According to Michele Weldon, newspapers aren’t dying: They’re becoming more lively. Over the past several years, newspaper editors and reporters have turned to anecdotes, average people and narrative to replace the simple report of what officials said at a press conference.
Weldon, a Medill professor, discussed those ideas and her new book, Everyman News, on Monday night at McCormick Tribune, along with Abigail Foerstner, who talked about her new biography of space scientist James Van Allen.
In other words, it’s true — newspaper journalists are writing more stories with typical people, partly because it’s what readers want.
“We’ve really become a culture of story, with a reverence for what people are experiencing,” she said, pointing to reality TV, and Web sites and documentaries seeking more personal stories. Weldon’s got the numbers to back it up, having researched the front pages of 20 American newspapers in 2001 and 2004.
She held up today’s freshly redesigned Chicago Tribune, pointing out that all of its A1 stories are features, and later added that the design packs far less information than the Tribune’s Web site. Because the Web handles news better than newspapers, they’ve evolved into what she calls “storypapers.” Even hard stories about property taxes, she said, would get the “Little Jimmy” lead — about how some young boy can’t play ball in a field because of the taxes.
It’s an interesting, often unnoticed, thread — I’ve read much more about how news is becoming more opinionated and personality-driven, especially on TV, and of course how on the Web anyone can comment on and challenge mainstream stories.
But I’m not sure that the growth of narrative and average-person sources extends past the front gate of newspapers into the rest of journalism, and even when it does, it’s not obvious that it is holding onto audiences.
The evening news shows, full of narrative broadcast pieces with average-person leads, have seen their audience dwindle over the past three decades (the CBS Evening News just hit an all-time low). Newspaper circulation also continues to drop in general, and Chicago’s newspaper success story, RedEye, uses briefs and charts instead of narratives (does anyone read their cover stories?), though it does have a fair amount of average-person sources and stories. But it has an equal amount of celebrity gossip and news, too. Radio is dominated by talk, while its reporting is shallow, brief and sourceless, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. As for cable TV news — well, The Colbert Report became popular for a reason.
The Web is hard to categorize, but certainly lists, short items, and arguments are popular. Even The New York Times’ most popular lists online are filled with opinions, hard/breaking news and thought pieces. Its home page, like most other major papers, is full of the latest political, national and international stories that eschew feature leads or heads. The Chicago Tribune’s Web site is the opposite of their redesigned paper, now, with virtually only crime, death and government stories, and hard-news angles to them.
Still, Weldon’s assertion is interesting because it shows the flip side of Medill 2020’s new-media focus, looking at how newspapers are reacting to 24 hours of breaking news on the Web and broadcast, as well as the effects of Sept. 11, citizen journalism and blogging. In a media world where any person can tell their own story, though, I wonder whether newspapers can make a living doing the same.