SAY, STRICTLY FOR the sake of argument, that you want to read a work of nonfiction. We know that, in the real world, you may not have a lot of choice, that the purpose may be driven not by desire but by compulsion. You have a school assignment. Or a work assignment. Or a need to keep up with (or begin to have) basic knowledge in a field. Sometimes, you really don’t have a choice. But humor me and pretend that you do and that your choice is to read that item. Which can also be true even if you’re being forced to do it. You might, say, want to do well in the course or get a promotion or not look like an idiot when you speak before the school board. There are lots of reasons to want to read something even when the impetus is not your own desire.
Here’s the good news: every form of human communication has a basic grammar, a set of rules of the road that will govern how information is offered to readers. So if you understand that grammar, that set of rules and practices, you can make your way down that road a little faster. Swell so far, right? It’s just that . . .
You have to know the form to know the grammar. Part of that identification is fairly easy: if you see a broadsheet format in multiple sections, that’s probably a newspaper. But not all parts of the morning paper are the same; news articles follow different rules from features, which are in turn different from opinion/editorial content. Happily, the third of those occupies a separate part of the paper—usually the last page or two of the front section—and the first two sometimes have separate sections. We’ll discuss that further in a while, but on with the problem! Magazines, like newspapers, appear at regular, defined intervals (normally weekly or monthly rather than daily), but they have sets of rules of their own. I say “sets” because magazines also publish a variety of forms in their pages. And books have a host of grammars. Is the book you just picked off the shelf history, biography, how-to, self-help, memoir, essay, current affairs, nonfiction narrative, journalism, New Journalism, travel, arts, true crime, psychology, spirituality, or philosophy? There will be many points of overlap, but they will all follow their own rules and policies.
Take, oh, history versus New Journalism or what is now often called participatory journalism, the sort of writing pioneered by Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and John McPhee. In both sorts of writing there will be an emphasis on accuracy; that is, the writer is obliged to report what was actually said and done, while avoiding putting words in anyone’s mouth or inventing actions in a sort of what-if speculation. Whether the trip is undertaken by Lewis and Clark in Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage or Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), readers want to know that the text is accurately reporting what went on back in the mists of time. Or just last year. So there’s one similarity. Another is that in both genres, writers should reward readers by being somewhat interesting. This expectation would not be inevitably valid, by the way, for academic histories—or books in a lot of other academic fields from mathematics to sociology to, yes, literary criticism. Academic readers, prompted by professional concerns, will often put up with boring or downright bad writing if the insights or new information are sufficiently compelling. More’s the pity: they are afforded ample opportunities to practice such forgiveness. Lay readers, on the other hand, should not be expected to suffer unduly just to acquire a little information. My experience is that they are pretty good sports about minor suffering, but they have their limits.
This distinction raises an “interesting” question: how engaging is engaging enough? For Ambrose, it seems, the material is so compelling that he has only to stand to one side. We’re talking Alice in Wonderland with grizzly bears. This new world was a fantasy land. With the threat of sudden, violent death. Get out of the way; let the story tell itself. Don’t clutter it up with excess analysis. Don’t get between the reader and the explorers’ astonishment and elation and terror. Don’t try to be the star of the show. Ambrose’s claim to authority is the mass of scholarship that lies behind his narrative. He need not press an argument that he is an authority; the better strategy is to let that mountain of learning speak for itself. Wolfe has a different problem: there is no mass of scholarship precisely because the phenomenon in Electric Kool-Aid is so new. This is First Contact with Aliens. The only way to intimate any sort of expertise or authority is to get on the inside, to worm his way into the unworldly culture. A relatively transparent narrative approach will never do. Instead, Wolfe makes his narrative persona the star of the show: preening, smart-alecky, hip, clever, judgmental, ironic, linguistically ostentatious, simultaneously involved and detached. By making his narrative filter manifest, he becomes a tour guide or maybe a carnival barker for this collection of oddities. He wants us to be taken with Electric Kool-Aid’s main cast—Kesey and his crew—but not to be taken in by them. His stratagem has the paradoxical effect of seeming to bring us inside the group while at the same time inoculating us against the most damaging excesses to be found there.
