It’s Time to Embrace Artsy Journalism
To start out this semester, I played my Intro to Journalism students a clip of The Dead Files, a reality TV show that investigates paranormal activity plaguing families. In the clip, a medium described disturbing feelings and mysterious sights she experienced while exploring a haunted property. She presented the property owners with a drawing of a monstrous shadow looming within the basement of the home. They gasped — that was exactly the being they had been seeing.
“Is this journalism?” I asked my students.
Some said yes — it was stories reporting an investigation and documenting the experience of a place. Some said no — the stories did not present verifiable facts or sources. Some said yes, but it was “bad” journalism — stories presented as facts but without verifiability.
Their responses were all smart and well-articulated. Journalism does involve telling stories and documenting facts, and I was impressed with the way the students gathered their ideas and articulated their thoughts about journalism before even taking the class. The activity served us well as we recalled our baseline perceptions of the sprawling subject and field that we would explore for the next 15 weeks.
However, their initial perceptions as people at least vaguely interested in the field betray what I believe has been a flaw in journalistic training for the last several decades. Namely, in an effort to appear social scientific and objective, journalism has distanced itself further and further from the careful study of literature and creative writing, creating a false dichotomy between tales of cold-blooded journalistic fact and touchy-feely artistic expression. Trained creative writers often envelop themselves in the lofty pursuit of art. Trained journalists pursue the earthy, practical world of straightforward facts. Both are necessary in the world and for society, but both, so goes the current curriculum and scholarly philosophy, represent separate ends of a storytelling continuum.
While differences certainly should remain in journalistic and creative writing training, I find it a great loss that we’ve moved away from educating students in an outright manner about the literary potential of really strong journalism. Budding journalists should be honoring Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and James Baldwin just as much as retelling the Watergate and Pentagon Papers coverage and discussing how to brand and market themselves within our fractured digital media landscape.
“We have to train them to be more direct and not take so long to get into a story,” someone told me about creative writing students who joined the school newspaper at their university. “They spend whole paragraphs just describing the scene leading up to an event. Readers just want facts.”
I disagree. When you choose your media to consume in your limited free time, do you choose dry lectures of black and white slide decks that report bullet points of encyclopedic information? Or do you choose movies, books, music, podcasts, magazines, or social media content that often seems arbitrary yet changes your whole worldview as a person?
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As much as I love a good fact, I choose the latter. I love a good meandering jaunt through the chaos and tangles of a masterly narrative voice. In the beginning of a 2006 edition of Memoirs by Tennessee Williams, writer and filmmaker John Waters writes that the book “saved my life” even though it was reviewed horribly when it first came out. “Maybe I like ‘bad’ Tennessee Williams just as much as ‘good,’” Waters writes. Indeed, just as early reviews noted, the writing in Memoirs meanders through episodes of Williams’s life without much structure or unified thesis. And just like Waters writes, I enjoyed every sentence of it, finding personal connection and human insight as I continued along with Williams’s lively and vulnerable voice. I often long for such chaotic insight and narrative power when reading journalism, which often is structured so tightly I never feel room to breathe or explore with a level of larger human emotion.
That being said, artsy journalists should remain trained in verifying information and fact-based storytelling. They should never, as creative writers at times can, sacrifice the truth for the sake of a good story, especially in a time when so many are distrustful of journalism as an institution.
Careful creative writing study and developing of craft could actually help journalists be more truthful in their writing, though. For instance, I often encounter students savvy in journalistic norms and Associated Press style who do not know how to effectively wield the past perfect tense (“had”) to indicate backstory within an otherwise past tense narrative. This tense could be essential to connecting contextual details for the reader and minimizing confusion with timelines of events. Journalists are not always as attentive to the figurative and evocative connotations of the words they use — or could use to tell a better story. Attention to creative, literary writing tactics would allow journalists to be clearer, more vivid, and ultimately more truthful in their writing.
In our time of rethinking journalistic norms, several creative journalism forms are already expanding our notions of how to pursue truth through stories of accurate information. Some that may offer us an artsy journalism path forward:
- Expressive photojournalism: Some have argued that photojournalism is a professional craft and not an art. I’ll leave such arguments to the philosophers. All I know is that visuals have long added a necessary layer of emotion to newsworthy events, an “emotional truth” that, along with text, can explain a more complete story of newsworthy events. For instance, check out Sarah Bird’s photos, layered with cultural significance of 1970s Black rodeo.
- Speculative journalism: Journalists are, for good reason, trained to never speculate. However, many issues we face in our present time rely on a solid understanding of potential future events. Speculative journalism is the practice of telling truthful narratives with accurate, expert-verified information about what could happen in the future, such as a podcast predicting a global pandemic in early 2019 and work exploring the future impacts of climate change.
- Poetjournalism and newspoems: Poets incorporating current events into their poetry has long been around. For instance, recall Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” giving emotional context for the news event of Abraham Lincoln’s death in 1865. A recent initiative called the Institute for Poet Journalism has attempted to start providing standards and organization to these forms of writing, a direct attempt to bring emotional truth to informative news.
- Personal essay-style features: Despite the false dichotomy between creative and journalistic writing that often appears in journalism training and curriculum, in practice many feature writers are astoundingly good at bringing the personal into their feature articles in creative and literary ways. Ta-Nehisi Coates is particularly adept at this, using his personal experiences to provide essential emotional context that audiences need to understand the full truth of news events.
For the record, I don’t believe that The Dead Files is journalism. It is a reality TV show crafted for entertainment above truth, what Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel describe as the “first obligation” of journalism in their book Elements of Journalism. Even if you believe in the paranormal (and who doesn’t at least want to, sometimes), the priorities of the show differ widely from the priorities of a pro journalist.
But in an age of boundary spanning and professional fluidity, we should pursue more crossover between journalism and other crafts of conveying information. As Kovach and Rosenstiel also write, “Every new generation, building on what came before, has created journalism anew.” With such a sentiment, I believe that we should be recreating our journalism curriculum too — in a way that embraces new technologies, yes, but also honors the literary storytelling traditions that could deepen journalistic storytelling.
