What’s the dirty secret of college speaker stories?
They’re not news.
Now, this site assigns speaker stories like anyone else. They cry out longingly to editors looking for story ideas: “Ooh, a famous person is coming to talk! It’ll be amazing! Cover me! Cover me!” And I’ve definitely written some myself.
But maybe we should stop doing speaker stories. Even when they’re well-written, they suffer because a person talking is just not inherently newsworthy. It’s that person’s ideas, or the issue at hand, or the arc of their life, that matters. Stories are about conflict, and one person standing up and telling other people what to think is not conflict.
So what’re the options? Over a very brief Thanksgiving dinner at Hinman, Spencer Kornhaber and I came up with a couple ideas:
- Profiles. It’s about the person and how they come to believe what they do. Samantha Power, for instance, used to be a sports TV producer, until one day in 1989 she saw Tiananmen Square live, and thought, “Oh, my God. What am I doing with my life?” And now she’s a political scientist and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.
- Issue stories. Maybe it’s not really the person but the issue they’re addressing. In that case, the story is what’s happening with Darfur or activism, and not the speech itself.
- Sights and sounds. Some people are just very charismatic, and their magic is the story of the night.
- Discussions. If the topic is really controversial, why not people inject their own opinions into the fray?
- Blog it. Some people only appeal to a very specific audience – so just knock it out in a blog post and be done with it.
So, what do you think of the speaker story? Do you read any of them or do you just let your eyes glaze over?