We’ll go into requirements for specific nonfiction genres in more detail a bit later. For now, we need only remember that the rules aren’t set based on the physical form, the codex, but by the type of contents that form presents.
Types of Writing in Your Morning Paper
ONE OF THE THINGS we need to learn as readers is how to manage our expectations. By “manage,” I don’t mean “reduce.” Rather, if we’re going to get the most from our reading, we need to learn which expectations are appropriate for which types of writing. Remember those sections of the newspaper? Let’s go back there and see what we can see. A newspaper is a diverse neighborhood. Lots of different sorts of writing coexist in close proximity. True, the comics page and the editorial page are isolated in their own quarters, not quite walled off but nearly so. More like chain link than cinder block, but behind barriers nonetheless. Whether this is to protect those two places or the rest of the paper from contagion via close contact is hard to say. What other writing do we find in those pages? Hard news stories, the just-the-facts-ma’am, who-what-when-where-why meat and potatoes of news gathering. Features are often longer (unless news items are large-scale exposés) and softer as to subject matter and reportorial stance. They may range from human interest tales, oddball topics, remembrances of businesses long gone or prospects for those just opening, beautiful-home stories, the kinds of pieces usually cast as soft news. Most can be said to lie along a continuum between hard news reporting and public relations news releases. The home beautiful articles, for instance, are sometimes glorified real estate listings, complete in recent years with asking prices for the properties. Ongoing columns are another category (or maybe several categories). We may think of recurring columns as synonymous with op-ed pieces by syndicated or in-house writers, because many of those are (a) columns and (b) recurring, but there are many other types. Certain columnists take human interest features as their beat. These columns are sometimes concurrent with ombudsperson type items. That is, the columnist will take reader input about being wronged by companies or government, ferret out the most truthful version she can find, and try to set things right by acting as intermediary between the parties or by playing the public scold to shame the wrongdoers into doing a little bit more right. The columnist will assume the mantle of Avenging Angel on, say, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, interspersed with Seeker of Interesting Neighbors on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Or she may do something entirely personal, something like my-life-in-the-community reflection pieces in which she contemplates nature, her family, her dogs, and maybe the night sky. That’s okay, though: being an Avenging Angel is tough work.
Is that all papers have to offer? Not at all. They offer reviews (books, movies, television shows, dance and theater performances) and previews (upcoming programs on television). They carry specialized advice columns, usually by national figures, on relationship problems or questions about finance. They provide, perhaps less often than formerly, the previous day’s stock market numbers, for which there may or may not be accompanying analyses. There are travel pieces, which may be reviews or features, designed to lure us at least in imagination to far-off places. And there are letters from readers, wherein we meet some of the more thoughtful and, occasionally, less securely hinged neighbors.
A fully functioning newspaper, aside from rapidly becoming a rare commodity, is an astonishing compilation not only of writing but of types of writing.
Where is the one place in the paper where all of these categories find a home? The Sports section. The front page or two will usually be taken up with straight reporting, hard news for sports fans. The purest form of hard reporting in the sports pages is the box score, a specialized reading challenge. To the uninitiated, a box score is a jumble of names and numbers signifying nothing. To the cognoscenti, on the other hand, it is a way to reconstruct a ball game from a list of abstractions. Sadly, one of the victims of reduced income and squeezed space in contemporary papers is precisely that box score. It may be a minor loss in an age when all of the information can be found somewhere online, but the beauty of the traditional model is that all of these things appeared in a single section of the dailies. But that’s not all. There will often be sports features, particularly in the Sunday edition, and most papers still employ local columnists and import syndicated columnists for commentary on national stories. And those columns will have more than a little opinion in them. Indeed, for sheer contentiousness, the Editorial page has nothing on Sports. It’s the section that can stand as a microcosm for the entire paper.
