The Poynter Institute's Roy Peter Clark on whether smartening up, wa-a-a-y up, will be the way forward for tomorrow's newspapers.
There's an idea about the future of newspapers floating over the land and it goes like this: As more and more breaking news and information drives readers to Web sites, the newspaper of the future will have to change. It will become more up-scale in its audience and advertising, more selective, more focused, a little brainier. In some expressions, it will seem more literary, more creative, more visually exciting. Liberated of the need to break so much news, it will provide readers with analysis, context and meaning.
Think of NPR on paper.
Who will work for such a newspaper? It will have to be reporters, writers and editors who are comfortable with ideas, with theories, with abstractions. Pretty tough stuff for folks whose philosophy can be summed up: "Get the name of the dog!" ...Journalists already have two practical ways for gaining altitude. The first is the nut graph, a device for linking a scene or a character to higher categories of news or meaning. Editors may not tolerate the anecdote of a young woman, her face covered with soot, in a morgue, her husband keening over the body, unless we identify that woman as a victim of an underground mine disaster, and connect her death with the idea that as women move into traditional male workplaces, they come to share with men not only the benefits but the vulnerabilities.
A distant cousin of the nut paragraph is the "conceptual scoop." In short, this comes from the ability of the journalist to sift among confusing data, information, and phenomena, see a cultural pattern and give it a name: the "soccer mom" or the "dynastic presidency." I'm about to work on an essay that will argue that journalists -- and citizens at large -- often confuse incompetence for corruption. That theory will require specific evidence, of course, but all the proofs will hang on the tree of an idea, a theory, an explanation, an analysis of American politics and culture.
The ability to think or work through abstractions connects us at the highest level to a world that can only be described by metaphysics or theology, from the debates between Plato and Aristotle over things and ideas, to Freud’s argument that the true gift of the Jews to humankind was not monotheism, but the belief in an invisible God, which inspired human beings to think more abstractly.
When some gurus of new information technologies describe the potential of the Internet, they often minimize journalists as mere content providers and data dumpers. Most of the writers and story tellers I know won’t think of themselves that way. Instead, they will find a way to report what matters, to tell stories that change lives, and, more and more I hope, help us gain a little altitude along the way.