Why does it matter what kinds of writing appear in a newspaper? Because each of them demands a slightly different reading strategy. In part, it’s about pace. I mentioned a bit ago that features are more leisurely and ease their way into their material. In a straight news piece, the famous Five Ws—who, what, when, where, and why—are frontloaded, more often than not in the first paragraph. Some folks append an H, how, to those five elements, or even substitute “how” for “why,” but I think “how” is what the rest of the article is about. The lede (or, lead in some journalistic quarters) paragraph is the thumbnail of the event being described in the article; the rest is explanation, filling in the blank spots until a complete picture emerges. If you read a feature with the same expectations for rate of revelation, you are bound to be disappointed. The lede in a feature is often a tease. It may be a hint of difficulties to come (“As Larry Davidson sat at the traffic light, he could little imagine the life change coming his way”) or a picture of an endpoint (“Back at his workbench, Larry Davidson is happy to once again handle his drawknives and chisels”). Actually, if you published those two together, readers could probably assemble the story for themselves, but that would defeat the purpose of a feature. You cannot, however, figure out the facts of the story from the lede alone—at least, not in a soft news story.
It’s hard to keep these various types of newspaper writing sorted. Even the pros have difficulty sometimes. In discussing a hugely viral fake news item from 2016, Professors Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall in their otherwise terrific The Misinformation Age (2019) compare it to an “article” in the Washington Post that, by comparison with the phony tale, was shared over one hundred thousand times fewer, even though it was the most shared among legitimate media pieces. Just one problem: the article in question was actually a column by Post opinion writer Paul Waldman. They further identify the piece as “nakedly partisan,” “hardly ‘news’ at all in the standard sense.” Of course not. By definition, a column is not a news item; it is an opinion piece, here as is customary identified as such and printed on the opinion page. We wouldn’t criticize a news article for lacking an opinion, would we? I so hope you said no.
Wait a minute. You keep acting like newspapers are critical to a good life. But they’ve been dying for a while now, and life goes on. Just how critical are they?
I suppose that’s up to us, and sadly, a lot of us have voted. Newspapers used to be a good deal longer than they are now. Gradually, through the final third of the twentieth century, many—not all—readers lost interest in the in-depth articles, the long exposés, and just the sheer length of the morning (or afternoon) Daily-Journal-Tribune-Herald-Globe-World-State-County-Times-News. Along about that time, in 1982, either responding to or anticipating declining interest, the Gannett Company published a new sort of national newspaper, USA Today. Articles were shorter, punchier, largely stripped of context, more focused on graphics and photos, nearly as much color as the Sunday funnies, and written in simpler language than the flagship dailies such as the New York Times or Boston Globe. Readers could breeze right through it. It became the lightning-round first rough draft of history. As you can guess, the new creature provoked strong reaction. The critics, who were legion, hated it, called it McPaper or “television you can wrap fish in,” and suggesting that the fish-wrapping was its highest best use. They also predicted that USA Today would lead to the demise of the daily newspaper. Others hailed it as a breath of fresh air in a stale news environment that hadn’t kept up with the times or taken readers’ wishes into account. As you can also guess, it caught on with the public. Although it, too, has experienced readership decline, its daily subscription sales as of late 2017 were just under a million daily. Add to that the number of local Gannett papers that include a section from the mother ship as well as the various mobile device apps and searchable content, and the daily total climbs much higher, possibly as much as seven million. My own local paper has long since ceased to carry national or international content from traditional wire services in favor of USA Today content and has more recently dropped syndicated columnists and national sports stories in favor of Gannett-originated writing. The changes cannot be called improvements, and the paper has continued to shrink. It does, however, still publish every day, something not a lot of journals can claim.
Because of the ceaseless work of journalists, newspapers (or some electronic version thereof) will continue to occupy an essential niche in the nonfiction environment. We still want hard news, personal interest features, game results, movie reviews, articles on music trends, obituaries, police blotter reports. And where else are you going to get those in one place? Social media? Not very likely. Sure, Facebook will have lots of stories on the death of a disgraced politician or a movie star in her prime, but not the one for your aunt Mabel or your neighbor’s father. Moreover, we, or at least some of us, would prefer those reviews, those backstage stories, that analysis be written by someone who actually knows something. Including how to write. The quality of a great deal of online information is simply dreadful, and sometimes far from true, however passionately presented. So that’s why I would suggest that those niches are in fact essential.
Okay, then, but why do we need all these different forms of publication? You know, newspapers and blogs and magazines and books. I mean, what’s the point?
That’s easy: time. The thing of which there is never enough. That heals all wounds or possibly wounds all heels.
Time? You sure?
Absolutely. Don’t forget the maxim that “journalism is the first rough draft of history,” often attributed to Philip L. Graham of the Washington Post (whose death allowed his widow, Katharine, to succeed him as publisher and be played by Meryl Streep in The Post). The reality is that Alan Barth, also of the Post, had said the same thing in a book review in The New Republic in 1943, and he may not have been the first. In any case, the bromide has rattled around long enough in the culture to be pretty widespread by now. What does that mean? Chiefly, that the news is the first indication most of us have that something large or small has happened. In the old days, a major event—a sudden death, say, or an explosion at a factory—that took place in the morning would be in a large city paper’s evening edition. You can tell that was the old days by the fact that papers had multiple editions when needed. Nowadays, it would be in tomorrow’s edition, which is still pretty fast. The name of the journalistic game is speed, at which papers excel. What they sacrifice in the headlong rush to publish is context. Between late afternoon, when our putative event takes place, and around eleven o’clock that night when the editors put the paper to bed (an old expression meaning, send it downstairs to the printers and pressmen), there is precious little time to establish context. That’s okay, though: there will be other days on which the writers can provide more background, more insights, more context.
Which is also the job of magazines. Even a weekly magazine can’t possibly compete with the dailies for speed of reporting. And a monthly magazine? Forget it. So what do we need those for? Other kinds of stories. Many monthlies have never been interested in news or current affairs reporting, because by the time an issue appears, news is old and stale. Even news in a weekly is likely to be several days old at best, and in the age of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, several days might as well be years. What, then, can a magazine provide if not news? Perspective. Analysis. Context. Those things take time. Obviously, the perspective gained through three or four weeks is hardly that of three or four decades, but it is enough perspective that we can think of it as a second draft of history: a little less rough, a little more fleshed out, a little more shapely. Time, Newsweek, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Life, Look—those are among the classic weekly and monthly magazines with an interest in current affairs. The first two are full-on news magazines. Others take news coverage as part of their mission. Several rely on a good deal of commentary. They all provide greater context and perspective than is possible in daily journalism. A couple, Life and Look, were famous for the addition of lots of photographs to the public record. All of them, whatever their publication schedule, shared with papers the unforgiving deadlines that sometimes cause incomplete stories to be dropped at the last moment or cut off at the knees to publish what has been constructed thus far. Better, more complete, more contextualized. But not complete.
Nor are magazines interested only in current event and political coverage as their contribution to the historical record. Many periodicals come under the heading of specialty journalism. These are magazines devoted to every sort of human activity, from cooking to model trains to landscaping to fly-fishing. But only one of those activities per journal, which is what the “specialty” term suggests; they stick absolutely to their special field of interest. Anyone looking for political reporting in Martha Stewart Living or the Pointing Dog Journal will find they have made a wrong turn in their search. Others, like several of those I listed above, are general interest magazines, meaning that they publish a variety of types of stories on many different subjects. In The New Yorker, an article on the opening of the latest Broadway show may reside next to one on the environmental hazards of copper mining. Not everyone will approach those two stories with the same enthusiasm, which is one reason that general interest magazines have dwindled from the most common type in the middle of the last century to a mere handful. At the same time, this eclectic approach holds appeal precisely for the surprises it offers. Few readers expected, upon opening the April 27, 1987 issue of The New Yorker, that they would be attracted by an examination of the history of dynamite, much less a two-parter that stretched into the following week’s issue, yet that is what Bryan Di Salvatore’s fascinating “Vehement Fire” offered them.
So here’s a question: if journalism is the first rough draft of history, where does the final draft find a home?
In histories.